Jeremiah, the weeping prophet.  He mourned the fate of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple at the hands of the Babylonians around 586 BC.  Prior to the final invasion, Jeremiah warned that the city and its inhabitants would undergo unspeakable horrors.  As any effective poet or prophet, Jeremiah used evocative language intended to paint worlds of vivid imagery.  He stirred the minds and spirits of his audience with his dramatic and picturesque language.

One striking passage comes early in his book, in chapter 4.  Jeremiah calls Jerusalem to circumcise the foreskins of their heats (4:4).  He describes their fate in terms of an animal of prey about to be pounced upon by a lion (4:7), and he instructs them to "wash their hearts" (4:14).

No one reading his warnings in his day (or hearing him preach) would have understood Jeremiah to be communicating literal commands.  He was not cautioning them to avoid a vicious feline.  Moreover, how could they wash their hearts, much less engage in cardio circumcision?

Even today, we understand that he used poetic imagery to conjure up the feelings of helplessness and dread (with the lion).  By speaking about “washing their hearts,” he invites his audience to repent and make amends, to live with justice and equity.  Circumcision of the heart is a call to integrity.  More than going through the ritual of physical circumcision, the sign of the covenant is to reside in their hearts (another metaphor...a covenant doesn't really 'reside' anywhere).  They should live out what the covenant represents.

This leads to 4:27-28, where the prophet utters a divine oracle.  "The whole land shall be desolate; Yet I will not make a full end. For this shall the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black, because I have spoken. I have purposed and will not relent, nor will I turn back from it.”

Envisioning the oncoming disaster, Jeremiah continues to apply descriptive language.  The earth will mourn, and the heavens shall turn dark.  Like his utilization of the devouring lion and circumcised hearts, the prophet engages in allegorical speech. Jeremiah is not predicting that the blue-green globe made of rock floating through space would shed tears.  Nor does he anticipate the sky blackening. Instead, he employs language that suggests grief, disaster, woe.

 

Depicting a cataclysmic reversal of the Genesis creation narrative, Jeremiah essentially proclaims, “Let there be darkness.” For him, the fall of Jerusalem and its temple would signal the undoing of God’s creation, and that tragedy would provide reason to mourn like nothing else. This literary method finds its way into several pieces of ancient Hebrew writing, like the Book of Job. After sitting a symbolically-significant seven days in ashes, a boil-covered Job curses the day he was born and systematically calls for a reversal of creation. He says, “Let there be darkness,” as he wishes for the heavenly bodies to cease their shining (Job 3).

 

So, it shouldn’t be surprising, to see Jesus using similar figures of speech—especially since many of his contemporaries likened him to Jeremiah (Matthew 16:13-14). In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus spoke to his disciples about the impending destruction of the Jerusalem temple (Mark 13:1-4). Like Jeremiah, he asserts that the temple would undergo demolition within the generation of those then living (13:30). Throughout his statement, Jesus employs several metaphors filled with images of sorrow, destruction, and misery.

 

One in particular resonates with Jeremiah’s prophecy. "But in those days after that tribulation the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken” (Mark 13:24-25). Just as Jeremiah portrayed the earth mourning and the darkening of the heavens, Jesus envisions celestial darkness and the heavens being shaken to their core.

 

Traditionally, Jesus has been interpreted as foretelling literal events yet to happen in our future. However, he did not look forward to the extinction of the physical space-time universe. He did not predict the sky going black, the extinguishing of the sun, and the dissolution of the atmosphere. Instead, he drew from Hebrew prophetic tradition in order to communicate an oncoming disaster that he expected to happen in the lifetime of his contemporaries. To convey this with authority, he employed the symbolic language that his listeners—steeped in and shaped by the Hebrew prophetic consciousness—understood.

 

Within a generation the Roman-Jewish War had broken out, Jerusalem had been devastated, and the temple was torn down. Jesus anticipated this catastrophe, just as Jeremiah had warned his contemporaries against rebelling against an empire nearly six-hundred years earlier, and he used the metaphorical and apocalyptic language of his day and culture to warn his listeners.

 

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/cov_dark-heavens-weeping-earth.php

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