How many of you have ever written to or called an elected official so that he or she would reconsider a position they had publicly taken on an issue? How often, in your experience, were their minds changed? Maybe some of you have seen that change of heart. In my experience, though, it’s rare. Whenever I write, email, or call, I get a polite form letter listing the official’s talking points. Better than nothing, I guess, but it can feel like an exercise in futility. (Though I would never discourage anyone from writing or calling our elected officials.)
But it’s not like this feeling of futility is new. It’s as old as civilization. The first third of the book of Exodus paints a vivid picture of Pharaoh refusing to change his mind regarding the Hebrew slaves. When Israel was settled in Canaan and demanded a monarchy like all the other nations, the utterly predictable happened. Kings, only accountable to God, saw themselves as accountable to none. And while the prophet Nathan was able to get King David to acknowledge his grave sin in the affair of Bathsheba and Uriah, later prophets were rarely successful. In fact, the whole prophetic corpus can be read as a story of God’s Word landing on brass ears. Time and time again, the prophets called king and people back to Torah obedience: fidelity and trust in God alone, care for society’s most vulnerable, and fair treatment of workers. The purpose of doing these things was to live a life rooted in God’s shalom. And most of the time, they ignored the message. Or worse, they would go after the prophet who dared speak it.
And such is the case in today’s reading from Jeremiah. Commanded by God to do so, Jeremiah dictates the prophecies he’s received from God to Baruch for a scroll to be delivered to the king. Jeremiah is not entirely devoid of sympathetic officials in the Temple hierarchy. After Baruch reads the scroll in the Temple, these officials take it to the king, who destroys the scroll line by line with a penknife as it is read. The message is clear: nothing is going to change the king’s mind. Jeremiah had a tough crowd to work with.
So, what happens when God’s Word falls on deaf ears?
Well, in the text, there’s an immediate promise of judgment. Disaster will strike the city and the king. But destruction isn’t the last word. The scroll is rewritten. And many similar words are added! This scroll may be the proto-version of the book of Jeremiah we have in our Bible. Despite falling on deaf ears, the Word endures. And the Word still does its work.
When we have studied Jeremiah in our Thursday Bible study group, one of the first questions asked was, “Why does Jeremiah say the same thing over and over again?” Why the same oracles of doom? Why the same heart-wrenching poetry? Why couldn’t he just say the thing once and be done?
Perhaps it’s because we often don’t learn that way. All parents know that it doesn’t usually work to tell our children to do something once. It has to be impressed on them over and over again, sometimes in different ways. And as parents, we often run through a gamut of ways to get our children to listen to us. We bribe. We cajole. We threaten. And as adults, the pattern sometimes repeats. Ever had a spouse or partner tell you something true about yourself that you didn’t want to hear? The truth can be painful.
But it can also liberate. And that’s the promise in all this. Our hearts and minds can be closed to truth sometimes. Often, our worldviews, so useful for us in how we make sense of things, can be riddled by failures of perception. That is kind of the defining feature of human ideology: a worldview that ignores inconvenient truths. But despite our willful ignorance, the truth of God still comes to us. The Word of God arrives as a great disruptor. And it often disrupts us through suffering. As Luther writes in his Heidelberg Disputation, “It is certain that a person must utterly despair of his or her own ability before he or she is prepared to receive the grace of Christ.” Only when we are confronted with our own failures to love God and neighbor as we ought can we receive life-giving grace. A colleague of mine summed it up for me. In a conversation about her ministry, she mentioned she had been privileged to see lives transformed by the gospel. And when I asked her where she saw it, she said, “I’ll tell you where I see it, David. I see it in suffering and surrender.” When people are made low by their suffering, brought to the bottom, and they surrender everything to the Lord, the grace of God in Christ works miracles. The Word of God, who is none other than Jesus the Messiah, is the One who continues to work miracles every day, transforming lives. The Word cuts to the heart. It reveals us for who we really are. But it also reveals the love of God which is stronger than any sin.
And that love is shown us in another great failure, perhaps the greatest failure of the Word to impact hearts and minds. The incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, was put to death by the combined forces of the state and religious establishments. It’s hard to overestimate the magnitude of this failure. Saying, “I believe in Christ crucified,” was like saying, “I believe in David, crushed by Goliath.” Or “Joshua, put to the sword.” After all, few in power were willing to listen to him: not Pilate, not Caiaphas, and not Herod. For them, Jesus was dangerous. And they dealt with him in the same way empire has always dealt with troublemakers.
But out of that failure came a success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Those in power were right to see him as dangerous. Because three days after the Word was killed, he was raised up again. Not even death could stop the Word of God from taking root. In fact, it is his very death and resurrection that propelled the faith across the ancient world. Once and for all, it was known that empires and religions, both wielding the power of death, do not have the last word. God has the last Word—his incarnate Word. And that Word triumphs over all the powers of sin and death. It triumphs over all the hate our world is infected with today. It triumphs over all the powers who refuse to be held accountable, from King Jehoiakim to today. And most of all, it triumphs over our own hard-heartedness and hard-headedness. The Word of God shatters the illusions we cling to; it exposes the lies we readily believe. And in their place, it gives us truth—the truth that leads to life and shalom for all. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.
