Preachers should pause to acknowledge lectionary editors when, like sommeliers, they make good pairings. Jeremiah’s sobering words of judgment on a nation gone astray are well paired with the equally gloomy Psalm 14—provided one hears the blue note of hope for the poor and oppressed in the psalm’s sixth verse.
Most scholars agree that it’s virtually impossible to pinpoint the date of Jeremiah’s prophetic utterances in chapter 4. Here again we see the hand of a skilled editor. The editors of the book we know as Jeremiah seem to have shaped various proclamations of the “weeping prophet,” organizing independent addresses into a thematic whole whose tone is established in 4:5–8. An enemy from the north (Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BCE?) will capture Jerusalem. The “hot wind” from the desert will not “winnow or cleanse” but will instead bring catastrophe.
The burden of Jeremiah is to proclaim a message not of redemptive suffering but of what Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas termed “useless suffering.” Jeremiah makes plain the reasons for the coming destruction with a sweeping national indictment: the leaders of Jerusalem and Judah are “stupid children” who do not know how to do good. Jeremiah echoes Isaiah, who proclaimed,
