Jeremiah: The Burning of the Scroll

Sunday Scriptures from the Narrative Lectionary

Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-31

John 5:31-38

It is week three of our six-week series on Jeremiah.

If I were asked to pick the accompanying Gospel reading for this week’s Jeremiah text, I would have been tempted to jump out of John back to Luke 19. Luke records Jesus entering Jerusalem for the final time in this passage. As he moves along the road, people are cheering and calling out, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Religious officials tell him to silence the crowd, but Jesus tells them that even if they were to be silenced, the stones along the road way would cry out. If God wills a word to be spoken, or recorded, it’s going to happen.

King Jehoiakim is being exposed to this lesson in Jeremiah 36, although he will refuse to learn it. Jehoiakim is warned in particular in Jeremiah 22:21 where God tells him, “I warned you when you felt secure, but you said, ‘I will not listen.’” The king’s lack of listening resonates with the lack of listening we read about in last week’s chapter. Jehoiakim seems to either think that he knows better than God or that he can skirt accountability to God. Whatever he thinks, it will not hold true. But he tries to contain and restrain and even eliminate the Word of God by refusing that which is written on the scroll.

In chapter 26, God tells Jeremiah to write the Words he has given him on a scroll. The people are gathering in the Temple for a time of fasting and Jeremiah wants it read there in the hopes that the people would turn from their wicked ways (v.7). But Jeremiah has been restricted from the Temple; another attempt to silence the Word of God, so he sends his scribe Baruch in to read the scroll. Baruch does this. An official who heard what was read gathers together other officials over this Word. They bring Baruch before them, ask him to read it again, and hearing it, “they turned to one another in alarm” (v.16). They had studied their history; they were familiar with the prophets and how the Word of God comes to them, and having asked Baruch some questions about how the scroll came to be, determined not only that the King must be made aware, but that Jeremiah and Baruch were in great danger and so they told them to hide where no one would know where they were.

They then take the scroll to the chamber and read it to the King. And as three or four columns were read, the King would cut them off and throw them into the fire that he was sitting next to warming himself. The text says that King was not alarmed by the Word. The text says that his servants were not alarmed by the Word, or the burning of the Word. But alarmed or not, the King clearly did not like the words, because not only did he burn them, but he did not want them to reappear. He sent out two men to arrest Baruch and Jeremiah. But God hid them.

God tells Jeremiah to dictate the words again, and Jeremiah does. Baruch faithfully records the words on another scroll which is not burned, but survives hundreds and hundreds of years to be in the Bibles we have before us.

Indeed, if necessary, the stones will cry out.

But I do not select the lectionary passages. And while the Luke text is helpful, the lectionary passage from John removes any lack of clarity. The truth of Jesus Christ was revealed by John and by the works Jesus did. But those who did not believe John, and those who did not believe the works of Jesus haven’t seen the Father, “and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.”

I wonder if King Jehoiakim would have burned that Word as well?

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