Jeremiah 28:5-6 – The Platform of the Positive Possibility

5 Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and in the presence of all the people who stood in the house of the Lord, 6 and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! The Lord do so; the Lord perform your words which you have prophesied, to bring back the vessels of the Lord’s house and all who were carried away captive, from Babylon to this place. Jeremiah 28:5-6, New King James Version

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon writes of Islam but surely with broader applicability, "Human fancy can paint with more energy the misery then bliss of a future pain."

Even prophets of the Truth can, which is what makes the pivot in Jeremiah 28:5-6 so remarkable. Jeremiah's message has been so consistent that he bequeaths the word jeremiad to describe a negative message of warning. He is, after all, the weeping prophet never far from lamenting his culture's offenses against the glory of God. By now, he surely has the heuristics of neural shortcuts to finding and declaring the bad news. It's his calling card. It's his trademark to paint future pain.

Yet, he doesn't get stuck there. He is still subject to the Word of the Lord, responsive to the possibility that his people might repent and that His Lord might relent from the consequences He has had Jeremiah foretell. As dubious as Hananiah's instantly popular pronouncement is that his country's troubles will be over much sooner than obedient Jeremiah has foretold, Jeremiah is humble and open before the Lord. Even optimism, after always decades, is still within reach. As God has sprinkled the word perhaps with the possibility of repentance among gloomier probabilities of protracted punishment, so does Jeremiah His messenger.

We can easily become less adaptable to the prospect of good news, like the lawyer exiting the profession whom Po Bronson interviewed in What Should I Do with My Life? With the lawyer leaving the former things behind, we can admit, "Defensiveness and guilt become a skin you wear every day."

That skin is especially stubborn, and especially likely to cohere with a perpetually negative message, if we don't dwell as Christians on the reality that God has forgiven us, and that aspects of His forgiveness are evident in the here and now. Henri A. Nouwen insists in Life of the Beloved, "You have to keep looking for people and places where your truth is spoken and where you are reminded of your deepest identity as the chosen one. Yes, we must dare to opt consciously for our chosenness and not allow our emotions, feelings, or passions to seduce us into self-rejection."

What better way, Christian, to FIND such a place, than to BE such a place? What better way, Christian, to feed one's soul a balanced diet of the remaining reality of the sin nature with the penalties it deserves AND of the possibilities God's grace and mercy still hold open than to declare both with the lives we live. If certain conversational patterns beset us, certain people raise our hackles and trigger our more negative script, certainly God's work in Jeremiah 28:5-6 offers hope.

Even in the presence of false prophets, even in the age of replacement Christs, we can offer hope as God grants us words and timing to do so. As we serve God but are not God, we can submit to the sanctity in the word maybe. Did not Christ pattern for His own to ask that the starkest of challenges not come in the season of the year when they would be most difficult to bear? We can develop a balanced poise which is insistent on His Word, yet faithfully humbled as to its exact implementation. Better this than to become latter-day Jonahs more interested in being right ourselves then seeing God's undeserved deliverance once again shelter our fellow humans.