Jeremiah at the Crossroads
Around 627 BC, Jeremiah the prophet appears on the scene in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom of Israel has been in captivity for nearly 100 years. The southern kingdom has endured 5 decades of the evil reign of Mannasseh, and 2 evil years of his son, Amon. His son, Josiah, has reigned for 13 years and has instituted a reform in the name of Jehovah. Almost anything is a breath of fresh air compared to the wickedness that preceded him. Yet Jeremiah speaks otherwise. His words declare that God wasn't all that pleased with the "revival" either. Some will yearn for the days of Manasseh, because even though he was evil, the nation enjoyed economic prosperity. Some will side with the legalistic reform of Josiah. Precious few will accept Jeremiah's words.
After the Jews were taken captive into Babylon, the people were forced to accept the truth of Jeremiah's words. Sitting on the banks of the Euphrates for 70 years with no Temple or active priesthood, the people had to admit that Jeremiah's prophecies were correct. They had to determine in what manner they had forsaken the Lord and what was the remedy. The answers to these questions produced the sects that we read about in the Gospels. The priests decided that the ritual of the Law had been violated and the Temple with its priestly formalities needed to be reinstituted. The scribes and Pharisees determined that the letter of the Law had been broken and needed to be kept with greater diligence. The Essenes and others thought the Spirit had been disregarded and the problem was actually the priesthood and the Pharisees. The Zealots believed the problem was Rome and the answer was military intervention. All of these groups interpreted Jeremiah according to their own responses. Sadly, few really heard what Jeremiah was saying, and the course of the nation steadily descended until 136 AD when the Roman Emperor Hadrian, fed up with the revolts of the pesky Jews, banned them from entering their own beloved city of Jerusalem.
When Jeremiah first appeared in Jerusalem, he stood at the crossroads and offered the people a way of escape - a detour from the pending judgement. Because of their blindness and hardness of heart, the people descended headlong into the depths of desolation. This same pattern - a message of salvation, followed by utter rejection because of hardness of heart - will be repeated some six centuries later. The Messiah will come to the same city, to the same people, to a second Temple, with the same message...and will encounter the same result. Except, whereas they attempted to kill Jeremiah...they will succeed with Jesus.
The writer of the Gospel of Mark understood this relationship and made numerous quotes and allusions to the Book of Jeremiah which are not readily apparent in the English. Mark, more so than the other Gospels, makes it very clear that Jesus' message was very closely tied to that of Jeremiah, and the people's reactions were identical to their predecessors.
In Mk 3, Jesus appears in a synagogue in Capernaum intent on healing a man's withered hand. As the Pharisees gaze in order to accuse Jesus of healing on the Sabbath, Jesus looks around at them angrily and is grieved by the hardness of their hearts. This is the first of 3 occurrences of a form of the word, πώρωσις. This word or its verb form, πηρόω, will only occur once in another Gospel (John), and 4 times in Paul's writings. They come from a root word, πoρoς, meaning "a stone". In English you could easily transliterate the words as stony (v), and stoniness (n). Jesus isn't just saying that the Pharisees' hearts are hard, but that they are rock-hard. The question is, what were these leaders resisting? It isn't enough to simply say they were rejecting Jesus. We learn nothing from that answer. It's also not enough to say they didn't want the Sabbath violated. I don't believe Jesus wants the Sabbath violated either. The answer lies deeper than that.
At the end of the chapter, it is interesting that Jesus gets into a debate with the Pharisees and says, "but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness." In other words, as we have said before, Jesus is saying it is impossible for someone to receive forgiveness who refuses to see that the life they have (and all that entails) has come from the Father. I believe He answers in this manner to reveal the root of a hardened heart. The more I recognize that all the aspects of my life come at the hand of a loving, kind, and generous Father, the more I will walk in the forgiveness He freely bestows, and the more my heart will melt in the presence of that goodness.
We won't get into the details this time, but let me just point out, that a few verses later Jesus illustrates all of this to the multitudes in the Parable of the Sower (Mk 4:1 ff.), and right in the middle of it He talks about a stoney heart. It is a different Greek word, πετρώδης, but it is simply synomymous and means, "a stony place." It will be the end of this parable where we begin to make the tie to Jeremiah.
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