The Deeds in the Clay Jar

Jeremiah had been a prophet in Jerusalem for forty years by then, saying out loud the thing nobody wanted said, and it had cost him beatings and prison and a night at the bottom of a muddy well. And now the army of Babylon was camped all around the city.

And that is where he was — a prisoner in the guard court, with the siege ramps of Babylon piled against his city’s walls — when God told him to buy a field. “Look. Hanamel your uncle’s son is coming to you, and he is going to say: buy my field at Anathoth, because you are the nearest relative and it is your right to buy it.” And Hanamel came, into the courtyard of the guard, exactly as God had said, and said: “Buy my field. It is in the land of Benjamin, at Anathoth. You have the right to buy it, and you are the eldest.” It was the worst piece of land in the world to buy. Anathoth was already in enemy hands, the country was about to be emptied, and nobody was buying anything. And Jeremiah bought it. He weighed the silver out on the scales and wrote the deed and sealed it and had witnesses sign it, in front of everybody in that courtyard. And then he handed the papers to Baruch and said it out loud, so that they would all hear: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: take these papers, the sealed deed and the open one, and put them in a clay jar, so that they will keep for a long, long time.” “For this is what the Lord says: houses and fields and vineyards will be bought in this land again.” And then, when he was on his own, he prayed — and it is an honest prayer, because he told God exactly how it looked from where he was standing. “Lord, you made heaven and earth by your great power, and nothing is too hard for you. Now look at the siege ramps. They have come right up to the city to take it, exactly as you said they would. And you say to me: buy yourself a field, and pay for it. So I bought it.” And God answered: “I am the Lord, the God of everything that lives. Is anything too hard for me? Yes — this city will be given to the king of Babylon, and he will take it. And I will gather them back out of every country I scattered them into, and bring them home, and settle them here safely. They will be my people, and I will be their God. And fields will be bought again in this land — the land you are all calling empty.”

And then, after forty years of nobody believing him, it happened. In the ninth year of Zedekiah, in the tenth month, the army of Babylon camped all around Jerusalem. In the eleventh year, in the fourth month, on the ninth day, the wall was broken open, and the generals of Babylon walked in and sat down in the Middle Gate. The house of the Lord was burned. The walls were pulled down. The people were taken away. Every single thing Jeremiah had said would happen, happened. And when it was over he sat down and wept, and made a poem about the city. They found him in the guard court and let him go, and he lived among the poorest people who were left behind. And Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, who had pulled him out of the mud, was given a promise of his own: “I will get you out on that day, says the Lord. You will not be handed over to the men you are afraid of. Your life will be your prize, because you trusted me.”

So that is the sad half. Here is the other half. After the first exiles were marched away to Babylon, Jeremiah wrote them a letter. Everybody expected it to say: hold on, do not unpack, this will be over by spring. It did not say that. “Build houses, and live in them. Plant gardens, and eat what grows in them. Get married, and have sons and daughters, and let your sons and daughters get married too, and grow, and do not get smaller.” “And look for the good of the city I have sent you to, and pray to the Lord for it — because if it does well, you will do well.” Pray for Babylon. Plant gardens in Babylon. It was going to be seventy years, and they were to live all seventy of them. And then the promise people write out and keep: “When Babylon’s seventy years are nearly finished, I will come to you, and I will do the good thing I promised you, and bring you back to this place. For I am making a plan for you — a plan of peace, and not of harm.” “Pray to me, and I will listen to you. Look for me, and you will find me — because you will look for me with your whole heart. And I will let you find me.”

And there was one more promise, the largest one of all, and it is about a covenant, which is a forever promise. The first one had been carved on two slabs of stone and carried about in a golden chest, and the people broke it almost at once and went on breaking it for hundreds of years. So God said he would make another, and put it somewhere it could not fall out. “Look, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt — they did not keep to that one.” “This is the covenant I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be my people.” “And they will not have to teach one another any more, saying to a neighbor or a brother, ‘Know the Lord’ — because they will all know me, from the smallest of them to the greatest. For I will forgive the wrong they have done, and I will not remember their sins any more.” Jeremiah never saw any of it. He was carried off to Egypt by frightened people who would not listen to him one last time. But somewhere under the ground at Anathoth, in a clay jar, there were the papers for a field, waiting for somebody to come home and dig them up.