Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
28th of September, 2025

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Finally, finally, at long last, the Prophet Jeremiah is offering us a word of hope: ‘For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.’ It has only taken six weeks of lectionary readings, but here we are, in a time of peace and prosperity, at least for those who can afford to buy houses and fields and vineyards.

Given everything that I have already said about the Book of Jeremiah, about its lack of historical sense, its confusion of speakers, its mixture of biography and history and prophecy and lament, I am sure that you will feel no surprise when I say it is not that simple. Today’s reading begins with some clear historical contextualisation: ‘in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar’ (Nebuchadnezzar II). What is happening in this tenth year? Nebuchadrezzar’s army is besieging Jerusalem. All the land around Jerusalem has already been conquered and is in the hands of the Babylonians. A decade earlier Zedekiah’s nephew, King Jehoiachin of Judah, had surrendered to Babylon, and the Second Book of Kings tells us that ‘all the officials, all the warriors, ten thousand captives, all the artisans and the smiths,’ were carried away with him into exile in Babylon, and that ‘no one remained, except the poorest people of the land’. (2 Kings 24:14) This obviously is not completely true, but we can assume that many of the leaders of Judah have already been exiled.

Meanwhile, King Zedekiah of Judah has the Prophet Jeremiah confined in the court of the guard in his palace, because Jeremiah insists on prophesying that Babylon will take Jerusalem, too, and that it would be better for the remaining people of Judah to surrender now. He is acting like Lord Haw-Haw in World War II, telling the people that their enemies have already won and they might as well give up. No wonder Jeremiah has been imprisoned! However, his confinement is not too strict, because a member of his family can find him and demand that he redeems some property.

We know that Jeremiah came from ‘the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin’. (Jeremiah 1:1) We also know that the people of Anathoth had previously threatened him, saying, ‘You shall not prophesy in the name of the Lord, or you will die by our hand’. (Jeremiah 11:21) Now that Anathoth is occupied, they claim his help. His cousin Hanamel tells Jeremiah to redeem a field to which neither of them now has access, following the law in Leviticus that, ‘If anyone of your kin falls into difficulty and sells a piece of property, then the next of kin shall come and redeem what the relative has sold’. (Leviticus 25:25) Is the law meant to be followed in circumstances in which the land is practically unobtainable? Leviticus does not make that clear, but in this particular case, the Lord does.

Much of the mechanics of the redemption is done by Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch. We can assume that it is Baruch who prepares the deed that Jeremiah signs, and that he finds the seventeen shekels of silver and the witnesses. Jeremiah is, after all, confined in the palace. And it is Baruch who is asked to keep those title deeds secure, ‘for a long time’. But for how long a time?

When I first read today’s reading, I assumed that the long time during which the deeds of purchase had to remain in the earthenware jar was the entire length of the Babylonian Exile. It was not until I had read some of the commentaries on this passage that I realised that the pro-exile propaganda of the editors of the Book of Jeremiah had caught me. The final form of the Book of Jeremiah was created by editors who had returned from Babylon, who argued that only the people who had gone into exile and returned were truly the people of God. But there is nothing in today’s reading to limit the promise of a stable future to the descendants of the exiles. The word translated ‘again’ in ‘Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,’ could also be translated ‘still’: houses and fields and vineyards shall still be bought in this land. It could be read as a sign of the continuing relationship between the Lord and the people who remain in the land after the exiles are taken away. The Second Book of Kings tells us that the Babylonians left ‘the poorest people of the land to be vinedressers and tillers of the soil’. (2 Kings 25:11) Maybe they are the ones who will be able to buy houses and fields and vineyards when the siege of Jerusalem is over, and the wealthy have been taken to Babylon?

That question could seem unimportant were it not that the Book of Jeremiah, and this understanding that the real people of God are those who have returned from exile and not those who remained in the land, is used today to justify the Zionist narrative of Israel. One Jewish Israeli who read this chapter as part of a group based in Jerusalem in the early 2000s responded to it by saying:

As I read it, I became excited – I feel it talks about my family, it gives all the history from the bad times to good times. The feeling of destruction connects it to our generation. In the destruction of the city I see the Holocaust: my grandfather who did not survive … My grandmother [who] came back with two children. They were coming from destruction, and going to building. It is something we feel in my family.

Many Palestinian Christians also read the Book of Jeremiah as a Zionist text. Later in today’s chapter, the Lord tells the exiles, ‘Fields shall be bought in this land of which you are saying, “It is a desolation, without human beings or animals; it has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans.”’ (Jeremiah 32:43) A Palestinian Christian who read that description as part of a group in Bethlehem said, ‘That is the Zionist idea! That Palestine is a land without people, and the Jews are a people without land! I see many Zionist principles in this chapter. I also have a problem with that.’ The Scriptures, written millennia ago, influence today’s most intractable geopolitical conflict.

However, Palestinian Christians have also used today’s passage to argue against occupation: ‘We should insist that the field was not given to a Jew just because God promised them this land. He purchased it. You cannot take it, occupy it. You cannot kill the people and displace them.’ I do not know whether or not this is ironic: the land on which Anathoth once stood is today in the Palestinian West Bank, but has been ‘confiscated’ by an illegal Jewish settlement established in 1982. If you wanted to, you could visit the one and a half thousand Israelis living there illegally: apparently, ‘The stunning views, pastoral quiet and abundance of green space makes this an ideal place to raise a family!’

Historian Meredith Lake, in her cultural history of The Bible in Australia, says that the first free settlers in Australia used the stories of the Israelites claiming the land of Canaan to inspire and make sense of their migration. It could be argued that Australia as we know it, and our presence here today, is at least partly a result of the biblical narratives of the Exodus and the Babylonian Exile; that, like modern Israel and modern Palestine, modern Australia is a product of the Hebrew Scriptures. It will probably not surprise you that that is not the connection I want to make between us and the prophecies of Jeremiah. Instead, I want us to think about hope.

The Book of Jeremiah is a book profoundly concerned about the future: the near future, when Jerusalem will fall; the middle future, when the Babylonian Exile will end; and the far future, the eschaton, when, God says: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’. (Jeremiah 31:33) That is not a promise simply for the exiles; that is a promise for all of us. It is because of faith in this future, it is because he holds onto this hope, that Jeremiah performs the crazy parable of buying land under occupation during a siege. What he is doing in front of witnesses, including all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard in which he is imprisoned, is ridiculous. And yet he does it.

Two weeks ago, I said that despite the horror and judgement of the Book of Jeremiah, there is always a hint of hope, and that desolation never has the final word. In today’s reading, there is more than a hint of hope; there is an abundance of crazy-brave hope. I imagine that everyone observing the interaction between Hanamel and Jeremiah thought that Hanamel was making a shrewd deal; maybe the sort of shrewd deal that we heard Jesus praise last week. (Luke 16:1-13) But it is Jeremiah that we remember today, and Jeremiah’s example that we are called to follow. In a world that too often seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, let us be the people who hold onto hope because of our faith in the God who has said to us: ‘I will be your God, and you will be my people’.