First Reading · Jeremiah
The wadi that goes dry
Where we are
Scattered through Jeremiah are six passages the tradition calls his confessions — private complaints addressed to Yahweh, unlike anything else in the prophets, in which the messenger turns on the sender. This is the second, and the sharpest.
What happens
"Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth! a man of strife and contention to all the land! I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me... When I found your words, I devoured them; they became my joy and the happiness of my heart, because I bore your name, Yahweh, Theos of hosts. I did not sit celebrating in the circle of merrymakers; under the weight of your hand I sat alone because you filled me with indignation. Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? You have indeed become for me a treacherous brook, whose waters do not abide!" And the answer: "If you repent, so that I restore you, in my presence you shall stand; if you bring forth the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece. Then it shall be they who turn to you, and you shall not turn to them; and I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass... for I am with you, to deliver and rescue you."
What to notice
He begins by addressing his mother, which almost nobody in the Bible does. Oy-li immi ki yelidtini — woe to me, my mother, that you bore me. Job curses the day of his birth; Jeremiah speaks to the woman. And the complaint he makes is professional: ish riv ve-ish madon le-khol ha-arets, a man of lawsuit and a man of contention to the whole land. Riv is the technical word for a covenant lawsuit — the genre Micah 6 uses. Jeremiah does not say he is involved in a lawsuit. He says he is one, walking about.
And then the loneliest piece of accounting in the prophets. Lo nashiti ve-lo nashu-vi, kullo meqallelani — I have not lent and they have not lent to me; all of them curse me. In a village economy debt is the standard, reliable reason to hate a neighbour, and he has no debts in either direction. He has removed the only ordinary explanation for why everyone hates him, and is left with the real one.
The verse about the words is the most beautiful thing he ever wrote, and it is the ground of the complaint. Nimtse'u devareikha va-okhelem — your words were found, and I ate them. The passive is worth keeping: the words were found, as if he came upon them rather than being handed them. And he ate them — the same act Ezekiel is commanded to perform with a scroll, and John in Revelation. Va-yehi devarekha li le-sason ve-le-simchat levavi — and your word became to me a delight and the gladness of my heart.
Then the bill. Ki niqra shimkha alai — because your name has been called over me. That is the ownership formula: it is what Jeremiah 7 said about the temple, this house over which my name is called. And the consequence is exclusion: lo yashavti be-sod mesachaqim — I did not sit in the circle of the laughing ones. Sod is an intimate council, the group that shares confidences. He was not thrown out of the party; he did not go, and the reason is mipnei yadekha badad yashavti, because of your hand I sat alone.
Verse 18 is where a prophet says something no one else in the Bible says. Lammah hayah ke'evi netsach, u-makkati anushah, me'anah heraf? — why is my pain permanent, and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Me'anah means it refuses: the injury has been given a will of its own.
And then the accusation, and it is a quotation turned around. Hayo tihyeh li kemo akhzav, mayim lo ne'emanu — will you really be to me like an akhzav, waters that cannot be relied on? An akhzav is a deceptive wadi: a streambed that runs in the wet season and is dry stone when you walk to it in July. This is exactly the charge Yahweh made against Israel in Jeremiah 2:13 — they abandoned me, the spring of living water, and dug themselves broken cisterns — read six days ago. Jeremiah has taken the book's own central metaphor for apostasy and pointed it at its author. And the participle he uses, ne'emanu, is from aman: water with no load rating.
The answer does not comfort him. Im tashuv va-ashivkha — if you turn, I will turn you back; the prophet is told to repent. Then a smelter's image: im totsi yaqar mi-zolel — if you bring out what is precious from what is worthless — and only then ke-fi tihyeh, you shall be as my mouth. The one who has been Yahweh's mouth for chapters is told he may become it.
And the verb shuv runs four times through two verses, ending in a reversal: yashuvu hemmah eleikha, ve-attah lo tashuv aleihem — they shall turn to you, and you shall not turn to them. What is being protected is the direction of travel. Finally, the promise from chapter 1 is re-issued verbatim — a fortified wall of bronze... I am with you — which means it had to be given twice, and that the second time was because he asked.
Responsorial Psalm
Not for my transgression
Where we are
Psalm 59's superscription places it when Saul sent men to watch the house in order to kill him — a night of men posted outside a door. The lectionary has chosen it for one phrase that answers Jeremiah exactly.
The selected verses
Psalm 59:2-3. "Rescue me from my enemies, O my Theos; from my adversaries defend me. Rescue me from evildoers; from bloodthirsty men save me."
Psalm 59:4. "For behold, they lie in wait for my life; mighty men come together against me, not for any offence or sin of mine, Yahweh."
Psalm 59:10-11. "O my strength! for you I watch; for you, O Theos, are my stronghold, my gracious Theos! May Theos come to my aid."
Psalm 59:17, 18. "But I will sing of your strength, and revel at dawn in your kindness. You have been my stronghold, my refuge in the day of distress. O my strength! your praise will I sing; for you, O Theos, are my stronghold, my gracious Theos."
What to notice
Lo-fish'i ve-lo-chatati Yahweh — not for my rebellion and not for my sin, Yahweh. That is the psalm's version of Jeremiah's I have not lent and they have not lent to me. Both men have gone through the obvious explanations and found nothing there, and both say so to Theos rather than about him.
The refrain is a single noun repeated three times: misgav — a high place, a stronghold, the crag you get up onto when there are men at the door. A misgav is not a fortress you build; it is a piece of terrain you reach.
And the day's hinge is the time of day. Va-aranen la-boqer chasdekha — I will shout aloud in the morning of your loyalty. Ranan is the loud one, and la-boqer means at daybreak, which is when the men outside the house will have to leave. Jeremiah's complaint is that his pain is netsach, perpetual, with no morning in it. The psalm sings about a morning it has not yet seen — which is not a contradiction of the prophet's complaint but the same situation, held differently.
Gospel · Matthew
Two men who sell everything
Where we are
Two of the shortest parables in the Gospels, and Matthew's alone. They are a matched pair with one deliberate difference: one man was not looking, and the other was.
What happens
"The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it."
What to notice
The treasure is kekrymmenō — having been hidden — which is the third appearance of this root in the discourse. Matthew used it two days ago of the woman who hid leaven in the flour, and of things hidden since the foundation of the world. And then the finder's very first act is to hide it again: hon heurōn anthrōpos ekrypsen. He does not lift it out. He covers it back over and goes to raise money.
The transaction is legally shrewd and possibly sharp, and the parable does not comment. Under the property conventions of the time, buying a field secured title to what was in it; announcing the find first would have raised the price or lost the claim. Readers have argued about the ethics for centuries and the parable is serenely uninterested — it says only what the man did and, remarkably, why.
Because the motive is named, and it is not calculation. Apo tēs charas autou hypagei — from his joy he goes. The one interior state Matthew reports is not shrewdness or resolve but delight, and it is given as the cause of the selling. The man is not making a sacrifice; he is doing the obvious thing, quickly, because he cannot believe his luck.
The second man is the opposite kind of finder. Emporō zētounti kalous margaritas — a wholesaler seeking fine pearls. Emporos is not a shopkeeper but an importer, a man with a business and a stock. He has spent his career looking, which is the exact inverse of the labourer who tripped over something in a field. Matthew is careful to give both routes.
And what the merchant does is stranger than it looks. Pepraken panta hosa eichen kai ēgorasen auton — he has sold everything he had and bought it. For a dealer, that means liquidating the stock: he goes out of business to own one item he can no longer trade. A pearl of that class was the supreme luxury of the ancient world — Pliny reports one valued at a sum that would have provisioned an army — and pearls came from the sea, dived for by foreigners in waters most Jews never saw. The merchant has converted a working enterprise into a single object of no further use to a merchant.
Both parables end on the same two verbs and neither mentions cost as a loss. Sells all that he has, and buys. Nobody in either story is described as giving something up. The field-labourer is glad, and the dealer simply completes the trade his whole life had been rehearsing for.
| Reading |
What it cost, and what the payer thought of the price |
| Jeremiah 15 |
He ate the words with delight, lost the party and the friends, and demands an answer |
| Psalm 59 |
Men at the door for no offence of his — and a song promised for the morning |
| Matthew 13:44-46 |
Two men liquidate everything, one from joy and one from a lifetime's search |
Today gives three people who paid everything, and one of them is furious about it.
Jeremiah's account of the transaction is the same as the parables' in every respect but one. He found something — your words were found, and I ate them — and it was a delight, sason ve-simchat levavi, joy and the gladness of my heart. And it cost him everything: the sod mesachaqim, the circle of people who laugh together, and any prospect of being anything other than a walking lawsuit. The two men in the Gospel pay exactly the same price and Matthew calls one of them glad.
What Jeremiah adds is the invoice arriving later than the purchase. Why is my pain permanent and my wound refusing to heal? And then the accusation, which is the most audacious sentence in the book: you have become to me a wadi that runs when I do not need it and is dry when I do. He is quoting his own preaching back at Yahweh — the charge in chapter 2 was that Israel abandoned a spring for cracked tanks; the charge here is that the spring itself is unreliable.
And he is not rebuked for saying it. He is told to turn — the prophet gets the same imperative he has been giving everybody else — and then given, word for word, the promise from his call: a fortified wall of bronze; I am with you. The consolation offered is not new information. It is the original terms, re-issued to a man who had stopped believing them, and the fact that it needed re-issuing is left in the text.
Psalm 59 sits between them as somebody in the same position who has found a different sentence to say. He also has no explanation — not for my rebellion and not for my sin — and he is also awake at night with hostile men in the street. But his refrain is misgav, a stronghold, which is a piece of high ground you get to rather than a wall you build, and his last promise is I will shout aloud at daybreak of your loyalty. He has not seen the morning yet. He is scheduling the song anyway.
The two parables answer none of this and do not try to. They simply put the price beside the item and let the arithmetic stand: a field labourer who has stumbled on something and cannot get to the notary fast enough, and a professional who has looked at pearls his entire adult life and finally shuts the business. Apo tēs charas autou — from his joy. The gladness is not a reward that comes after the payment; it is the reason the payment happened, which is exactly what Jeremiah said about the day he ate the words, and exactly what he cannot feel now.
A Question to Sit With
Jeremiah did the same thing the two men in the parables did: he found something, it delighted him, and he paid everything for it — the friendships, the laughing circle, any chance of an ordinary
life. The difference is that he is far enough down the road to have the bill in his hand, and he has looked up and said
you have been a dry streambed to me. He is not punished for it. He is told to turn round, and handed back the
promise he was given at the start. When the joy that got me into something has run out and only the price is left, is there a version of saying so out loud that is
faithful rather than faithless? And would I recognise the answer if it came, as his did — not as new information, but as the original terms repeated to somebody who needed them said twice?