The weeping prophet who watched Jerusalem fall and bought a field as a sign
Jeremiah is given the worst vocation in the canon. He is called as a young man (Jeremiah 1) and told to prophesy to a Judah that will not listen. He preaches for forty years. The kings persecute him. The other prophets call him a liar. He is thrown into a cistern and left to die in the mud (Jeremiah 38:6). He is dragged off to Egypt against his will at the end (Jeremiah 43). Through all of it he is required to keep speaking the word of the LORD into a city that is going to fall, and to keep loving the people he is being commanded to denounce. The book that bears his name contains the canon's longest expression of prophetic grief.
The call narrative (Jeremiah 1) sets the tone. The LORD says, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5) Jeremiah objects — he is too young, he cannot speak. The LORD touches his mouth: "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." (Jeremiah 1:9–10) Four verbs of destruction; two of building. The proportion of the vocation is named at the start.
The temple sermon (Jeremiah 7, repeated in Jeremiah 26) is what finally gets him put on trial for his life. The people of Judah are repeating the slogan, "This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD," as a security blanket. The temple's presence in Jerusalem cannot, they reason, allow the city to fall. Jeremiah stands in the gate of the temple and tells them the LORD's presence is conditional. "Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, 'We are delivered!'" (Jeremiah 7:9–10) The sermon is preached the way Christ will preach in the same temple six centuries later. The priests and the official prophets call for Jeremiah's death.
The prophetic sign-acts are the canon's most physical. Jeremiah wears a wooden yoke around his neck to signal that Judah will go into Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah 27). When the false prophet Hananiah breaks the wooden yoke and says the LORD will break Babylon, Jeremiah is told to make an iron yoke instead — the captivity will be even more severe. He buys a clay jar and breaks it before the elders to signal the breaking of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 19). He is forbidden to marry, to attend funerals, to attend weddings (Jeremiah 16) — his whole life is to be a prophetic sign that ordinary life is about to end for everyone.
The confessions (interspersed through chapters 11, 15, 17, 18, 20) are the most personal lament the prophetic literature contains. Jeremiah complains to God about the vocation. He accuses the LORD of having seduced him into it. "O LORD, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed." (Jeremiah 20:7) He says he has decided to stop preaching — "there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." (Jeremiah 20:9) The fire is the word of the LORD. He cannot keep it in even when he wants to.
The new covenant promise (Jeremiah 31:31–34) is the highest theological point in the book and one of the most quoted passages in the New Testament. The LORD says: I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the one I made with their fathers when I led them out of Egypt — a covenant they broke. I will put my law within them; I will write it on their hearts. They will all know me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes the entire passage twice (Hebrews 8 and 10) as the framework for the new-covenant theology Christ inaugurates at the Last Supper. The cup is the cup of the new covenant in his blood — the new covenant Jeremiah was given the words for six centuries before it was sealed.
The sign that holds the book together is the field at Anathoth (Jeremiah 32). The Babylonians are besieging Jerusalem. The fall is days away. Jeremiah is in prison. His cousin Hanamel comes to him with the right of redemption on a family field in Anathoth. Jeremiah is told by the LORD to buy it. He buys the field. He has the deed witnessed and sealed and buried in a clay jar so it will survive. He prays the longest prayer he prays in the book. The field cannot be visited; the family will be deported. But the title is held. The sign is this: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land." (Jeremiah 32:15) The exile is coming. So is the return. Jeremiah is buying a field he will never walk.
The Christian church has held Jeremiah as the prophetic type of Christ on multiple registers. Christ weeps over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) the way Jeremiah does in the Book of Lamentations. Christ preaches the temple sermon (Mark 11:17) the way Jeremiah did at the same gate. Christ inaugurates the new covenant Jeremiah was given the words for. And Christ goes through the trial Jeremiah survived — falsely accused, condemned to death by the religious leadership — and is not, like Jeremiah, rescued.