Prophet Jeremiah
May 1st
When the people of Jerusalem refused to listen to his warnings of impending disaster, he decided to take drastic action. From a helpful farmer, he managed to obtain a great wooden yoke of the kind worn by oxen when they pull a plow. Without pausing to reflect, he attached the yoke to his own neck. Now he looked like a beast of burden. He looked grotesque, and he looked frightening.
Wearing the enormous yoke on his bent shoulders, he wandered the streets of the Holy City – while crying out in a loud voice that the Lord God was angry at the Israelites because of their idol-worship, and that they were going to pay a terrible price for having rejected Almighty God and turned their backs on Heaven.
The residents of the great city stood gaping at him in amazement. His name was Jeremiah – they knew that much – and he was reportedly a God-fearing man, the son of a Hebrew priest name Helkiah. Apparently, he TAKEN FEOM had been pacing back and forth across the city for days a time, while warning the citizens in a loud voice that they would soon be wearing the yoke he was now wearing. How could that be, they asked. It was simple, he replied. Within a year or two, he warned, they would be invaded, and captured, and then hauled off into slavery by the monstrous Nebuchadnezzar and his bloodthirsty Babylonian Army!
Unless they repented and tore their clothing and sprinkled their hair with ashes – and then begged the forgiveness of their All-Powerful God for having sunk into base idolatry during recent years – these proud citizens of Jerusalem would soon be wearing yokes themselves. But their yokes would be the yokes of slavery, and exile and unremitting labor for 70 years in an alien world where they would be valued less than common farm animals.
The good citizens of Jerusalem listened to the stark prophecies of Jeremiah – one of the greatest and most passionate prophets in the entire world of the Old Testament – and when he had finished warning them of the great cataclysm that was about to overwhelm their sacrilegious world, they responded swiftly.
They threw him into jail for a while, and then into a slimy pit full of creeping rodents and reptiles. Day after day, he crawled around at the bottom of the greasy pit, attacked by rats and spiders and venomous lizards. Was this his reward for telling them the simple truth about what was going to happen to their city . . . since they had chosen to ignore the God of Abraham and to defile themselves with every kind of pagan debauchery? It was. The hour of judgment was coming round, he warned, but they did not want to listen. They were enjoying their degraded lives, and they had no intention of repenting.
They punished him for his visions, but they did not kill him. He was not important enough to kill, not yet. They simply forgot about him and went back to their sinful, idolatrous ways. Soon they were once again praying to the hideous idols made of gold and silver and bronze. And then one morning, soon after daybreak, they noticed a dark smudge against the horizon. Was that smoke? Had a fire broken out in the next neighboring town? All day long, they watched the smudge darken, and grow larger, and grow closer. Yes, it was smoke!
It was Nebuchadnezzar, and he was setting fire to everything in his barbarian path! In a fever of panic, the citizens of Jerusalem sounded the alarms and called for their armies to save them. But it was too late now. They had awakened from their sinful slumber too late! Before they could rally themselves and prepare the defenses that would be needed to stave off the assault, Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians were upon them.
Jeremiah had predicted every bit of the horror that now began.
He had prophesied: And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. (Jeremiah 25: 11)
And he had also prophesied: And say to them, Thus says the LORD of hosts: “Even so I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, which cannot be made whole again; and they shall bury them in Tophet till there is no place to bury.” (Jeremiah 19:11)
They would not listen. Thus it is always, with the prophets. Ignored and despised, they are scorned by the sinful until it is too late. But nobody suffered more at the fate of the Israelites during the great Babylonian Captivity (605 B.C. to 537 B.C.) than Jeremiah, who had been born in the town of Anathoth, located only a few miles from Jerusalem, and then raised in piety and strict rectitude as the son of a virtuous temple priest. According to the Holy Scriptures, he was chosen while still in the womb by the Almighty to become His prophet:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5).
This Prophet of Almighty God suffered terribly over his visions. After beginning to make his dreadful prophecies at the age of fifteen, the great Prophet of God would spend much of his life weeping and sighing with grief at the destruction of the world he had loved, the world of ancient Jerusalem, which went down to utter ruin and desolation.
Jeremiah was born about six hundred years before Christ, of the tribe of Levi, and he began to prophesy during the reign of the great Israelite king Josiah. Nearly murdered on several occasions by powerful nobles who resented the criticism they saw in his pronouncements, he would survive and go on to challenge four different kingly successors of Josiah. On one explosive occasion, for example, he would predict that the mighty King Jehoiakim was soon to be killed and flung outside the walls of the city by an invading army, and it would be a horrible thing to witness: He shall be buried with the burial of a donkey, Dragged and cast out beyond the gates of Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 22:19)
Because of this prediction, Jeremiah would be thrown into prison – and reduced to “dictating” his prophecies to his loyal assistant Baruch, who stood near a window of the prison and wrote down everything that the Great Prophet said to him. The enraged king threw his utterances into a roaring fire, but they soon were realized, regardless.
And so it went with the other monarchs of Judah. One by one they ignored the words of the Prophet – and then watched helplessly while his predictions came to pass . . . until the hour arrived, under King Zedekiah, when Jeremiah would wear the yoke of an ox and predict the titanic disaster that would be known as the Babylonian Captivity, which lasted for seventy years and did not end until the will of the Deity had been fully expressed. (Jeremiah’s name in Hebrew means: “Yahweh is exalted.”)
After writing both the Book of Jeremiah, one of the great spiritual documents of mankind, and his heart-rending Book of Lamentations, the Great Prophet Jeremiah would finally be stoned to death – along with his faithful friend and assistant, Baruch -- in the town of Taphnas, Egypt, around 583 B.C., according to most Biblical historians . . . after having made yet another prediction about a war that would soon reach that country and kill most of the Israelites who had recently taken refuge there. Jeremiah’s prophecies took place between about 613 and 583 B.C., and he ranks as the second of the Four Major Prophets whose immensely powerful vision illuminates the ancient world of the Old Testament. His greatest work, the Book of Jeremiah, was divided into 51 chapters and has inspired some of the greatest art and some of the greatest religious commentary in the history of the Holy Church. But this great Old Testament prophet also predicted that a Savior would arise some day in the far future – and that he would be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver.
According to tradition, King Alexander the Great eventually visited the tomb of the Prophet Jeremiah at Taphnas and ordered that the Holy Prophet’s body be moved to Alexandria and buried there.
From the life of the Great Prophet Jeremiah, we learn that Prophecy is always a gift that comes from God. We also learn that we ignore the prophets in our midst at our own peril! In the end, the warnings that Jeremiah brought to the Israelites were gifts from God, sent to them out of His infinite wellspring of love for the entire human race.
Apolytikion in the Second Tone
As we celebrate the memory of Thy Prophet Jeremias, O Lord, through him we beseech Thee to save our souls.
Kontakion in the Fourth Tone
O blessed Jeremias, being chosen of God from thy mother's womb, in thy compassion, thou sorely didst mourn for the falling away of Israel. And in Egypt, O Prophet, thou wast murdered by stoning for thy most just rebukes by them that understood not to cry with thee: Alleluia.
