Yokes, Lies, and the Cross: Jeremiah’s Prophetic Showdown

Good morning, St. John's. If you don't know me, I'm Pastor James Dimmel. I'm

Pastor of Youth and Outreach here. I'm glad to be sharing the Word with you

today. Our reading this morning comes from the book of the Prophet Jeremiah,

the entire 28th chapter, so buckle up for that. Here now, God's Word. In that same

year, at the beginning of the reign of King Zedekiah of Judah, in the fifth

month of the fourth year, the Prophet Hananiah, son of Azur from Gibeon, spoke

to me, me being Jeremiah, in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests

and all the people, saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, I have

broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to

this place all the vessels of the Lord's house, which King Nebuchadnezzar of

Babylon took away from this place and carried into Babylon. I will also bring

back to this place King Jeconiah, son of Joachim of Judah, and all the exiles from

Judah who went to Babylon, says the Lord, for I will break the yoke of the king of

Babylon. Then the Prophet Jeremiah spoke to the Prophet Hananiah in the presence

of the priests and all the people who were standing in the house of the Lord.

And the Prophet Jeremiah said, Amen! May the Lord do so! May the Lord fulfill the

words that you have prophesied and bring back to this place from Babylon the

vessels of the house of the Lord and all the exiles. But now, listen to this word

that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people, the prophets

who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and

pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who

prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes true, then it will be known

that the Lord has truly sent that prophet. Then the Prophet Hananiah took

the yoke from the neck of the Prophet Jeremiah and broke it. And Hananiah spoke

in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus says the Lord, this is how I will

break the yoke of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon from the neck of all the

nations within two years. At this, the Prophet Jeremiah went his way. Sometime

after the Prophet Hananiah had broken the yoke from the neck of the Prophet

Jeremiah, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. Go, tell Hananiah, thus says the

Lord, you have broken wooden bars only to forge iron bars in place of them. For

thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, I have put an iron yoke on the

neck of all these nations so that they may serve King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon,

and they shall indeed serve him. I have even given him the wild animals. And the

Prophet Jeremiah said to the Prophet Hananiah, Listen, Hananiah, the Lord has

not sent you, and you made this people trust in a lie. Therefore, thus says the

Lord, I am going to send you off the face of the earth. Within this year you will

be dead, for you have spoken rebellion against the Lord. And that same year, in

the seventh month, the Prophet Hananiah died. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Gracious God, give us ears to hear you

clearly, and hearts to discern your will amidst the noise of this world, and let

the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be

acceptable to you, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. So I want to start

this morning with a bit of context in history, as I think the Scripture passage

that we have for us is entertaining enough on its own. Today we focus on the

drama of one of the core prophetic showdowns in all of Scripture, the

showdown between the Prophet Jeremiah and the Prophet Hananiah is at the crux

of the entire book of Jeremiah, and so let's begin this morning by reviewing

our Old Testament prophetic fundamentals. Jeremiah's story. He was called as a

young, reluctant child into the service of God to be a prophet, a word which has

all sorts of connotation. And sure, there's a bit of truth in the fact that

prophets in the Old Testament told the future, but they only ever did so because

they were considered to be mouthpieces of God. They were consecrated and set

apart to bring the Word of God to the people present tense, and so more often

than not, they are focused on present realities and present injustices, and they

speak of the future mostly just to foretell the consequences of those

present actions. You see, we get it twisted because we like to think of

prophets in popular culture as primarily concerned with the future. In the Old

Testament, the prophetic tradition is primarily concerned with the present.

Such is the case in our passage this morning from Jeremiah 28. The long story

made kind of short is that the Empire of Babylon has conquered, or at least is

in the process of conquering, the kingdom of Judah. Judah has become a vassal state.

Then the Babylonian Empire, King Nebuchadnezzar has appointed a kind of a

proxy king in place. This happened roughly in the year 605. Then in 597, the

kingdom of Judah rebelled for the first time, and many of the elite wealthy class

were carried off into exile in Babylon, and a lot of the vessels were stolen

from the Jewish temple. You hear some concern about that in the text. A new king

was put in place. And then Judah rebelled again a second time, ten years later, in

587, and this was the big one. Babylon had no mercy. The city was razed. The

temple was completely destroyed, and everyone just about was carried off into

exile. The 70-year Babylonian captivity, a defining moment in the history of God's

people, began. Now Jeremiah and this showdown that we have before us takes

place sometime between those two rebellions. The elites have been

carried off into exile, but Jerusalem has not yet been destroyed, and God gives

Jeremiah a very unexpected and paradoxical word. Submit and live. Just the

chapter before this one, Jeremiah 27, here's what it says. Bring your necks

under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him and his people and live.

Not to be expected. Submit and live. I thought God's people were supposed to be

victors always. God even cautions against false prophets who preach peace

and victory because there is no victory to be had in this situation, at least not

in the traditional immediate sense. There is only survival towards a future

restoration. And so Jeremiah himself is given a prophetic action to

enforce this. He is told to make a wooden yoke like that animals would use in a

field and to place it around his neck and wear it around as a sign and symbol

that, for the time being, the people of Judah will be under the yoke of Babylon.

And so the scene is set, right? Enter this infamous prophetic showdown. Another

prophet, Hananiah, has appeared and proclaims the exact opposite of the

message that Jeremiah has given the people. Only, and as you might imagine, his

message sounds just a bit more appealing. It's essentially what they

want to hear, right? Judah will be liberated imminently. The exiles are

going to be brought back. The temple is going to be restored. The Babylonian

Empire is going to be wiped off the face of the earth. You're going to get your

way and it's going to be soon. You can trust me.

Hananiah goes so far in the temple of the Lord as to approach Jeremiah and take

that wooden yoke and break it off of his neck. And the thing is, this isn't the

first time something like this has happened in Scripture. The Bible is full

of confrontations of interpretation, right? You've never disagreed with

someone about interpretation before, have you? Think about it, right? The serpent in

the garden, twisting, interpreting God's Word just a little bit differently. Moses

and the priests of Egypt, Elijah and the prophets of Baal and first kings, Jesus

and the Pharisees, all throughout the gospel. You see, the tricky thing is about

religion is that it depends upon interpretation. Though God's Word is firm

and solid, we human beings are quite fluid. Every time we approach Scripture,

we are making choices about how to read, whether this is conscious or not. Most of

the time I think it isn't. There's no such thing as reading Scripture without

interpretation. And so the question is, especially as we have two prophets that

are battling it out here in this chapter, how can we know? How can we really know

how to read the Scripture? How can we know who to listen to or who to trust in

a world full of noise and competing interpretations? I think questions like

this are maybe more live than they have ever been, because we live in a moment

where most discipleship occurs on a screen, where one might spend more time

listening to an influencer of religion, a podcaster or a YouTuber, than to a live,

in-person, flesh-and-blood pastor or priest. Ironically, this is the easiest

that discipleship has ever been, right? Find someone who tells you what you want

to hear, and the Internet will work its algorithmic magic to provide you more

and more of that content, which you can be sure will make you feel justified and

righteous, and also quite angry and upset and divided from anyone who thinks

differently than what your algorithm has tuned itself for.

Hananiah's temptation, then, is the same as we face today. It is to use our

religion, our spirituality, to make us feel good about ourselves. Temptation is

to create an illusion of peace where there actually is no peace to be found.

It's to provide distraction so that there can be no accountability or growth.

It's to puff ourselves up in self-assurance so that we don't really

have to think about how we are actually treating our neighbors or our world or

ourselves or how close we are actually listening to and following God's Word.

Martin Luther had a name for prophets such as these, prophets like Hananiah,

prophets who tell you what you want to hear. He called them theologians of glory.

I'm gonna read you a bit of an extended passage here from a piece that Luther

wrote in 1518 called the Heidelberg Disputation. Many people ask me, what do

Lutherans actually believe? This is, like, top, in my opinion, top three most

important passage that Luther wrote.

Instead, he deserves to be called a theologian, however, who

comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and

the cross. A theologian of glory calls evil good and calls good evil. I'm gonna

say that again, a little bit extended. A theologian, a theology of glory, calls

that which is evil good and that which is good, they call evil. A theology of the

cross calls the thing what it actually is. That wisdom which sees the invisible

things of God and works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and

hardened. One of the main points Luther's trying to make here is that we,

categorically as human beings, we can never really get it right. You see, sin

infects and corrupts and warps us too deeply, and even apart from this, in a

world in which there were no sin, we are still limited, created beings, and so we

can and should never pretend to understand the mind of God, a being

beyond us, apart from which God has revealed to us. You see, we have to despair

of our own ability before we are ever able to receive grace, and until we

receive grace, we can never hope to even begin to develop those spiritual

faculties by which we can discern God's will at work in our world. Theologians

of glory talk a lot. They are confident that they understand God's will in all

things, and most of the time those things align with their own desires. Hananiah,

the prophets of Egypt, the serpent in the garden, the corporation behind your

Instagram algorithm—this is the point where they cut us off the livestream,

Taylor—the list of false prophets, those who want to make you believe in a lie

for the sake of their own good, that list goes on and on. And so, again, this begs

the question, how do we know what God's will is? What does it look like? How can

we discern it? Thanks be to God that the answer is found in the cross of Jesus

Christ. Sit with that for a minute. God's will was a cross. God is willing to meet

you in your brokenness, in your suffering, and God works to resurrect you up out of

it. This is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And a close reading of

the scriptures from cover to cover reveals this, that the cross wasn't just

a one-time event. It was part of a larger pattern of God's compassion, of God's

suffering with and for us, of God working all things out for our good. You see,

God's will is life, life abundant and eternal, but God's will, also mysterious

and paradoxical as it may seem, is not a life without suffering. To quote Luther

again, a theologian of the cross, calls a thing what it is. God's will, brothers and

sisters, more often than not, is a mystery to us. And so it's more faithful to

listen and to learn how to discern it in community than it is to proclaim that we

have it all figured out on our own. The hard truth is that God's will always

looks like a cross. The cross is the only thing that can ever bring us life. This

is why Jeremiah was willing to preach the hard word. It was why he was willing

to wear that yoke on his neck. It is why the prophet Hananiah burned out, because

he preached an illusion of life and peace, and he missed out on what true

life and peace with God actually is. As Christians, we look for God in the midst

of suffering because we have that hope and that promise of the resurrection. And

so if your plan is to avoid the suffering and pain of life, I have good

and bad news for you. You won't. That's life, right? But the good news is that God

is always waiting there for you, so that he can bring you out of it once more.

The paradox of victory in Christ is this, that God suffers and dies for you to

have it. The paradox of life in Christ is this, only when we meet God in those

broken places of our lives are we strengthened and enabled and empowered

to go meet others in their broken places. And the paradox of prophecy, of

discerning and interpreting God's Word, is this, the word of challenge is more

often than not the word of gospel. Both those things go together and can't be

pulled apart. Now after the showdown with Hananiah, Jeremiah pens one of the

most memorable passages in the entirety of the Bible. You know this passage, get

ready for it. After his prophecy has been proven right, he writes a letter to the

exiles that have been taken away after that first rebellion in Babylon. He knows

they need good news, he knows that they need to be reminded of God's promise, and

so he writes these words. You definitely know the second verse.

For thus says the Lord, only when Babylon's seventy years are completed

will I visit you, and I will fulfill my promise and bring you back to this place.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. Plans for your

welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. That's Jeremiah 29

Jeremiah 29:10

verses 10 and 11. And I think the most important words of this passage are the

words, only when. Only when Babylon's seventy years are completed will I visit

you. How human of us it is to want to rush to the end and neglect the journey,

to have our instant gratification, have things just magically work out. How

divine it is to wait, to let God's plan for our lives unfold, to let it temper

and strengthen us. God's Word is life for us, but it is also always challenge

to us. Those things can't be pulled apart. And God does have plans for us, plans for

you, but those plans are, well, they're on God's time, and more often than not, they

are not going to go the way that you think. And so it is our great spiritual

discipline to wait, to grow, to learn, to seek God in our suffering, in our trial,

and to let that suffering and trial show us just who this God we worship really

is, and to let it show us who we should be for others. And so, as for the

lingering question of interpretation and who to trust, I have some closing

criteria for you this morning. If you hear good news that comes without a

cross, it is likely a fantasy. If you hear pride and glory without service and

suffering, then it is an illusion. And if you hear peace without patience, then you

should likely be very, very wary. A theologian of the cross calls a thing

what it actually is. Amen. Let's pray.

God, we give you thanks for your Word, which is life to us and challenge for us.

God, we pray each and every time that we turn to the Scriptures, that we listen to

your Word, proclaim that the Holy Spirit might meet us and enable us to discern

your will for us, your life for us, how you want us to grow and to become more

like you as disciples. God, we give you thanks for your cross, for the power of

your resurrection. God, we give you thanks that you meet us in every broken place

in our lives and in our world, that you redeem and reconcile and resurrect us

time and time again.

Meet us there, God, in those places. Slow us down, grow and strengthen us, help us

to listen more than we speak, and to learn to hear your Word anew in all

things. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.