(Please read this Scripture passage first, before the homily.)
I don’t know, but I can suppose that King Zedekiah had wanted to make his kingdom and his capital city, Jerusalem, great again. Eleven years earlier, the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, had besieged the city and forced Zedekiah’s nephew to surrender. The Babylonian king had removed any and all who could possibly rebel against him, the wealthy, the craftsmen, the advisors and supporters of the monarchy. He had left in their stead only those who keep the land from becoming a wilderness.
That lasted for eleven years. Then the puppet king began to feel antsy. He wanted to make Jerusalem a great city as it once had been. He began negotiations with other small kingdoms in the area, and rebelled against the king of Babylon. The King of Babylon returned to starve the population of Jerusalem out by besieging the city for seventeen months. The price of Zedekiah’s greatness was death for him and exile for the rest, except for the poorest of the poor, whom we would later call the “essential people”, who were good only for field work.
So ends the history of the Kings of Israel, from Saul through David to Zedekiah. They were only great when they governed for others and not for themselves. When they gave themselves to luxury and to their own interests, they lost their greatness. When I seek my own glory, I lose my greatness. The same is true for all of us. Our greatness lies in our submission to the Greatness of God: God lifts up the lowly and puts down the haughty.
The proud king of the proud Jerusalem became the dead king of an exiled Jerusalem. Unless we humble our pride and become lowly, we too shall be like Zedekiah and his people, broken and scattered far from one another. This we includes me and it includes each of you. The Word of God is not spoken for others who do not hear it, but for us who do hear it.
The fall of Jerusalem became the theme of Psalm 137. The exiles remembered Jerusalem as they sat by the streams of Babylon and wept. They heard the taunts of their captors. They were made to sing their beloved songs in a foreign land. They were broken and weary, without consolation, reduced from greatness to nothingness.
There is time for us, time for us to repent. We have to put aside our foreign alliances, namely all those things we use to blot God out of our daily lives. We all have blind spots and we all need to ask God to reveal these blind spots for us and enable us to see through them. We all need repentance and we all tend to resist repenting. We need to rid ourselves of our foreign gods, those many things we use to substitute for God.
We can learn from Zedekiah and his generation. Our salvation only comes to us from one source, the life that God gives us through God’s beloved Son. We can add nothing to that without rebelling against God. We can add nothing to God’s greatness, but God will shed his greatness upon us and make us great.