NOTES for Jer 20:10-13

The prophet's words about vengeance on his enemies look to many people like only a tribute to the pre-Christian age, a kind of spiritual remnant out of place in New Testament times. But is everything so simple? It is not by chance that Jeremiah speaks of vengeance while linking it with the fact that he has entrusted his cause to God. In essence, he is no longer asking for himself, and he is not concerned with himself or with his own triumph over his enemies. He does not need triumph for triumph's sake at all; he does not thirst for revenge, and he has no desire to mock his enemies as they mock him. What matters to him, what he needs, is only the triumph of God's cause.

For Jeremiah, the defeat of his enemies is not the goal, but a necessary condition of that triumph. He understands that without the complete defeat of his enemies there will be no triumph of God, and he wants God's victory to become reality as soon as possible. One would think the prophet could not fail to understand that such a victory is possible only at the end of time, on the Day of Judgment and of the Messiah's coming. But for him the messianic Kingdom was already a reality, as it was for all the prophets.

A prophet is not a mystic or a predictor of the future. He is not a predictor because there is nothing to predict: God has no future written out in advance in every detail. He is not a mystic because mysticism presupposes the existence of at least two originally separated worlds, and from one world some people at certain moments manage to look into another, usually closed to us and therefore invisible to us. But God did not create two worlds or many worlds; He created one world, which was meant to be the Kingdom, revealing itself more and more in that quality over time.

The illusory division into two worlds is a consequence of the fall; it is not absolute. Even before Christ's coming, there were people in the world to whom this world was opened as God had intended it to be: whole and permeated by the breath of God. But the prophet's enemies did not fit into this world in any way. Not because they were Jeremiah's enemies, but because they were enemies of God and destroyers of His plans. And the prophet understands: the disappearance of his enemies, their destruction, will become not so much his own triumph as a sign of the approaching coming of the Messiah and the triumph of the Kingdom. These are events that could not fail to gladden any witness of God.