First Reading · Jeremiah
Six verbs, four of them demolition
Where we are
Jeremiah begins today and will run through the rest of the summer. He preached for forty years across the last five kings of Judah, watched the reform of Josiah rise and collapse, and lived to see Jerusalem burn. This is his call, and it is the shortest and bleakest of the great commissioning scenes.
What happens
"The words of Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah, of a priestly family in Anathoth, in the land of Benjamin. The word of Yahweh came to me thus: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you. 'Ah, Master Yahweh!' I said, 'I know not how to speak; I am too young.' But Yahweh answered me, Say not, 'I am too young.' To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Have no fear before them, because I am with you to deliver you. Then Yahweh extended his hand and touched my mouth, saying, See, I place my words in your mouth! This day I set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root up and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant."
What to notice
The address in verse 1 is doing more work than an address usually does. Anathoth is a village in Benjamin, about five kilometres north-east of Jerusalem, and it has a history: 1 Kings 2:26 says Solomon banished the priest Abiathar there — go to Anathoth, to your fields, for you deserve death, but I will not put you to death today — after backing the wrong son. Anathoth is where the losing branch of the priesthood was sent. Jeremiah opens his book by naming himself as a member of a family that has been out of favour for four centuries, and is then appointed a prophet to the nations.
The verb in the womb is a potter's. Be-terem etsorekha va-beten yedatikha — before I formed you in the belly I knew you. Yatsar is what a craftsman does with clay; it is the verb of Genesis 2:7, where the human being is shaped from dust, and it will come back in Jeremiah 18 when the prophet is sent to watch a potter at a wheel. The book's most famous image is planted in its first paragraph, applied to Jeremiah himself.
Then his objection, and it is a standard move. Moses said I am slow of speech; Isaiah said I am a man of unclean lips; Gideon said I am the least in my father's house. Jeremiah says lo yadati dabber, ki na'ar anokhi — I do not know how to speak, because I am a na'ar. The word covers everything from a small child to a young man, and it also means a servant, an attendant — somebody without standing. The complaint is about age and about rank at the same time.
The reply does not argue with the objection; it changes the subject to logistics. Al-tomar na'ar anokhi, ki al-kol-asher eshlachakha telekh, ve-et kol-asher atsavvekha tedabber — do not say "I am a boy," because you will go wherever I send you and speak whatever I command. No reassurance about his abilities. The question of whether he can do it is simply removed from the agenda, replaced by two relative clauses about instructions.
And then the gesture, which is worth setting beside Isaiah's. Va-yishlach Yahweh et-yado va-yagga al-pi — Yahweh stretched out his hand and touched my mouth. In Isaiah 6 the cleansing of the prophet's mouth is done by a seraph, using tongs, with a coal — three degrees of insulation. Here there is no intermediary and no instrument: a hand, directly on the mouth, and the words are simply put there. Natatti devarai be-fikha — I have given my words in your mouth.
The commission is six infinitives, and the arithmetic is the book. Li-ntosh ve-li-ntots, ule-ha'avid vela-haros, li-vnot vela-nitoa — to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant. Four verbs of demolition and two of construction. Nobody softens the ratio, and Jeremiah's forty years will honour it exactly: the building comes, but most of what he is given to say is the other four. Notice also the frame: the first verb, natash, is uprooting a plant, and the last, nata, is putting one in. The whole appointment is bracketed by gardening.
Responsorial Psalm
From my youth
Where we are
Psalm 71 is the Psalter's prayer of old age. Its most famous petition — not in today's selection — is do not cast me off in the time of old age; when my strength fails, do not forsake me. The lectionary has picked the verses that look backwards, and the effect is to answer Jeremiah's objection with a whole life.
The selected verses
Psalm 71:1-2. "In you, Yahweh, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. In your justice rescue me and deliver me; incline your ear to me and save me."
Psalm 71:3-4a. "Be my rock of refuge, a stronghold to give me safety, for you are my rock and my fortress. O my Theos, rescue me from the hand of the wicked."
Psalm 71:5-6ab. "For you are my hope, Master; my trust, Yahweh, from my youth. On you I depend from birth; from my mother's womb you are my strength."
Psalm 71:15, 17. "My mouth shall declare your justice, day by day your salvation... O Theos, you have taught me from my youth, and till the present I proclaim your wondrous deeds."
What to notice
The phrase that makes the pairing is mi-ne'urai — from my youth — and it is built on the same root as Jeremiah's excuse. He said na'ar anokhi, I am only a boy. The psalmist, looking back from the far end, says mivtachi mi-ne'urai, my trust since I was a boy, and then again in verse 17, Elohim limmadtani mi-ne'urai, you have taught me from my youth. The same word is a disqualification in one mouth and a length of service in the other.
And the psalm reaches further back than youth. Alekha nismakhti mi-beten, mi-me'ei immi attah gozi — on you I have leaned from the belly; from my mother's insides you are the one who cut me free. Gozi is obscure and probably from gazah, to cut off or take away — the midwife's action, severing the cord. Some read it as my protector. Either way it puts Theos in the delivery room, which is exactly where Jeremiah 1:5 puts him: before I formed you in the belly, I knew you.
The middle verses are all fortification: tsur ma'oz, a rock of refuge; beit metsudot, a house of strongholds; sal'i u-metsudati, my crag and my fastness. Four masonry words in three lines, from someone whose own strength is going. And then the last selected verse turns to the mouth: pi yesapper tsidqatekha — my mouth will recount your justice, all day. The psalm ends where Jeremiah's call ends: on what a mouth has been given to do.
Gospel · Matthew
Four kinds of ground
Where we are
On that day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea. The crowd is so large he gets into a boat and pushes off a little. This is the beginning of the third of Matthew's five discourses, and everything in it will be parables.
What happens
"A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky ground, where it had little soil. It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep, and when the sun rose it was scorched, and it withered for lack of roots. Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it. But some seed fell on rich soil and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold. Whoever has ears ought to hear."
What to notice
The sower is not careless, and this is the single most common misreading of the parable. In that agriculture the seed was broadcast first and ploughed in afterwards. The path, the rocky patch and the thorn-scrub are not places the farmer missed — they are parts of the field, and the field has not been turned yet. Nobody in the original audience would have heard incompetence. They would have heard an ordinary morning's work.
The rocky ground is a specific geology and the detail is agricultural, not moral. Ouk eichen bathos gēs — it had no depth of earth. Much of the Galilean hill country is limestone bedrock under a few centimetres of soil, and the tell is in what happens next: eutheōs exaneteilen — it came up at once. Shallow soil over rock heats faster, so the seed germinates sooner than the good seed does. The rapid growth is the symptom of the defect, not a phase before it — and by the time the sun is high, dia to mē echein rhizan exēranthē, it withered for having no root.
The thorns get the most violent verb in the parable: epnixan auta, they strangled them. Pnigō is what you do to a throat. And the thorns came up — anebēsan — which means their roots were already in the ground when the seed was sown. They did not blow in; they were there.
And the numbers are extravagant, which is easy to miss. A good yield in that country was somewhere around sevenfold to tenfold; ancient agronomists writing about the fertile parts of the Mediterranean report similar figures. Thirtyfold is a remarkable harvest. Sixty is astonishing. A hundred is off the scale. So the parable's three failures are ordinary and its one success is not.
Matthew's order is worth noticing because it is not Mark's. Mark counts up — thirty and sixty and a hundred — building to a climax. Matthew counts down: hekaton, hexēkonta, triakonta. He leads with the impossible number. Whatever the ground does, the yield is stated first and largest.
And the parable is left unexplained. Matthew will supply an interpretation later in the chapter, but here the last word is ho echōn ōta akouetō — the one who has ears, let him hear. A story about hearing, ending in a command to hear, addressed to a crowd on a beach.
| Reading |
Words, and the ground they go into |
| Jeremiah 1 |
A hand on a mouth; six verbs, four of them demolition, bracketed by uprooting and planting |
| Psalm 71 |
From my youth — the excuse turned into a record of service, ending on a mouth |
| Matthew 13:1-9 |
Broadcast sowing across a whole field, and what three quarters of it does |
Jeremiah is commissioned in the language of gardening, and the Gospel is a parable about sowing — but the deeper agreement is about proportion.
The six infinitives handed to Jeremiah are the least reassuring job description in the Bible. Four of them are demolition — uproot, pull down, destroy, overthrow — and two are construction, and no attempt is made to soften the ratio or to promise that the building phase will come soon. It did not. He would spend four decades mostly on the first four verbs, and the two hopeful ones would arrive in a prison cell, in the form of a deed to a field he could not visit.
The parable states the same ratio in a different currency. Three soils fail and one produces. Read as a warning about human hearts that is discouraging; read as a description of broadcast sowing it is simply Tuesday. The farmer knew about the path, the rock and the thorns before he opened the bag — they are in the field he was given — and he threw seed across all of it. What the parable adds, and what Jeremiah's commission does not have, is the number at the end. A hundredfold is not a good harvest; it is a harvest nobody had ever brought in. The three failures are realistic and the one success is not, and Matthew puts the impossible figure first in the list.
Psalm 71 supplies the missing element, which is time. Jeremiah's objection — I am only a boy — is answered in the psalm by an old man using the same word: from my youth, you have been my trust; from my youth, you have taught me. The disqualification and the credential are the same noun, separated by a life. And both texts put Theos in the delivery room — before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and from my mother's insides you are the one who cut me free — which is the ground of the whole thing. Neither the prophet nor the psalmist is claiming to be adequate. Both are claiming to have been handled early.
A Question to Sit With
Jeremiah's excuse was true. He
was young, he
did come from the wrong village, and he almost certainly did not know how to speak; nothing in the reply disputes any of it. What the reply does is decline to treat his adequacy as the relevant question —
you will go where I send you and say what I tell you — and then put a hand on his mouth. Where am I still negotiating about whether
I am qualified, in a conversation that has already moved on? And when I look at my own field, and see mostly path and rock and thorn, can I hear the number at the end of the parable — a hundredfold, said first — as the thing
being promised rather than the thing being demanded?