Then
my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the
word of the Lord,
and said to me, “Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for
the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself.”
(Jeremiah 32:8)
There’s a very nice range of pickles and preserves
in the supermarkets with the brand name Anathoth. It is a Hebrew feminine plural noun and it
means “answers”. When you say I want
answers, anathoth is what you want. Jeremiah
is standing there in the ruins of Jerusalem and the temple, the people being herded
off into exile in Babylon, Judah now a vassal state of Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah
is challenged to buy his cousin’s field at Anathoth. It is scarcely a smart time to be buying real
estate. But Jeremiah buying that field
is what we call proleptic prophecy.
Proleptic prophecy is an act of faith – Jeremiah buys the field as
though Jerusalem were restored and all was peace and prosperity again. In Hebrew faith however it was more than
that… the gesture of buying the field mysteriously helped recovery and
restoration to happen. Jeremiah drove a
stake in the ground.
And when Jesus’s followers in our day find ourselves
willing to be different, unwilling to be deaf to the call we hear, to the
scriptures we love, to the way that opens for us to walk…then we are
anticipating another day of faith, which we may not live to see. When in a clamorous, violent, confused, rancorous
world we opt for the treasures of silence and stillness, humility and the ways
of love… our feeble voices are speaking to the world from a better time and a
better place. We are buying a field at
Anathoth.
Now
hope that is seen is not hope. For who
hopes for what is seen? But if we hope
for what we do not see we wait for it with patience… words
of St Paul.[1] We
don’t see the church of the future, and it’s hard to imagine. What we do see is Jesus’s people, far more around
the world than we realise, who respond instinctively to his way, his call, his
placing his life on the line, his lack of arrogance. Many are in the formal church, many not. And they arise from every christian sect, or
none, every ethnicity… as though those categories are less and less decisive
any more, or helpful.
Waiting moreover is not some unfortunate choice
thrust upon us. It is purposeful
waiting. We need to learn it. It is honouring God, who is encountered when
we are still, and – to put it plainly -- have shut up. Elijah on Mount Carmel encountered God not in
the earthquake, wind and fire, but in what in the Hebrew translates as a silent
voice of stillness. As Jesus taught, the
kingdom is already present, in our hearts and in our midst. We join him there, as it were, on the field
of Anathoth… as the writer to the Hebrews put it, the promise of things not
seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment