On Stir-up Sunday, Christianity’s debt to Judaism
by Julian Mann, TCW:
WITH anti-Semitism a worsening blight on Britain, the Prayer Book ‘For the Epistle’ reading for today, the last Sunday before Advent, is a powerful reminder that the Saviour of the world is the ultimate Davidic King.
Normally, the Epistle reading is from the New Testament, but in the run-up to Advent Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), the theological genius behind the Book of Common Prayer, chose a passage from the Old Testament book of the prophet Jeremiah:
‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: and this is his name whereby he shall be called, The Lord Our Righteousness. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, The Lord liveth, which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they shall dwell in their own land’ (Jeremiah 23v5-8 – King James Version).
Jeremiah probably spoke this Messianic prophecy in Jerusalem in 597 BC during the brief reign of the 18-year-old King Jehoiachin of Judah. His three-month reign came to an end when he surrendered to King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon who had been besieging Jerusalem. The conqueror took the young Jewish king captive to Babylon along with the Jerusalem elite leaving a puppet king, Zedekiah, in charge of a denuded kingdom.
Jeremiah chapter 22 records the Lord addressing Jehoiachin directly through his prophet: ‘And I will give thee into the hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon’ (v25).
The exile of this defeated Jewish king, a descendant of Israel’s greatest king, David, who reigned in the 10th century BC, is thus the context for this wonderful prophecy of a future King from David’s line who ‘shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth’.
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