To find the latest articles available on the website please use the side menu or use the button below
The latest services are always available by clicking on the link below.
We offer comprehensive information for the bride and groom considering marrying in the parish of Swaythling
Visit The Reverend Canon Gary Philbrick on Facebook by clicking on the link below.
Jeremiah exercised his ministry during the last years of the Kingdom of Judah. Babylon to the north, and Egypt to the south both exercised pressure, treating Judah as a buffer state between them.
After King Josiah died (609) the kings vacillated between the two powers, until eventually Nebuchadnezzar moved in (2 Kings 22-25).
By 603, Jehoiakim was a vassal of Babylon, but when he rebelled in 598, Nebuchadnezzar attacked. Jehoiakim died in the same month, possibly assassinated, and Jehoiachin his son came to the throne.
Within three months, Jerusalem had surrendered.
The leading citizens were deported to Babylon, and Mattaniah the King’s uncle was left to rule, with his name changed to Zedekiah.
In 587 there was another rebellion, and Jerusalem was besieged and taken.
A Governor Gedaliah was left in charge, but he was murdered, and most of the important people left in Judah fled to Egypt, Jeremiah among them.
Jeremiah is sometimes described as a gloomy prophet – he has even given his name to the expression of lamentation, a ‘jeremiad’.
It is true that he found it very hard to be a prophet, because his message was not popular, and he was treated so badly by some of his opponents that he wished that he had never been born.
But his calling was to bring people back to following God’s law, and he knew that he could not abandon that task.
During the reign of Josiah, a Book of the Law, usually identified with Deuteronomy chs 5-26 and 28 was found in the Temple, perhaps hidden there in the long reign of the previous king Manasseh, who had encouraged the people to drift away from God.
This discovery triggered a reform, and initially Jeremiah supported it (Jer 2-6).
But as time went on, he began to see that the Temple had become a kind of talisman – as long as it was there, people felt that all would be well, regardless of their behaviour.
Jer chs 7 and 26 contain his denunciation of people’s failure to change in any fundamental way.
He said that God’s judgement would be the destruction of the Temple.
The religious leaders did not like this, or his belief that God would crush the nation in order to remake it.
His vivid imagery and acted-out teaching about the potter (Chs 18-19) led to a run-in with the priest, Pashur (Ch20), and a night in the stocks.
Later he was put in prison, and on one occasion (Ch 38) was put down a well to die.
King Zedekiah couldn’t make up his mind about how to treat Jeremiah, for he saw that there was sense in what Jeremiah was saying.
Jeremiah consistently said that the people would be taken into Exile in Babylon, and that would be God’s opportunity to re-establish his relationship with the people.
There would be a new Covenant of individual relationships (Jer 31 23-34) in which God and the people would be committed to each other.
Far from being gloomy, Jeremiah held out hope that God had a future for his people.
When the city of Jerusalem was captured for the first time, there were those who said that the Exile would not last – it would be over in a couple of years.
Jeremiah said that would not be the case, it would last for a generation or more, and he wrote a letter to the Exiles in Babylon (Jer 29) urging them to settle in their new land, and seek its welfare, for that was where God would remake his people.
All hope for the future lay with the Exiles, who had to learn to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.
Ps 137 describes their initial feeling of desolation.
They still believed that gods only had power over their own physical territory.
The Jews had to learn that God would not be confined like that.
Deutero Isaiah would be instrumental in helping them to enlarge their vision.