000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

Proper 17 [22]/Year C 265
Jeremiah 2:1–3 frames the lawsuit as if the relationship between God
and the community is a marriage gone bad (2:2–3). God summons the
party being charged to hear the charges (Jer. 2:4), and then asks rhetorical
questions to get readers to recall what God has graciously done for
Judah (2:5–8). God wants to know what the ancestors found wrong with
God, so that they went after “worthless things,” idols (e.g., Jer. 8:19; Deut.
32:21). By going after idols, the people have “become worthless themselves,”
and their community life has taken on the character of the idols
(2:5). Jeremiah 10:1–16 satirizes idols as “like scarecrows in a cucumber
field,” unable to speak or walk, impotent, false, worthless, works of delusion,
soon to perish (cf. 14:22; 16:18; 51:17). The people did not remember
God delivering them from slavery in Egypt, and sustaining them in
the wilderness, nor did they remember how God brought them into the
promised land. By engaging in idolatry they defiled the land (2:6–7). In a
comment that today’s ministers should find sobering, the priests and other
leaders bear special responsibility for the community’s lapse into idolatry.
The prophets, who should have functioned as ombudspersons and helped
the people recognize they were departing from God’s purposes, became
instruments of Baal (2:8).
The accusation is summarized in 2:9–11. The term “I accuse” is riv, a
technical term for bringing charges (2:9). With rhetorical questions, God
urges the community to look to Cyprus and to Kedar to see if any other
people have abandoned a deity who loved them as much as YHWH loved
Judah. (Cyprus is an island sixty miles west of Israel; Kedar was a large
area approximately a hundred miles east of the Jordan.) Can the defendants
cite another people who gave up their deities for beings who are
“no gods,” who have changed their glory for “something that does not
profit”?
God calls witnesses, the heavens, to verify the truth of the charges in
2:12. So flagrant are the violations that God can call elements of nature
(whom the Jewish tradition often viewed as animated) to testify against
the community. Heaven and earth were original witnesses to the making
of the covenant (Deut. 30:19).
The verdict is made public in 2:13. The people have committed two
evils. While scholars debate just what those two evils are, a natural interpretation
from the context is that they are (a) forsaking God, who is a
fountain of living water, and (b) digging out cisterns for themselves that
are cracked and can hold no water, that is, turning to idols that are made
by hands. The contrast between living, fresh water and stagnant cistern