The Wide Road of God's Grace
Jeremiah 31:7-14
As you may have heard, it’s January. The year 2024 is history. Christmas is over. New Year’s is over. Alright! Everybody back to work! When I was growing up, my father would pronounce the end of Christmas on Christmas Day as soon as the last present was unwrapped. “Well, Christmas is over,” he would say, with what sounded like a mixture of resignation and relief. I think he was only half kidding because he made it his job on Christmas Day to walk around with a large trash bag collecting all of the discarded wrapping paper. The opening of gifts having concluded, so had his Christmas.
Of course, my father was wrong. Christmas was not over but had only just begun. The Twelve Days of Christmas is not just a goofy song but the true length of the season of Christmas, which begins on Christmas Day and concludes—why today—January 5th being Day 12. Traditionally, the final night of Christmas was a time of great revelry known as Twelfth Night. Back in your school days you may have even read Shakespeare’s comedic play of that name, which was written for Twelfth Night and features multiple love triangles and cases of mistaken identity. It is a comedy, after all.
The season of Christmas gives way to Epiphany tomorrow on January 6th (my father’s birthday), and so today we straddle the line between Christmas and Epiphany. Epiphany. That’s a rather churchy word that has crossed over to the secular world where it refers to a moment of sudden realization or insight. Think of the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head leading him to an understanding of the force of gravity. Or for that matter, anytime someone exclaims, “Eureka!”, they’ve just had an epiphany.
But the Epiphany (with a capital “E”) refers specifically to the arrival of the Magi, so-called wise men from the East, to the place of Jesus’ birth. Although they are gentiles, they honor the birth of the Jewish Messiah with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Their presence at the manger symbolizes that the newborn Jesus is the Savior not only of Israel but of the entire world.
The reading today from Jeremiah doesn’t mention the Magi or the manger. In fact, its focus is on the Jewish exiles living in Babylon more than 500 years before the birth of Jesus. Nonetheless, Jeremiah’s prophecy of hope is good news not only for the Jewish remnant residing in Babylon but for the rest of the world as well. As such, it’s an appropriate reading for today as we prepare to transition from Christmas to Epiphany.
We read from Jeremiah about a month ago, but a quick refresher on his background and historical context will help ground us. Jeremiah was from a priestly family. His home was in a village just three miles from Jerusalem. He lived in a tumultuous time in the history of Judah, the southern kingdom of the once united Israel. The northern kingdom had been destroyed more than 100 years earlier by the empire of Assyria. Now the southern kingdom was a wasteland as well, having fallen to the Babylonians. The king was deposed, the temple was a pile of rubble, and the leading citizens of Jerusalem had been carried away as slaves to exile in Babylon. Judah, for all intents and purposes, was over, finished.
Most of Jeremiah’s prophesies warned in advance of the looming threat from Babylon and warned the king of Judah not to resist, not to make an alliance with Egypt, Babylon’s enemy, but to submit. Submit to Babylon and live or resist and die. That was Jeremiah’s message. Sadly, Judah chose to resist, and the consequence was death.
But there is one small section of the prophet’s writings—chapters 30 to 33—that amid all the doom and gloom speaks a word of comfort to the community in exile. That is what we are reading today—a word of hope, a word of consolation, a word of comfort for a people who languish in a foreign land feeling forgotten and forsaken by their God.
The passage begins with the Lord speaking through the prophet telling the people to sing aloud and raise shouts of joy. Come again? To the ears of those in exile I imagine that this command to sing and rejoice may have come off as tone deaf. Singing? Rejoicing? Really? Come on, Lord, read the room. Your people—all that’s left of them—aren’t exactly in a celebratory mood. They’re feeling abandoned, left behind.
The problem whenever we discuss the exile is that we have no frame of reference. Not only is the exile ancient history—something that happened 2,500 years ago—but none of us has experienced anything like it. We’ve never been conquered by a foreign power. We’ve never been forcibly taken from our home and sent to live in a foreign land as outcasts.
Lacking any frame of reference or any comparable experience, to make sense of the existential despair of those who endured a real, physical exile, we have to turn exile into a metaphor for alienation. I don’t like it, but I don’t see any other option. Otherwise, we’re left with nothing more than a history lesson. And that’s not what you came here for.
So, while we’ve never experienced a literal exile, the feelings that exile engenders we can still relate to because we are no strangers to alienation, and alienation is at the heart of the exile experience. Alienation—that feeling that you are disconnected from meaning, purpose, passion, the presence of God, and any source of hope.
Maybe you mourn for a past that you long to return to but is now forever out of reach. Or perhaps you feel adrift, languishing without a plan or a purpose. Or you are full of self-loathing and think that you are being punished for something you did. Or you just can’t escape the feeling that you have been forsaken by God, because if God truly loved you, how could God allow you to feel so isolated and alone?
Faith in God does not inoculate us against suffering.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not a secret, exactly. It’s more of an uncomfortable truth, one that some Christians pretend is not the case. And that truth is this: believing in God does not protect you from pain and suffering. Some of us think that we have to be smiling all the time (“Be joyful always,” Paul writes), especially here in church, showing others that all is right in our world. Praise God!
Yet the truth is that believing in God does not mean that you will never get divorced, go bankrupt, become clinically depressed, become alienated from your children, receive a grim diagnosis, or experience some form of tragedy. Faith in God does not inoculate us against suffering.
Yet at the time that Jeremiah was warning about the threat from Babylon, many people believed otherwise, foremost among them Judah’s king. He had his own prophets who told him only what he wanted to hear. Babylon was a paper tiger. The Lord would deal with Babylon just as he had dealt with the Egyptians in the time of Moses. To say that God would allow Jerusalem to fall was crazy talk. To think that God would allow the temple—the symbol of God’s abiding presence—to be destroyed was unimaginable. To even ponder the notion of exile from the land—the land that God had promised to their ancestors—was not worth serious consideration.
The people of Judah did not think that exile was a possibility until it happened, and then once they lived in exile for two or more generations, they could not imagine the exile ever ending. So it is with us when we are convinced that whatever dreaded thing has a hold of us is too strong for us. We are overwhelmed. Defeated. There is no end in sight.
But here comes the good news (you knew it was coming). The Lord speaks through Jeremiah:
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth…
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back…
He who scattered Israel will gather him
and will keep him as a shepherd does a flock.
God is going to bring the exiles home. God is not going to wait for them to come crawling on their knees begging for forgiveness. Like the father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who does not wait for his wayward son to come home and repent but instead runs out to meet him, God will go to where the people are. God will lead his people back like a shepherd leads his flock to water and to rest. God will gather them all, even singling out for special mention the most vulnerable—“the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor.”
The darkness that had enveloped the exiles, that had seemed so impenetrable, must now give way to the everlasting light of God’s love. This is the same light that guided stargazers from the east—the wise men—to a humble manger in Bethlehem, the city of David. What could have caused these gentiles from afar to trek all the way to Bethlehem? What would compel these gentiles to trek all the way to Bethlehem to see the Jewish Messiah?
“Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,” writes Jeremiah. And with the arrival of the wise men at the manger, the nations have indeed heard God’s word. They have seen his face. When Mary opens the door to let the wise men in, she opens the door to the entire world. The promise that God had made to Abraham—that through him all nations would be blessed—has now come true. For this child is not only the Jewish Messiah but the Savior of the world. In him the Lord has freed us from hands that were too strong for us—the iron grip of sin and death.
The road by which the exiles eventually made their way home, and the road taken by the Magi to reach the Christ child may not have been the same exact road geographically, but theologically they are one and the same. Both Jew and Gentile alike are fellow travelers on the wide road of God’s grace.