Chapter 33

A brief note – at this stage it looks like I’ll be starting my break from the commentary on Tuesday week. I will let you know of the exact dates closer to the time.

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The ultimate reality humans face is death. No matter who we are, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, to use Robin Williams’ words from “Dead Poets’ Society”: “One day each one of us is going to turn cold, stop breathing – and die.”

It’s one of the harsh moments of childhood – that time when for the first time you experience the loss of someone close to you. For me, it was my grandfather, but I didn’t really understand that. It wasn’t until many years later, when I was in my early teens, that the loss of a good friend truly brought it home to me, at least in emotional terms. But by then, rest assured, I was already aware that my body had a use-by date, and that sooner or later I’d go too[1].

One thing that I have observed as a father is that the irreversibility of death is something that kids understand quite early. My seven-year-old and my five-year-old have both commented on things with lines like “When you die, you don’t come back.”

It may make you a little curious when you read this passage. What has it got to do with the final reality of death? There’s a couple of references to dead bodies in the street, but most of it is about the city of Jerusalem.

I might be drawing a long bow here, but it is my contention that as well as being a prediction of events which definitely were going to happen in Jerusalem (after all, for us they are ancient history – we know they did!), the destruction and re-birth of Jerusalem as described in Jeremiah are in fact a word picture of death and resurrection.

You see, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Oh, a few people were left in the rubble, but make no mistake – the city was dead. It was killed when the people were exiled. The fact that some were left behind didn’t change that; in fact, it made it all the more obvious, because those left behind were really the dregs, the people that the Babylonians couldn’t use. The real social leaders of Judah had been taken as part of the exile. So the city of Jerusalem was destroyed to such a deep level that I’d imagine that the surviving citizens would have struggled to even visualize the city ever returning.

Yet here God says it very clearly – one day in the future, the exiles will return, the city will be re-built, and Jerusalem will once again be the place where God is worshipped.

We know that this happened. Not only did the walls get rebuilt under the guidance of Nehemiah, the Temple rededicated by Ezra and rebuilt by Herod, both history and archaeology confirm the bustling city that Jerusalem became. We even know this from the story of the Crucifixion – by the time Jesus walked its cobbled streets, the exile of Jeremiah was a very distant memory.

But for our passage tonight, Jeremiah 33, this is all in the future; and Jeremiah’s readers will just have to take his word for it. After all, they’re looking at a dead city.

A dead city. Not resting or pining for the fjords, or even stunned; their beloved city was dead.

Jerusalem wasn’t merely re-built. Jerusalem was raised from the very dead. And without God’s intervention that certainly wouldn’t have happened.

Again, perhaps sticking my neck out here, but – God’s not really all that fussed about the city itself. Sure, it’s a nice city, with some nifty architecture. But what God really cares about is its inhabitants.

God wants them to realize that no matter what is going wrong in their lives, He can fix it. If the problem is sin, He can forgive it and restore them. If the problem is sickness, He can heal it. And ultimately, if the problem is death, then the Author of Life can overcome it.

Here we have the first glimmerings of what would ultimately become the driving theology of the Pharisees. And among those Pharisees would come some extremists – one called John the Baptist, and his cousin, Jesus of Nazareth. They too would preach of the coming time when the dead shall be raised in glory.

One of those two would demonstrate that this would happen, not by talk or fancy theology, but by demonstrating that he himself could not be held down by death.

God hasn’t changed. God is still capable of raising the dead. And when we face the loss of friends or family, we can grieve with hope – for alone of people, we Christians know that death isn’t the end it appears to be.

[1] It still didn’t prepare me for the shock of facing the loss of that friend. It’s one thing to talk about death in the abstract. It’s another thing entirely to face it in its ugly, cankered reality.