Wednesday • 10/18/2023 •
Wednesday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23) 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:1–24; Jeremiah 37:3–21; 1 Corinthians 14:13–25; Matthew 10:24–33  

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92) 

Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we ask how God might direct our lives from that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. This Wednesday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 23 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.  

Jeremiah: God’s “weeping prophet.” I look forward every morning to immersing myself in the grand story of God’s redeeming love. I confess, however, that going through the period of the divided monarchy these past few weeks has been rough. Despite the occasional “good” king of Judah and the minority voices of “my servants the prophets,” the constant drift is toward judgment, destruction, and exile for the people of God. I’m reminded of God’s people as a whole standing on Deuteronomy’s Mt. Ebal, calling down the curses of covenant disobedience upon their heads. It’s not a pretty picture.  

It’s especially difficult to round out this portion of the history of God’s people by focusing, as we do this week, on the latter part of the career of Jeremiah. He’s often called “the weeping prophet,” and for good reason. From childhood he was called as prophet, and from the very beginning he knew that his was not to be a life of ease. “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). Opposition was going to come, and it was going to be fierce: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:8). 

Yahweh touches Jeremiah’s mouth and puts his own words in his prophet’s mouth (Jeremiah 1:9). Ultimately that means Jeremiah gets treated with as much respect as the One for whom he speaks. And so, earlier this week we saw the contemptuous burning of the scroll upon which Jeremiah writes the words of Yahweh. Today, we see him arrested and falsely charged with treason, and then beaten and thrown into prison. Tomorrow we will find him cast into a muddy cistern: “Now there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud” (Jeremiah 38:6).  

Friday’s and Saturday’s readings recount how Jeremiah is brought up from his cistern prison and given an audience with King Zedekiah. Jeremiah knows that the Babylonian captivity is inevitable, and that it is a matter of Yahweh’s restoring sabbath rest to the land, doing a “reset” of his plan for redemption through Israel. So his counsel is straightforward: Surrender. But Zedekiah is as stuck in mire spiritually as Jeremiah was physically in his cistern: “Your trusted friends have seduced you and have overcome you; Now that your feet are stuck in the mud, they desert you” (Jeremiah 38:22). Zedekiah cannot bring himself to heed Jeremiah, and the destruction the Babylonians bring is the more terrible for Zedekiah’s being “stuck in the mud.” 

And still, despite the resistance, despite what must feel like failure, despite his grief over the suffering that God’s people are bringing on themselves, Jeremiah rises from his cistern to proclaim a message of hope:  

…[W]hen Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the LORD, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. Jeremiah 29:10-14.  

There is a profound and humbling cruciformity to Jeremiah’s life, for in many ways he anticipates the cross-shaped ministry of Jesus, his Savior and ours. That’s why it’s altogether instructive to read and ponder Jeremiah’s life and times.  

Matthew: becoming “little Christs.” Israel’s and Jeremiah’s story is a fitting background for our ability to identify with Jesus’s instruction to the twelve disciples as he sends them out on their first mission. As God’s “peculiar possession” and “kingdom of priests,” Israel was incubating God’s plan to have all the world’s sin be gathered up and assumed in One True Israelite who could stand in for all the world’s sin. Matthew’s entire gospel is the account of this One, whose name is “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).  

Jesus sends the twelve, warning them, “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! … So have no fear of them …” (Matthew 10:24–26a).  

If I may paraphrase and extrapolate: “If they treat you badly it’s not you with whom they have issues. They are rejecting me and taking it out on you. Evil, sin, and death will be conquered by my suffering evil, absorbing sin, and embracing death. If you hold me to be your Christ, you need to respond as “little Christs,” because that’s the way we win.”  

No matter what the response is—whether we meet receptivity, resistance, or indifference—we know, per Jesus’s promise: “[E]ven the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:30–32).  

Be blessed this day,  

Reggie Kidd+