An Infinite Calling

The story of the vocation of Jeremiah conveys a series of dramatic paradoxes: that the words of the book are both Jeremiah’s and God’s (Jeremiah 1:1–2); that Jeremiah has no authority to speak and yet speaks with God’s own authority (vv.6, 9); and that by prophesying specifically to Judah, Jeremiah prophesies to all the nations (vv.5, 17).

The anonymous illuminator of the Dover Bible (twelfth century) finds unity in these disparate ideas, using a miniature in the first letter of the first chapter to interpret the whole book in the light of Jesus Christ. Jeremiah and Christ face each other across a divide created by the left arm of the letter V in verba (‘words’). Jeremiah stands to the left of the initial with his mouth open, and from his lips come the first words he speaks in Jerome’s Vulgate translation: ‘Ah, ah, ah, Lord God’ (v.6). Christ, standing within the ‘V’, has his mouth closed but from his hand a scroll unfurls across the divide and touches Jeremiah, inscribed with the words: ‘I have made you a prophet to the nations’ (v.5).

In this illuminated initial, as in the story itself, God’s abundance is contrasted with human poverty. The interior space of the V where Christ stands is richly filled, painted in two tones of celestial blue; by contrast, Jeremiah stands on an earthy beige field. Christ is identified with the Greek letters Alpha and Omega inscribed on either side of him (cf. Revelation 1:8), while Jeremiah’s open mouth pours out ‘baby’ sounds: a, a, a. But the seemingly insurmountable divide between the figures is in fact bridged by a gift from God: the words of the prophecy.

The image portrays the vocation of Jeremiah as infinitely more than a mere imparting of information from God to Jeremiah: in receiving the words of God, Jeremiah receives the Word of God, and hands the Word on to his people. The abundant life of God rushes out through words that are both Jeremiah’s and God’s, calling first Judah and then the whole world to leave the contradictions of human weakness behind and to be drawn into the paradoxes of God’s infinite mercy.

The first moments flowing from the vocation of Jeremiah are dark and cold: ‘Out of the north evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land’ (Jeremiah 1:14), and ‘every one shall set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem, against all its walls round about, and against all the cities of Judah’ (v.15), and ‘I will utter my judgments against them’ (v.16). A long night has settled upon the land, and God plunges Jeremiah into its midst. He offers him no great weapons, no masterful rhetoric, no earthly patron.

New York City, 1948. William Congdon, a young artist who has fought in World War II and seen concentration camps firsthand—leading him to a bitter rejection of his Puritan upbringing—experiences an artistic conversion. Drawn into the orbit of Jackson Pollock, he leaves behind the Classical Realism of his artistic training and embraces Abstract Expressionism, turning the cityscape around him into impastoed canvases heaped with paint, violently and endlessly scored with an awl.

A year later, a pattern seems somehow to have crept into his mind, working itself out in an unintentional series of paintings. The city begins to appear as a monstrous dying form, bleeding from a thousand wounds. In this 1949 work, the black mass of the city seethes and writhes, struggling even in its death throes to swallow the river, to blot out the sky. Its bulk overwhelms the canvas, seeming to press the sky against the upper edges of the composition. Yet somehow, cruelly burdened and partially obscured, one light still shines: a disc of gold.

Jeremiah’s prophetic vocation is born in darkness, the gloom of the people’s ‘wickedness in forsaking me’, their burning ‘incense to other gods’, their worshipping ‘the works of their own hands’ (v.16). The people of God will be driven out, overwhelmed, and pressed out of their land. The holy city will die from within, its glorious life swallowed up and blotted out by the consuming death of idolatry and sin. But this prophet, who will be mocked, ignored, and beaten, is given to the people of Judah to be an unquenchable disc of gold: ‘for I am with you, says the LORD, to deliver you’ (v.19).

References

Congdon, William. 1962. In My Disc of Gold: Itinerary to Christ (New York: Reynal & Company)

‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’, says the Lord to Jeremiah, ‘and before you were born I consecrated you’ (Jeremiah 1:5). The Lord reveals that he has always been at the heart of things, always suffusing the scattered moments of Jeremiah’s life with a generative knowledge and a transformative love. But Jeremiah can’t yet see the Lord face to face; he sees him only through the prism of memory.

Six figures holding brightly coloured ribbons dance around a maypole incongruously jutting out of a snowy hilltop, overlooking train tracks, a fence, and some scattered rural buildings. A seventh ribbon floats untended. Atop the pole stands an evergreen tree, somehow both apart from and a part of what happens below.

Snow Hill, one of Andrew Wyeth’s most unexpected and gripping works, comes to life as memory: each of the six figures represents a person who had been important to Wyeth, many long dead, each represented as they appeared in earlier paintings by the artist. Similarly, the structures in the landscape at the foot of the hill recreate spaces from Wyeth’s past—once-significant and now lost.

The seventh, open spot around the maypole seems to invite the viewer to find a suitable addition to the dance: Wyeth himself? His wife? Another ordinary figure from Wyeth’s seventy-year-long life captured in the amber of his previous paintings? Someone new, as yet unknown? The viewer, perhaps?

The unexpected evergreen perched implausibly on the maypole prevents the work from being a mere performance of retrospection or nostalgia. There is something perpetually present-tense about its presence, as if it has always been there, and has always been green. Almost imperceptibly, it unites the manifold pasts of the painting into a single time-defying now.

Speaking both to the great and to the humble, Jeremiah sees visions of desolation. He is disbelieved, imprisoned, abandoned. He is alone. God seems to hide. The circle of memory stays broken, and an untended ribbon escapes his grasp. But Jeremiah’s life is not a mere conglomeration of raw facts; it is a perpetual dance that takes its shape from the Unchanging One whose presence makes it real. He knows ruin is coming—and redemption.

References

Junker, Patricia. 2017. ‘Reflection, 1989–2009’, in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect, ed. by Patricia Junker and Audrey Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017): 182–87

Meryman, Richard.1996. Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (New York: HarperCollins), 415–16