Chapter 1 The true meaning of scripture is the solid historical reality of the continuum of actual meanings over the centuries to actual people. It is as mundane, or as transcending, or both, as have been those actual meanings in the lives and hearts of persons. . . . The scripture . . . is dimly or vividly recognized as meaning not only such-and-such but at the same time more even than that, more than the reader or hearer has as yet discerned.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture?
A Comparative Approach (Fortress Press, 1993, 89) The durable role of biblical text as available tradition, which the community tends always to utter and experience again, is not done, characteristically, either with a full-blown canonical awareness or with a full- blown critical awareness. Rather, the force of these texts, which continue to sound in text, is through ad hoc use, utterance out of dense memory long schooled in the text in which an imaginative re-utterance makes poignant, astonishing, compelling, and illuminating but ad hoc contact with the present moment of experience. In this subsequent moment of re-utterance and rehearing, both the speaker (quoter) and the hearer recognize intuitively that this is the right text in this moment, even if it is taken out of canonical or critical context. In that moment of utterance, the text is offered by the speaker (quoter) and received by the listener as revelatory. That is, it discloses something about this moment that would, without this utterance, not be known, seen, heard, or made available. It is, in my judgment, this ad hoc quality of text reuse, given in courageous imagination and received by intuition, which has been lacking in much of the conflicted discussion about canon and criticism.
It is the work of canonical practice in ecclesial communities and the work of criticism in the scholarly community to keep the text available. It is by the ongoing enterprise of religious and scholarly communities that the text lingers over time in available ways. Out of that lingering, however, from time to time, words of the text characteristically erupt into new usage. They are seized upon by someone in the community with daring. Or perhaps better, the words of the text seize someone in the community who is a candidate for daring. In that moment of re-utterance, the present is freshly illuminated, reality is irreversibly transformed. The community comes to know or see or receive or decide afresh. What has been tradition, hovering in dormancy, becomes available experience. In the moment of speaking and hearing, this is treasured tradition now become present experience, inimitable, without parallel, irreversible. In that utterance, the word does lead reality.
In what follows, I will consider several examples from the book of Jeremiah of the way in which these lingerings of tradition become explosions of utterance that make the world oddly different in the present.
I will pay attention to the ways in which these texts exercise ongoing influence in the community of faith well beyond their primary utterance in the book of Jeremiah.
I
The first of these is in Jer. 2:6-8a:
They did not say, Where is the Lord
who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
who led us in the wilderness,
in a land of deserts and pits,
in a land of drought and deep darkness,
in a land that no one passes through,
where no one lives?
I brought you into a plentiful land
to eat its fruit and its good things.
But when you entered you defiled my land,
and made my heritage an abomination.
The priests did not say, Where is the Lord? These verses form a centerpiece in the larger text of vv. 4-13, which scholars have widely recognized to be a lawsuit speech. They are an indictment, a statement of Israel's guilt that justifies the punishment of Yahweh soon to be inflicted.
These verses are organized around two parallel indictments, They did not say . . . (vv. 6, 8). It is interesting and important that Israel is indicted here not for what it did not do, but for what it did not say. The indictment recognizes that Israel is essentially a community of utterance. When Israel ceases to utter rightly, the community is jeopardized. In the first indictment, the entire community is accused, the explicit subject being your ancestors. The phrase refers here to all the past generations of Israel from Moses to the time of Jeremiah. All of them are indicted for a failure to say. What they did not say pertains to Yahweh's deliverance from Egypt and Yahweh's safe leadership in the wilderness. The long line of ancestors did not publicly--out loud--give an account of the ways in which Yahweh's faithful, powerful presence made life possible for Israel. They neglected to say, or they forgot to say, and in their failure to say, Yahweh, the central character of Israel's past, disappeared--so that a failure to say leads to a sense of autonomy, a life without Yahweh.
The indictment is only they did not say. We notice that there is no indirect object. They did not say to whom? We might expect that they did not say to their children. Or perhaps to their nonbelieving neighbors. But then perhaps the point is not that they did not speak so that somebody did not hear who needed to hear. It is as plausible that Israel needed to say. It is the saying, not the hearing, that matters here, for it is the saying that keeps the speakers inside the story, just as the saying keeps Yahweh palpably at the center of Israel's narrative and identity.
The second indictment for not saying (v. 8) pertains to the priests. It is much briefer and appears to be a subset of the first not say indictment. That is, the priests did not name the name, make available-- out loud--the One who is the key actor in Israel's core story.
