Category: Wake-up Calls
Sunday Series No. 7 — 27 September 2026
Reader’s Edition
Most of us are still walking along a road that somebody else’s sentence laid down. A teacher’s aside: you are not a maths person. A father’s verdict at dinner. A superior’s remark in the first year of a career. The speaker forgot it within the hour. The hearer has been walking in its direction for thirty years.
Words do not evaporate. They become roads.
Some of those roads were laid by our sentences. And through all that traffic of voices, one voice has been speaking the whole time, asking for one thing: Listen to me. Walk this way. It will go well with you.
This week’s seven verses keep returning to the mouth and the feet, to what we say and where we walk, and insist that the two are connected.
The Passage
Jeremiah 7:23
Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.
ജറെമിയാ 7 : 23
എന്റെ വാക്ക് അനുസരിക്കുവിന്; ഞാന് നിങ്ങളുടെ ദൈവവും നിങ്ങള് എന്റെ ജനവുമായിരിക്കും. ഞാന് നിങ്ങളോടു കല്പിക്കുന്ന മാര്ഗത്തിലൂടെ ചരിക്കുവിന്; നിങ്ങള്ക്കു ശുഭമായിരിക്കും.
A True Slogan and a People Who Would Not Hear
Jeremiah preached these words at the Temple gate around 609 BC, in a season of national danger. Yet Jerusalem felt safe. The crowd had a slogan: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” (7:4).
Every word of it was true. Jeremiah called it deceptive, because it was being used as a charm — a sentence that reassured the speaker and asked nothing of his feet.
God’s reply reaches back to the Exodus: obey my voice. The Hebrew verb, shama’, means to hear, heed and obey all at once. Biblical Hebrew has no separate everyday verb for “obey.” By that vocabulary, a word from God that has not reached your feet has not yet been heard. Jeremiah even pictures God rising early to speak (7:13). The problem was never a silent God. It was a people who were always talking.
Six Verses Around One Command
What became of those who did not listen? “If you had walked in the way of God, you would be living in peace forever” (Baruch 3:13). It is Jeremiah’s road and Jeremiah’s promise, but the grammar has turned from command to regret. Yet in Scripture the “if only” is most often spoken by God himself (Deuteronomy 5:29; Isaiah 48:18; Luke 19:42). It is not a verdict. It is grief that has not given up.
Why could they not hear? “On the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter” (Matthew 12:36). Jesus said it after the Pharisees credited his healing of a blind and mute man to Beelzebul. The Greek word, argos, means literally “without work” — like the Temple slogan: true, pious, and doing nothing. The most dangerous idle words are the devout ones, because they feel like faithfulness.
What do careless words do to a person? In Tobit, Sarah has lost seven husbands on their wedding nights, and a maid tells her, “You are the one who kills your husbands!” (3:8). The words drive her to her father’s upper room, wanting to die. Yet she prays, and beneath that wish lies a simpler request: “command that respect be shown to me and pity be taken upon me, and that I hear reproach no more”(3:15). She wanted her name back. At that very moment, her prayer was heard in the glorious presence of God (3:16).
If words spoken to you have brought you to Sarah’s upper room, please speak today — to God, and to someone who can be with you. In India, call Tele-MANAS on 14416, free and at any hour; elsewhere, your local crisis line.
Can anyone guard their own mouth? Ben Sira, a lifelong teacher of wise speech, stopped advising and prayed: “Who will set a guard over my mouth and an effective seal upon my lips?” (Sirach 22:27). The question is a sigh — if only. And a seal is not a gag: it releases speech only at the right time, by the right hand.
How do I wait without falling? “Wait for his mercy; do not stray, or else you may fall” (Sirach 2:7). The Greek verb pictures swerving off the road. The danger is not the waiting. It is the shortcut that promises to shorten it.
Who carries us? “Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up” (Psalm 68:19). The Hebrew verb belongs to the load-bearer. Jeremiah asks us to walk in all the way God commands; Deuteronomy says God carried his people, as one carries a child, all the way they travelled (1:31). It is the same Hebrew phrase — one journey, seen from both ends.
The Central Tension
We would rather talk about God than listen to him. Talking keeps us in control. Listening, in the Hebrew sense, hands the direction of our lives to someone else.
So the question is not whether you know what God has said. It is this: whose voice has actually been deciding which way you walk?
A Rise & Inspire Moment
A slogan is a word that asks nothing of your feet.
In this Sunday’s Gospel, one son says “I go, sir,” and does not go; the other says “I will not,” and later changes his mind and goes (Matthew 21:28–32). Whenever God speaks in Scripture, somebody moves. If what you call your faith has never once changed the direction of your feet, it may be a slogan.
Living It This Week
- Keep a one-day ledger of your words. One evening, write down three things you said that day that did no good work, and one that did real good. Next day, repair one of the three.
- Retire one slogan. Choose a phrase you use to close a matter rather than act on it — “I’ll pray about it,” “I’ve forgiven him.” Make it true with one action, or stop saying it.
- Give back someone’s dignity. Think of a person you have labelled. Say one true, honouring sentence about them in the same company where the label was spoken.
A Short Prayer
God who rises early to speak,
you have been talking to me for a long time,
and I have been talking over you.
Forgive the words that did no good work,
and the true ones I used as charms.
Set a guard over my mouth,
teach me to wait without wandering,
and carry me through today.
Speak, and let me hear you with my feet. Amen.
Key Takeaway
Listen until the voice asks something of your feet — then walk, because the One who calls you to the road carries you all the way.
He has been rising early to speak for a very long time. Tomorrow morning, rise early to listen.
The complete study, with word studies and the daily video reflections for all seven verses, will follow on Rise & Inspire.
Whose Direction Are You Following in Life?
Fun fact: Hebrew has no everyday word for obey. Just hear. So God’s word counts as heard when your feet move. The new Sunday study is up.
RISE & INSPIRE | SUNDAY BIBLE SERIES Category: Wake-up Calls Sunday Series No. 7 — 27 September 2026 Scriptures of the week: 21 – 27 September 2026
Whose Voice Is Deciding Which Way You Walk?
Opening — Enter the Passage
Most of us are still walking along a road that somebody else’s sentence laid down.
It is usually a short sentence. A teacher’s aside in primary school: you are not a maths person. A father’s verdict across the dinner table: why can’t you be more like your brother? A superior’s remark in the first year of a career: people like you don’t rise here. Or, just as often, a good sentence: you have a gift for this; don’t waste it. The speaker forgot it within the hour. The hearer has been walking in its direction for thirty years.
Words do not evaporate. They become roads.
That means two uncomfortable things at once. The first is that somewhere in the world, people are walking along roads that our sentences built — sentences tossed off at the end of a tiring day, in a family group on the phone, across a staff-room table, and long since forgotten by us. The second is that in the constant traffic of voices — the ones that shaped us, the ones we produce, the ones streaming from the screen in our hand — there is one voice that has been speaking the whole time and asking for one thing:
Listen to me. Walk this way. It will go well with you.
We rarely refuse that voice outright. We simply cannot hear it over everything else — including, most of all, ourselves.
Last week the Scriptures kept returning to hands. The seven verses given to us this week return, again and again, to the mouth and the feet — to what we say and to where we walk — and they insist, with a persistence that is hard to shake off, that the two are connected. A guard over my mouth, so that I may not fall. Do not turn aside, or you may fall. If you had walked in the way of God. Every careless word.Obey my voice and walk in the way.
It is worth noticing how this week is framed. It began on 21 September, which in the Roman calendar is the feast of St Matthew — a tax collector who heard a two-word sentence, “Follow me,” and “got up and followed him” (Matthew 9:9). It ends today, on a Sunday when the Gospel read in Latin-rite parishes around the world is the parable of the two sons: one who said “I go, sir,” and did not go, and one who said “I will not,” and later changed his mind and went (Matthew 21:28–32).
A voice heard, and a road taken. A word spoken, and a road refused.
This is a Wake-up Call, and it is aimed at a particular kind of religious comfort — the comfort of having said the right things. Jeremiah preached this week’s anchor verse to a crowd who knew every correct phrase and repeated it with conviction. They were not short of words about God.
They were short of hearing.
The Passage
Jeremiah 7:23 (our anchor text this week)
Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people; walk only in the way that I command you, so that it may be well with you.
ജറെമിയാ 7 : 23
എന്റെ വാക്ക് അനുസരിക്കുവിന്; ഞാന് നിങ്ങളുടെ ദൈവവും നിങ്ങള് എന്റെ ജനവുമായിരിക്കും. ഞാന് നിങ്ങളോടു കല്പിക്കുന്ന മാര്ഗത്തിലൂടെ ചരിക്കുവിന്; നിങ്ങള്ക്കു ശുഭമായിരിക്കും.
Six further verses accompany it through the week. We will not take them in the order of the calendar but in the order of the argument they make together. They show us what became of a people who did not hear; why they could not hear; what careless words do to a human being; whether anyone can guard their own mouth; how to wait without wandering off the road; and, finally, who carries us along it.
Biblical Context
A sermon preached in the gateway
Jeremiah is told to stand in the gate of the Temple and speak to everyone coming in to worship (7:2). The sermon that follows (7:1–15), together with the oracles gathered around it to the end of the chapter, is one of the most dangerous speeches in the Old Testament — and we know how dangerous, because the Bible tells the story twice. Chapter 26 narrates what appears to be the same event from the outside and gives it a date: “at the beginning of the reign of King Jehoiakim” (26:1), that is, around 609/608 BC.
That date is a wound. In 609 BC King Josiah — the reforming king who had purged the Temple and renewed the covenant — was killed at Megiddo by Pharaoh Neco of Egypt (2 Kings 23:29). His son Jehoahaz lasted three months before Neco deposed him and installed his brother Eliakim, renamed Jehoiakim, as an Egyptian vassal (23:31–35). The reform had died with the reformer. Judah was paying tribute, and the great powers of the age — Egypt in decline, Babylon rising — were closing in.
And yet Jerusalem felt safe. A century earlier, in 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sennacherib had besieged the city and withdrawn without taking it (2 Kings 18–19; Isaiah 36–37). Many scholars think that deliverance hardened, over the following generations, into a popular conviction that Zion could not fall: God lived here; therefore nothing could happen here. Whether or not anyone put it so baldly, Jeremiah’s sermon shows that something like it was in the air, compressed into a three-fold chant:
“This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” (7:4)
Jeremiah calls these “deceptive words” — in Hebrew divrei hasheqer, words of falsehood — and he says it twice (7:4, 8). The sermon then lays out the conditions on which God will let his people remain in the land: act justly with one another; stop oppressing the alien, the orphan and the widow; stop shedding innocent blood; stop following other gods (7:5–7). Then comes one of the sharpest sentences in the prophets: “Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely… and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!'” (7:9–10). Has this house become “a den of robbers” (7:11)? — the line Jesus would quote as he overturned tables in the same courts (Matthew 21:13). Go to Shiloh, God says, the old sanctuary north of Jerusalem where the ark had once rested, and look at what is left of it (7:12).
Our anchor verse belongs to a smaller unit further on (7:21–28), where the subject shifts from the Temple to the sacrifices offered in it. It opens with a piece of bitter irony — “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices, and eat the flesh” (7:21) — followed by a statement that has puzzled readers ever since:
“For in the day that I brought your ancestors out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to them or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (7:22)
Then verse 23: “But this command I gave them: Obey my voice…”
How can Jeremiah — himself from a priestly family in Anathoth (1:1) — say that God never commanded sacrifice, when whole chapters of Exodus and Leviticus are devoted to it? Interpreters have answered in three main ways, and honesty requires setting them side by side:
- Many read it as a Hebrew idiom of relative negation, in which “not this, but that” means “not this so much as that.” Hosea 6:6 uses the same pattern: “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice.” On this reading Jeremiah is ranking, not abolishing.
- Others point to the order of events at Sinai. Before any law of sacrifice is given, the covenant opens with a condition: “if you obey my voice and keep my covenant” (Exodus 19:5). The first thing God said at the mountain concerned his voice.
- A number of critical scholars think Jeremiah reflects a tradition in which the wilderness covenant did not centre on sacrifice at all, and they point to Amos 5:25: “Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?”
The readings differ on history. They agree on the point. Offerings without hearing are not what God asked for, and never were. Jeremiah is not an outsider mocking worship. He is a priest’s son telling worshippers that they have mistaken the envelope for the letter.
What happened next
The sermon was not received as a thoughtful contribution to public debate. Chapter 26 records that the priests, the prophets and the people seized Jeremiah and said, “You shall die!” (26:8). He survived because certain elders reminded the assembly that a century earlier Micah of Moresheth had prophesied the ruin of Jerusalem and King Hezekiah had not killed him for it (26:17–19) — a small reunion for readers of this series, who met Micah two weeks ago. A court official, Ahikam son of Shaphan, shielded him (26:24). Another prophet, Uriah son of Shemaiah, who preached the same message, was not so fortunate: he fled to Egypt, was brought back, and was executed by Jehoiakim (26:20–23).
Then the unheard word came true. The first deportation to Babylon followed in 597 BC. In 587/586 BC the Babylonian army burned the house that had been called by God’s name. The slogan did not hold.
Where the other six verses come from
Baruch 3:13 stands in the book that bears the name of Baruch son of Neriah, Jeremiah’s scribe and companion (Jeremiah 32:12; 36:4; 45:1). The book presents itself as written in Babylon after Jerusalem’s fall (Baruch 1:1–2). It is read as Scripture in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions; most Protestant Bibles place it among the Apocrypha. Most scholars regard it as a later composite work, probably from the second century BC, written in the name of the famous scribe according to a recognised literary convention of the period. It survives in Greek, and many scholars think at least its first half was translated from a Hebrew original now lost. Its structure is clear: an introduction (1:1–14), a long prayer of confession (1:15–3:8), a poem on wisdom (3:9–4:4), and a poem of consolation for Jerusalem (4:5–5:9). Our verse sits near the beginning of the wisdom poem, which opens with a deliberate echo of Israel’s great confession of faith: “Hear the commandments of life, O Israel; give ear, and learn wisdom!” (3:9).
Matthew 12:36 comes from a long confrontation in Matthew 12:22–37. Jesus heals a man who is blind and mute, “so that the one who had been mute could speak and see” (12:22). The crowds wonder aloud whether he is the Son of David. The Pharisees offer another explanation: “It is only by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that this fellow casts out the demons” (12:24). Jesus answers with the image of a divided kingdom, the warning about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (12:31–32), the saying about a tree known by its fruit (12:33), and then a run of sayings about speech that culminates in our verse and the one after it: “for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (12:37). Earlier in the same chapter, in a dispute about the Sabbath, Jesus has already quoted Hosea: “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (12:7). Hold on to that verse; it ties Matthew 12 directly to Jeremiah 7. The Gospel’s traditional attribution to the apostle Matthew — whose feast opened this week — is ancient; modern scholars debate the question and generally date the Gospel to the later first century. Nothing in this study depends on the answer.
Tobit 3:15 belongs to one of the most humane books of the Old Testament. It is set among Israelites deported by Assyria to Nineveh in the eighth century BC, but was probably composed in the third or early second century BC. It was written in Aramaic or Hebrew — fragments of four Aramaic manuscripts and one Hebrew manuscript were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls — and survives complete in two main Greek forms, a shorter and a longer. Many scholars read it as an edifying narrative, a story told to teach, rather than a chronicle; its chronology is loose. It belongs to the Catholic and Orthodox canons, and its truth lies where the book itself places it: in what it teaches about prayer, providence, almsgiving, marriage and fidelity in a foreign land.
Chapter 3 is built with great care. On the same day, in two cities far apart, two people are wounded by words and pray to die. In Nineveh, the blind Tobit, after a bitter quarrel with his wife Anna, asks God to take his life, “because I have had to listen to undeserved insults” (3:6). In Ecbatana in Media, a young woman named Sarah is reproached by one of her father’s maids (3:7). The narrator then draws the two scenes together: “At that very moment, the prayers of both of them were heard in the glorious presence of God” (3:16), and the angel Raphael is sent to heal them both (3:17).
Sirach 22:27 and Sirach 2:7 come from the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach — Ben Sira — a Jerusalem scribe and teacher writing around 190–180 BC, shortly before the crisis under Antiochus IV. His grandson translated the book into Greek in Egypt, having arrived there, as his prologue tells us, “in the thirty-eighth year of the reign of Euergetes” — that is, 132 BC. The Latin title Ecclesiasticus, “the church’s book,” reflects its long use in the Church for moral formation. It is read as Scripture in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and placed among the Apocrypha by most Protestants. Much of the Hebrew original was rediscovered from 1896 onward in the Cairo Genizah, with further fragments from Qumran and Masada; but the Church has always read the book in its Greek and Latin forms, and it is the Greek that lies behind both of this week’s verses.
Chapter 2 is Ben Sira’s instruction to a beginner: “My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing” (2:1). Gold is tested in fire (2:5). Then comes a triple refrain — three consecutive verses each beginning “You who fear the Lord” (2:7–9) — of which ours is the first. The chapter ends by echoing the sentence of King David that we studied last week (1 Chronicles 21:13): “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, but not into the hands of mortals; for equal to his majesty is his mercy” (2:18).
Sirach 22:27 is a hinge. It closes a long section of practical advice and opens a short prayer (22:27–23:6) in which Ben Sira asks God to guard first his lips and then his thoughts and desires. In that prayer he addresses God as “Lord, Father and Master of my life” (23:1) and “Lord, Father and God of my life”(23:4) — a personal address to God as Father that is rare in Jewish writing before the New Testament.
Psalm 68 is, by general agreement, one of the most difficult poems in the Psalter. It contains an unusual number of rare words, some found nowhere else in the Bible, and its structure has been read in very different ways; the American scholar W. F. Albright once proposed that it was not a single poem at all but a catalogue of the opening lines of older hymns. Most interpreters today hear in it a great procession: God marching from Sinai through the wilderness (68:7–8, echoing Judges 5:4–5), ascending to his sanctuary with captives in his train (68:17–18), and entering in solemn procession with singers, musicians and the tribes of Israel (68:24–27). Its opening line is the ancient cry raised whenever the ark set out: “Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered” (68:1; compare Numbers 10:35). The Hebrew numbering runs one verse ahead of the English, so our verses are 68:20–21 in a Hebrew Bible.
Verse 18 — “You ascended the high mount, leading captives in your train and receiving gifts from people” — is applied by Paul to Christ’s ascension, in a form that says he gave gifts (Ephesians 4:8), a reading also found in the ancient Aramaic paraphrase of the Psalms. Our verses come immediately after that ascent, and they are a surprise. Having celebrated God’s triumph, the psalm turns to something far less spectacular: a God who carries his people day by day.
Lexical Notes
1. shim’u veqoli — “obey my voice” (Jeremiah 7:23)
שִׁמְעוּ בְקוֹלִי — literally, “hear in my voice.”
Biblical Hebrew has no separate, everyday verb meaning “obey.” The verb שָׁמַע (shama’) covers the whole range: to hear, to listen, to pay attention, to understand, to heed, to obey. English has to choose among these meanings; Hebrew does not. The construction shama’ be-qol, “to hear at the voice of,” is the standard idiom for heeding someone. God says of Abraham, “because you have obeyed my voice”(Genesis 22:18), and the Sinai covenant opens with “if you obey my voice” (Exodus 19:5). The same verb gives Israel its central prayer, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel” (Deuteronomy 6:4).
The consequence is simple and severe. In the Hebrew imagination there is almost no such thing as a hearing that stays in the ears. To hear and not to walk is, by this vocabulary, not to have heard.
Notice, too, the word God uses for what is to be heard: קוֹל (qol), voice — not “my law,” not “my text.” A voice is personal, living, addressed to someone. The covenant is presented as a conversation that is still going on. The Malayalam renders it എന്റെ വാക്ക് — my word — which keeps the same sense of something spoken.
And Jeremiah insists that the conversation is still going on. Twice in this chapter God says he has spoken to his people persistently (7:13) and sent his prophets “day after day” (7:25). The Hebrew idiom behind both is vivid — hashkem, rising early — and it is almost a signature of the book of Jeremiah: I rose early and spoke; I rose early and sent. God is pictured as someone who gets up before dawn to talk to his people.
The problem in Jeremiah 7 is not a silent God. It is a people who are always talking.
2. halakh and derekh — “walk” and “way” (Jeremiah 7:23; Baruch 3:13; Sirach 2:6–7)
הָלַךְ (halakh) means to walk or go; דֶּרֶךְ (derekh) means road, path, journey, and by extension a whole manner of life. Scripture pictures the moral life almost always as movement along a road; conduct is something you walk. Later Jewish tradition named its body of practical religious law halakhah — literally “the walking,” the way one goes. And the earliest name for the followers of Jesus, before they were called Christians, was simply “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 24:14) — a name that belongs to the one who said, “I am the way” (John 14:6).
Two details in Jeremiah 7:23 deserve attention.
First, the Hebrew says “walk in all the way that I command you” — בְּכָל־הַדֶּרֶךְ (bekhol-hadderekh). The NRSV, quoted here, renders it “walk only in the way,” which captures the exclusiveness; the Hebrew stresses completeness. Both arrive at the same demand: not the pleasant stretches, not most of the road — all of it. Keep that phrase in mind; it will reappear at the end of the week in a very different light.
Second, the verse closes with a refrain that runs through Deuteronomy: “so that it may be well with you” — לְמַעַן יִיטַב לָכֶם (lema’an yitav lakhem; compare Deuteronomy 5:16; 6:18). The command is framed as being for the hearer’s good, not as tribute paid to God. The way is not a toll road. It is the road home. The Malayalam says it with lovely simplicity: നിങ്ങള്ക്കു ശുഭമായിരിക്കും — it will be good for you.
3. ekklinō — “do not stray” (Sirach 2:7)
Ben Sira’s Greek is compact: anameinate to eleos autou kai mē ekklinēte, hina mē pesēte — “wait for his mercy, and do not turn aside, lest you fall.”
ἐκκλίνω (ekklinō) means to bend out of line, to swerve, to turn off the road. It is the verb the Greek Old Testament uses for Deuteronomy’s instruction not to turn aside “to the right or to the left”(Deuteronomy 5:32), and in the psalm Paul quotes in Romans: “All have turned aside” (Psalm 14:3; Romans 3:12). The Malayalam catches it exactly: വഴി തെറ്റരുത് — do not lose the way.
It is paired with ἀναμένω (anamenō), to wait for, to stay on in expectation — the verb Paul uses of the Thessalonians who “wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).
Set the two verbs side by side and the picture becomes precise. A traveller has been told to wait at a certain place for help that is coming. The danger is not the waiting. The danger is the side-track that promises to shorten it. The fall, in Ben Sira’s line, comes from the swerve — not from the delay.
4. sphragis panourgos — “an effective seal” (Sirach 22:27)
The Greek reads tis dōsei epi stoma mou phylakēn kai epi tōn cheileōn mou sphragida panourgon — “who will give a guard over my mouth, and upon my lips a shrewd seal?” Three features matter.
The question is a wish. “Who will give…?” is the Greek form of a familiar Hebrew idiom, מִי יִתֵּן (mi yitten, literally “who will give?”), which means “O that…!” or “If only…!” It is the idiom behind the psalmist’s “O that I had wings like a dove!” (Psalm 55:6) and Job’s “O that my words were written down!” (Job 19:23). So Sirach 22:27 is not a rhetorical question expecting the answer “no one.” It is a sigh. The Malayalam translators felt this and rendered the verse as a longing conditional: if there had been a guard for my mouth and the seal of discernment on my lips, I would not have fallen.
A seal is not a gag. In the ancient world a seal — a carved stone or metal stamp pressed into clay or wax — was set on a jar, a document, a door, a tomb. It showed ownership, protected the contents and prevented tampering, and it could be broken only by someone with the authority to break it (compare Matthew 27:66; Revelation 5:1–5). A seal on the lips is not permanent silence. It is speech released only with authority, at the right time, by the right hand.
The adjective is double-edged. πανοῦργος (panourgos) can mean crafty in a bad sense — Paul uses it, with irony, of the charge that he had been “crafty” with the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 12:16) — but in the Greek wisdom books it can also mean shrewd, astute, prudent in a good sense (as in the Greek of Proverbs 13:1 and 28:2). Translations vary accordingly: “an effective seal” (NRSV, quoted here), “a seal of prudence,” and the Malayalam വിവേകത്തിന്റെ മുദ്ര, “the seal of discernment.” Ben Sira is not asking for less speech. He is asking for intelligent speech.
5. ‘amas and totsa’ot — “bears us up” and “escape” (Psalm 68:19–20)
The Hebrew of verse 19 reads barukh Adonai yom yom ya’amos-lanu — roughly, “Blessed be the Lord; day by day he bears a load for us,” or “he carries us.”
The verb עָמַס (‘amas) is a working word: to load a pack animal, to carry a burden. Translations divide over its direction. The NRSV has “who daily bears us up”; the NIV, “who daily bears our burdens”; the King James, reading it as God loading us, supplied words in italics: “who daily loadeth us with benefits.”A few commentators take it as “if someone lays a burden on us, God is our salvation.” The grammar allows more than one reading. The image of a load-bearer is common to all of them.
The most illuminating use of the verb is in Isaiah 46. The prophet watches the gods of Babylon being carted away on the backs of exhausted animals — “these things you carry are loaded as burdens on weary animals” (46:1) — and then turns to Israel: “Listen to me… who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, even when you turn gray I will carry you… I will carry and will save” (46:3–4). The contrast is the whole of biblical religion in miniature: a god you have to carry, or a God who carries you.
Verse 20 ends with a word just as concrete: תּוֹצָאוֹת (totsa’ot), goings-out, exits, outlets. In Joshua it marks the point where a boundary line runs out at the sea (Joshua 15:4); in Proverbs it describes what flows out of the heart — “from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23). In Psalm 68 it is the way out of death. To GOD, the Lord, belong the exits. Death is pictured as a place with doors, and the psalmist knows who holds them.
6. oneidismos — “reproach” (Tobit 3:15)
ὀνειδισμός (oneidismos) means reproach, taunting, public insult — words that attach shame to a name. The word and its related verb run through the whole of Tobit 3: they describe what Tobit heard (3:6) and what Sarah heard (3:7, 10, 15).
The New Testament reserves this word for something remarkable. Paul applies to Christ the line from Psalm 69: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me” (Romans 15:3; Psalm 69:9). Hebrews says Moses “considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (11:26), and urges believers to “go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured”(13:13). The word that nearly destroyed Sarah is the word the New Testament uses for what Christ chose to carry.
A textual note. The English given to us this week — “command that respect be shown to me and pity be taken upon me, and that I hear reproach no more” — follows the shorter Greek text of Tobit, as the RSV does. The longer Greek text, generally supported by the Qumran fragments and followed by several modern translations including the NRSV, reads differently at this point: roughly, “hear me in my disgrace.” Both preserve the heart of her prayer. And the Malayalam — എനിക്കു മാന്യത നല്കണമേ, “grant me dignity” — names exactly what the insults had taken from her.
7. rhēma argon — “careless word” (Matthew 12:36)
The Greek reads pan rhēma argon ho lalēsousin hoi anthrōpoi apodōsousin peri autou logon en hēmera kriseōs — “every idle word that people speak, they will render an account of it on the day of judgment.”
ἀργός (argos) is a contraction of a-ergos, without work. Its basic meaning is idle, inactive, unemployed, useless. Matthew uses it a few chapters later of the labourers standing idle in the marketplace (20:3, 6). James uses it of faith without works, which is argē — barren, doing nothing(James 2:20). A rhēma argon is, quite literally, a word that is not doing any work — or not doing the work that words are for. The Malayalam വ്യര്ഥ വാക്ക്, a futile word, sits very close to it.
Interpreters differ on how far to press this. Some read “careless” words as the trivial and thoughtless: chatter, flippancy, words spoken without attention. Others point out that the context is anything but trivial — the Pharisees have just called the work of God’s Spirit demonic — and read argos as words empty of truth and good, including the malicious and the false. Both readings are defensible, and the saying’s “every” seems deliberately to cover the whole range.
Then the verb: ἀποδώσουσιν λόγον (apodōsousin logon), they will render an account. It is the language of a steward’s audit — “give me an accounting of your management” (Luke 16:2). There is a small wordplay in the Greek: for every rhēma, every word spoken, a logos, a reckoning, is due. The Malayalam uses the plain language of the account-book: കണക്കു കൊടുക്കേണ്ടി വരും — you will have to give the account.
Reading the Passage Closely
Read Jeremiah 7:23 slowly, and in its place, and several things surface.
First, it is a quotation. “This command I gave them” — God is not issuing a new demand. He is reaching back to the day of the Exodus and repeating the first thing he said. The covenant had a voice before it had a building. Jeremiah is not a reformer inventing a more spiritual religion; he is a remembrancer, reminding a people what the original terms were.
Second, notice the order of the clauses. Obey my voice — and I will be your God, and you shall be my people — walk in the way — so that it may be well with you. Hearing comes first; well-being comes last; and in the middle, holding the whole sentence together, is a relationship. This is the covenant formula, the Bible’s most compact statement of what God is after: “I will be your God, and you shall be my people” (compare Leviticus 26:12; Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:28). It will be heard for the last time in the final vision of Scripture: “they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (Revelation 21:3).
What the verse does not do is imagine a people of God who do not listen. Hearing is not presented as a fee paid for the relationship. It is the shape the relationship takes. You cannot be someone’s people and never hear their voice.
Third, set verse 23 against verse 4, and a contest appears. The people have a sentence: the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD. God has a sentence: obey my voice.Their sentence is about God. His sentence is addressed to them.
And here is the uncomfortable part. Their slogan was true. It was the temple of the LORD. Every word of the chant was theologically correct. What made it “deceptive” was not its content but its function: it was being used as a charm, a sentence that reassured the speaker and asked nothing of his feet. Words can be accurate and still be false in what they are doing.
Fourth, look at what they did instead. The next verse describes it: “Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their own counsels, and looked backward rather than forward” (7:24). The Hebrew is starker still — they were backward and not forward. The alternative to walking in God’s way is not standing still. It is reverse. A people who believed themselves safely inside the Temple were, by God’s account, walking backwards.
Fifth, notice where the chapter ends. Its closing verdict returns to the voice and then goes straight to the mouth: “This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the LORD their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips” (7:28). The Hebrew word for truth there, ’emunah, means faithfulness, reliability — the quality of a word you can lean on. A people who stop hearing God end up unable to speak truly to one another. The ear and the mouth fail together.
Sixth — and here we must be careful — notice what the text does not say. It does not say that worship is worthless. Jeremiah elsewhere looks forward to a restored Jerusalem ringing with “the voices of those who sing, as they bring thank offerings to the house of the LORD” (33:11) — last week’s todah again. It does not say that obedience guarantees comfort. “That it may be well with you” is the language of covenant welfare, not a promise of an easy life; Jeremiah obeyed more completely than anyone in his generation and was beaten and put in the stocks (20:2), imprisoned (37:15), lowered into a muddy cistern (38:6) and finally carried off to Egypt against his will (43:6–7). And it does not say that it is too late. The whole point of repeating the ancient command at the Temple gate was that the people standing there could still hear it.
Scriptural Connections
Now watch the other six verses take their places around this command.
What became of the people who did not listen?
Baruch 3:13 — “If you had walked in the way of God, you would be living in peace forever.”
Read this verse immediately after Jeremiah 7:23 and it sounds like an echo returning from the far side of a disaster. Jeremiah said: walk in the way… that it may be well with you. Baruch says: if you had walked in the way… you would be living in peace. Same road. Same promise. The only thing that has changed is the grammar — from command to regret.
The book carries the name of a man who knew this story better than anyone. It was Baruch who wrote Jeremiah’s words on a scroll at the prophet’s dictation (Jeremiah 36:4). And it was that scroll which was later read aloud before King Jehoiakim — the same king at whose accession the Temple Sermon had been preached — while the prophet and his scribe were in hiding. It was winter; the king sat before a fire in a brazier; and each time three or four columns had been read, he cut them off with a knife and threw them into the fire, until the whole scroll was gone (36:22–23). The narrator adds a quiet, devastating line: those who heard “were not alarmed” (36:24).
It is the most literal picture in the Bible of what Jeremiah 7:24 means by “they did not incline their ear.”A king slicing up a voice and burning it to stay warm.
Baruch’s response is worth remembering too. He simply wrote it all out again (36:32).
The book of Baruch describes where that road led: “Why is it, O Israel, why is it that you are in the land of your enemies, that you are growing old in a foreign country?” (3:10). And it gives the reason: “You have forsaken the fountain of wisdom” (3:12) — an echo of Jeremiah 2:13, where God says his people “have forsaken me, the fountain of living water.”
Growing old in a foreign country. There are few truer descriptions of a life that took the side road. It is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is simply the slow discovery, at fifty or at seventy, that one has aged somewhere one never meant to live.
But notice what Scripture does with the grammar of regret, because it is not what we usually do with it. The contrary-to-fact if — if you had walked — appears again and again in the Bible, and startlingly often in the mouth of God. “If only they had such a mind as this, to fear me and to keep all my commandments always, so that it might go well with them” (Deuteronomy 5:29). “O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river” (Isaiah 48:18). “O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways!” (Psalm 81:13). And Jesus, weeping over the same city Jeremiah preached to: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:42).
These are not accusations. They are laments. The Bible’s if only is the sound of God grieving, and grief is a form of love that has not given up.
That is why Baruch’s poem does not stop at regret. The very next verse turns to invitation: “Learn where there is wisdom… so that you may at the same time discern where there is length of days, and life, where there is light for the eyes, and peace” (3:14). And the poem closes not in mourning but in something close to joy: “Happy are we, O Israel, for we know what is pleasing to God” (4:4). In Scripture, if you had is spoken so that you still can may be heard.
ബാറൂക്ക് 3 : 13
ദൈവത്തിന്റെ മാര്ഗത്തില് ചരിച്ചിരുന്നെങ്കില് നീ എന്നേക്കും സമാധാനത്തില് വസിക്കുമായിരുന്നു.
Why could they not hear?
Matthew 12:36 — “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter.”
Matthew 12 opens its long confrontation with a quiet miracle that is easy to overlook. A man is brought to Jesus who is both blind and mute — he can neither see nor speak — and Jesus heals him “so that the one who had been mute could speak and see” (12:22). A man who had no words is given words.
Then people who have always had words use them. The Pharisees watch God’s Spirit set a human being free, and they say: this is the work of the prince of demons (12:24). The man who had been mute is now speaking. The men who have never been mute are misnaming God.
That is the setting of this week’s verse, and it matters, because it means the “careless word” of 12:36 cannot be reduced to small talk. Jesus has just been on the receiving end of a sentence that was quick, clever and socially useful — it explained away an inconvenient miracle — and utterly false. His response goes beneath the tongue: “You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (12:34). Words are not the root. They are the fruit (12:33). What comes out of the mouth is the heart made audible.
This is also why the following verse — “by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (12:37) — is not a scheme of salvation by careful phrasing. Jesus is saying that words are evidence. On the day of judgment, the record of what we said will testify to what we were.
Now return to the Temple gate. “The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” was, in the precise sense of Matthew 12:36, an argos word — a word that did no work. It was true, it was pious, and it accomplished nothing except the comfort of the one who said it. The most dangerous idle words are not the vulgar ones. They are the devout ones, because they feel like faithfulness.
And recall the verse from earlier in the same chapter: “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (12:7). There is Jeremiah 7:22–23 again, in Hosea’s words, on the lips of Jesus. There is Baruch’s grammar again: if you had known. And there, stated plainly, is the link between the week’s two threads. People who do not hear what God desires end up condemning the guiltless — with their words.
James, of all the New Testament writers the most preoccupied with the tongue, draws the lesson without softening it: “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire” (James 3:5–6). “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so” (3:10).
മത്തായി 12 : 36
ഞാന് നിങ്ങളോടു പറയുന്നു: മനുഷ്യര് പറയുന്ന ഓരോ വ്യര്ഥ വാക്കിനും വിധി ദിവസത്തില് കണക്കു കൊടുക്കേണ്ടി വരും.
What do careless words do to a person?
Tobit 3:15 — “But if it be not pleasing to you to take my life, command that respect be shown to me and pity be taken upon me, and that I hear reproach no more.”
The book of Tobit shows us, without any theory at all, what words can do.
Begin in Nineveh. Tobit, a man known for his generosity to the poor and his courage in burying the dead, has been blinded, and his wife Anna has gone out to work weaving cloth to keep the household alive. One day her employers give her a young goat in addition to her wages. Tobit hears it bleating and, in his humiliation, accuses her of stealing it. She protests; he refuses to believe her; and she answers him with the one sentence she knows will hurt most — in effect, where are all your famous acts of charity now? (2:11–14). Tobit, stung, prays to die.
It is worth noticing that the book does not flatter its hero. The first careless word in this story is his.
Now to Ecbatana. Sarah has been married seven times, and on each wedding night her husband has died — killed, the narrator tells us, by a demon (3:8). The household is raw with grief and fear. The maid’s own words suggest that Sarah had struck or punished the servants; whatever had happened, the maid turns on her: “You are the one who kills your husbands!… Why do you beat us? Because your husbands are dead? Go with them! May we never see a son or daughter of yours!” (3:8–9).
Look at what that sentence does. It takes a catastrophe Sarah did not cause and names her as its author. In its own small way it is the same kind of word as Matthew 12:24 — an evil power’s work misattributed, and a person condemned by the misnaming. And it goes straight for her future: no children, no name, no place.
The words find their mark. Sarah weeps, goes up to her father’s upper room, and intends to end her life (3:10).
Then, in the depth of her anguish, she stops — and the reason she stops is love. My father has only me,she thinks. If I do this, they will reproach him too, and I will bring his old age down in sorrow to the grave (3:10). She does not suddenly feel better. She simply cannot do that to him. So she does the one other thing she can think of. She goes to the window, and she prays.
Her prayer is completely honest. She tells God she wishes to die. She sets out her situation with painful clarity: she is her father’s only child; there is no near kinsman left for her to marry; seven husbands are dead. Why should I live? And then, in the second half of the verse — the half given to us this week — something turns. But if it is not your will to take my life… then give me respect. Have pity on me. Let me hear reproach no more.
That is the heart of it. What Sarah wanted, underneath the wish to die, was for the words to stop. She wanted her name back.
Scripture does not treat such prayer as a failure of faith. Moses asked God to take his life (Numbers 11:15). Elijah lay down under a broom tree and asked to die (1 Kings 19:4). Job cursed the day he was born (Job 3). None of them was cast off for praying it. Each was met.
And so was Sarah — faster than she could have imagined. “At that very moment, the prayers of both of them were heard in the glorious presence of God” (3:16). Tobit in Nineveh, Sarah in Ecbatana: two wounded people in two cities, heard in the same instant. The angel Raphael — whose name means God heals — is sent to them both (3:17).
And here is the quiet irony the storyteller has planted. Sarah prayed that there was no near kinsman for her to marry. Her answer was already being set in motion: within days, Tobit’s son Tobias — her kinsman, the one entitled to marry her before any other (3:17; 6:11–12) — would be on the road towards her, with an angel walking beside him.
The Church keeps the feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael this Tuesday, 29 September. It is a good week to remember that the angel of healing was first sent to two people nearly destroyed by words, and that his healing work was done not with a thunderbolt but by accompanying a young man on a long journey.
A word for anyone who has reached Sarah’s upper room. If the words spoken to you or about you have brought you to the point of wanting to end your life, please do what Sarah did next, and speak — to God, and also, today, to someone who can be with you: a friend, a family member, a priest, a doctor. In India you can call Tele-MANAS on 14416, free and at any hour; wherever you are in the world, your local crisis line exists for exactly this moment. You are not the sentence that was spoken over you.
തോബിത് 3 : 15
ഞാന് ജീവിക്കണമെന്നാണ് അവിടുത്തെ ഹിതമെങ്കില് എന്നെ കാരുണ്യപൂര്വം കടാക്ഷിക്കേണമേ! ഇനി അധിക്ഷേപങ്ങള് കേള്ക്കാന് ഇടവരാത്ത വിധം എനിക്കു മാന്യത നല്കണമേ!
Can anyone guard their own mouth?
Sirach 22:27 — “Who will set a guard over my mouth and an effective seal upon my lips, so that I may not fall because of them and my tongue may not destroy me?”
If anyone in the ancient world was qualified to guard his own mouth, it was Ben Sira. He was a professional teacher of wise speech, and his book is full of hard-won counsel on the subject: “Honor and dishonor come from speaking, and the tongue of mortals may be their downfall” (5:13). “The wise remain silent until the right moment” (20:7). “Many have fallen by the edge of the sword, but not as many as have fallen because of the tongue” (28:18).
And yet here, at the end of a chapter of practical advice, the expert stops advising and starts praying. O that someone would set a guard over my mouth. He knows the rules better than anyone, and he knows that knowing them has not been enough.
That confession is worth more than a shelf of communication techniques. Speech is the one area of life where almost everyone believes they are more careful than they are. Ben Sira, who had spent a lifetime on the subject, did not believe that about himself.
Then watch where the prayer goes. The next verse answers the sigh by naming the One who can do what he cannot: “O Lord, Father and Master of my life, do not abandon me to their designs, and do not let me fall because of them!” (23:1). And the prayer moves at once from the lips to the thoughts and desires that feed them (23:2–6). Ben Sira has grasped, two centuries before Matthew 12:34, that you cannot guard the mouth without guarding what flows into it.
The psalmist had prayed the same way: “Set a guard over my mouth, O LORD; keep watch over the door of my lips” (Psalm 141:3). The mouth has a door. The only question is who keeps it.
Notice, finally, how Ben Sira names the danger: so that I may not fall because of them, and my tongue may not destroy me. The tongue is the one weapon that always points in two directions at once. It wounds its target, and it wounds its owner. Tobit learned that in his own house. James knew it too: the tongue “stains the whole body” (James 3:6).
And with that, the week’s other recurring word arrives: fall.
പ്രഭാഷകന് 22 : 27
എന്റെ വായ്ക്ക് കാവല്കാരനും എന്റെ ചുണ്ടുകളില് വിവേകത്തിന്റെ മുദ്രയും ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നെങ്കില്, ഞാന് വീഴുകയോ നാവു മൂലം നശിക്കുകയോ ചെയ്യുകയില്ലായിരുന്നു.
How do I wait without falling?
Sirach 2:7 — “You who fear the Lord, wait for his mercy; do not stray, or else you may fall.”
Ben Sira is writing to a beginner. “My child, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for testing” (2:1). There will be humiliation and delay; gold is tested in fire (2:5). Then, in three consecutive verses, each beginning “You who fear the Lord,” he tells the beginner what to do: wait for his mercy (2:7), trust him (2:8), hope for good things (2:9).
Waiting comes first. And the warning attached to it is exact: do not turn aside, or you may fall.
Why would a person waiting for God be tempted to turn aside? Because waiting is the most exposed position in the spiritual life. It is where every shortcut makes its offer. A few verses later Ben Sira names the one who takes the offer: “Woe to timid hearts and to slack hands, and to the sinner who walks a double path!” (2:12). The Greek pictures a man trying to walk along two tracks at once. Last week we met James’s word for him — the dipsychos, the two-souled person facing two directions.
Jeremiah’s generation knew exactly what the side-roads looked like. Faced with Babylon, they did not wait on God; they went looking for Egypt. Jeremiah mocked them for it: “How lightly you gad about, changing your ways! You shall be put to shame by Egypt as you were put to shame by Assyria”(Jeremiah 2:36). The political shortcut was the swerve, and the swerve was the fall.
The remedy Ben Sira offers is memory: “Consider the generations of old and see: has anyone trusted in the Lord and been disappointed?” (2:10). And just before our verse, a line that joins his chapter to this week’s anchor: “Trust in him, and he will help you; make your ways straight, and hope in him” (2:6). Ways, again.
Then, at the very end of the chapter, Ben Sira does something that binds this week to the last. He echoes the sentence of King David we studied last week: “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, but not into the hands of mortals; for equal to his majesty is his mercy” (2:18). It is as though he says: if you must fall, fall there. In Scripture, the only safe way to fall is into his hands.
പ്രഭാഷകന് 2 : 7
കര്ത്താവിന്റെ ഭക്തരേ, അവിടുത്തെ കരുണയ്ക്കു വേണ്ടി കാത്തിരിക്കുവിന്; വീഴാതിരിക്കാന് വഴി തെറ്റരുത്.
And who carries us along the road?
Psalm 68:19–20 — “Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation. Our God is a God of salvation, and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death.”
After a week full of warnings — the road not taken, the careless word, the reproach, the unguarded mouth, the swerve and the fall — the Psalter gives us a doxology. It stands exactly where it is needed.
Everything else this week has asked something of us: hear, walk, wait, guard, account. Psalm 68 tells us what God does while we try. He carries. Yom yom — day by day. Not once, in a single dramatic rescue, but daily, the way a load-bearer carries a load: without ceremony, every morning, again.
The word fall has been shadowing us all week. Here is its opposite. Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up.
The verse also quietly corrects a misunderstanding that a week like this might produce. Jeremiah 7:23 says walk in all the way. It would be easy to hear that as a solitary march — the believer toiling up the road under the weight of commands. But Deuteronomy, the book behind so much of Jeremiah’s language, remembers the wilderness journey differently: “the LORD your God carried you, just as one carries a child, all the way that you traveled until you reached this place” (Deuteronomy 1:31). The Hebrew there is the same phrase as in Jeremiah 7:23: bekhol-hadderekh, in all the way.
God asks his people to walk all the way. He also carries them all the way. The two sentences are not in tension. They describe the same journey from its two ends.
Then verse 20: to GOD, the Lord, belong the exits from death. Christian readers have never been able to hear that line without thinking of the One who stood on the far side of death and said, “I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades” (Revelation 1:18). The letter to the Hebrews says Christ came to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Hebrews 2:15). The doors are in his hand. And it is a fine piece of placement that the verse Paul applies to Christ’s ascension (68:18) is followed at once by a blessing on the God who carries his people daily. The one who ascended is the one who carries.
After verse 19 the psalm writes Selah — a word whose precise meaning is uncertain, but which most likely marks a pause. It is the right instruction. Stop. Let yourself be carried.
സങ്കീര്ത്തനങ്ങള് 68 : 19-20
അനുദിനം നമ്മെ താങ്ങുന്ന കര്ത്താവു വാഴ്ത്തപ്പെടട്ടെ! ദൈവമാണു നമ്മുടെ രക്ഷ. നമ്മുടെ ദൈവം രക്ഷയുടെ ദൈവമാണ്, മരണത്തില് നിന്നുള്ള മോചനം ദൈവമായ കര്ത്താവാണു നല്കുന്നത്.
Interpretive Insights
1. In Scripture, hearing is not the first step towards obedience. It is obedience.
We have quietly separated hearing from doing, and in the gap we have built a religion of information. Most believers today hear more Scripture, more preaching and more religious commentary than any generation before them. By Jeremiah’s vocabulary, much of it has not yet been heard, because it has not yet reached the feet. The people at the Temple gate were not short of sermons. They had simply learned to hear without walking — which, in Hebrew, is not hearing at all.
2. Religious words can be true and still be careless.
The Temple slogan was correct in every syllable. What made it deceptive was the work it was being given: to reassure, to settle, to close the question. This is the insight easiest to miss and hardest to hear. An argos word is not necessarily a false word. It may be a true word that is doing nothing — or doing only the work of protecting the speaker from the voice of God.
3. The mouth and the feet belong to one system.
This week’s verses will not let us separate them. Ben Sira fears falling through the mouth (22:27) and falling through the swerve (2:7). Jeremiah’s hearers chanted a slogan and walked backwards (7:4, 24), and the chapter closes with truth cut off from their lips (7:28). Proverbs lays out the whole anatomy in four verses: “Keep your heart with all vigilance… Put away from you crooked speech… Let your eyes look directly forward… Keep straight the path of your feet” (Proverbs 4:23–26). Heart, mouth, eyes, feet. A life goes where its words go, and its words come from where its heart has been.
4. God treats wounding words as real harm — and wounded prayers as real prayer.
Scripture never tells Sarah that words cannot hurt her. It records her grief, her temptation, her honesty and her request, and then it says that her prayer was heard in the glorious presence of God. The Bible has room for prayers that begin with I want to die, provided they are prayed to God. What Sarah did with her pain — carried it to the window and spoke it aloud — is precisely what made it the beginning of her healing rather than the end of her story.
5. The “if only” of Scripture is an invitation, not a sentence.
Baruch 3:13 could be read as a closed door: you did not walk, so here you are. But the Bible’s pattern forbids that reading. Its most painful conditionals are spoken by God, in grief, and they are always followed by a way back. If you had walked is the voice of someone who still wants you on the road.
6. The God who commands the road carries the traveller.
The week’s final verse keeps all the others from becoming a burden. Jeremiah’s walk in all the way and Deuteronomy’s he carried you all the way are two halves of one covenant. Obedience in Scripture is never the solitary achievement of a strong walker. It is the walk of a child who is carried when the road is too long.
The Central Tension
Here is what this week’s Scriptures ask us to confront.
We would rather talk about God than listen to him.
Talking has great advantages. It keeps us in control. We choose the words, frame the story, reach the conclusion. We can talk about God at length without going anywhere at all. A slogan is portable, repeatable and flattering; it can be said at the gate of any temple and it costs the speaker nothing.
Listening — listening in the Hebrew sense — hands the direction of our lives to someone else. It asks something of the feet.
So we fill the silence. With prayers that are entirely speech. With conversations about faith that never arrive at a decision. With commentary, forwarding, explanation, defence. Much of it is true. Some of it is beautiful. And a great deal of it is argos — doing no work except keeping the voice of God at a comfortable distance.
Meanwhile the roads are being laid. Our words are laying roads under other people’s feet, as the maid’s words laid one under Sarah’s. Other people’s words have laid roads under ours. And through all that traffic, one voice has been speaking since before dawn, asking to be heard, promising that its road leads somewhere good.
So the question this week is not do you know what God has said? Almost everyone reading this could answer that.
It is far more personal:
Whose voice has actually been deciding which way you walk — and when did you last stop talking long enough for God’s voice to change your direction?
What This Means for Us Today
In the family. Tobit’s household and Raguel’s household were both good homes, full of faith, and both were nearly broken by sentences spoken in pain. Most families are. The labels we give at the dinner table — the difficult one, the clever one, the one who always forgets — become roads our children and siblings walk for decades. So does the careless remark in the family group on the phone, which is read by twenty people and forgotten by none of them. Jeremiah 7:23 and Matthew 12:36 together suggest a simple family discipline: speak at home as someone who will one day have to account for the roads you laid there.
In professional life, especially where words carry authority. Anyone who has drafted a statute, a judgment, a contract or an official order knows that a single word — shall or may, and or or — can change the lives of thousands. The same professionals can be remarkably careless in corridors: the offhand verdict on a junior colleague, the reference letter written in a hurry, the remark in a meeting that follows someone for years. Matthew 12:36 uses the language of the audit. The file note and the corridor remark are both on the record somewhere.
In reputation, and online. The maid’s sentence — you are the one who… — is the grammar of every public shaming. We now have instruments for oneidismos on a scale the ancient world could not have imagined, and the person reproached is usually not in the room. Before you post or forward, try Matthew 12:36’s test: is this a word that does good work — for truth, for justice, for someone’s healing — or an argos word? And try Sarah’s test: would I say it in front of that person’s father?
In the parish and in religious talk. Every Christian community has its slogans. God will provide. I am a practising Catholic. I have already forgiven him. Everything happens for a reason. Some are true; some are half-true; all can be used to close a matter rather than to open a road. Jeremiah’s sermon was addressed to worshippers at the door. It is addressed to us at ours.
In seasons of waiting. A diagnosis awaited. A job application. A case pending in court. A child’s marriage. A visa. A promotion that keeps not coming. Sirach 2:7 is written for exactly these seasons, because they are when the side-roads appear: the small dishonesty that would speed things up, the influential contact who will expect something in return, and the people who make a living selling shortcuts to the desperate — the guaranteed remedy, the special ritual, the man who knows a man. The fall, Ben Sira warns, comes from the swerve. It is worth deciding in advance which roads you will not take.
In ageing. Baruch speaks of growing old in a foreign country; Isaiah answers, even when you turn gray I will carry you (46:4). Both are true, and the second is God’s reply to the first. The later years are often when the if only arrives — the road not taken, the word that should not have been said, the reconciliation that did not happen. Scripture’s if only is always an invitation. It is not too late to walk a little way in the right direction, and it is never too late to be carried.
In the voice inside your head. Many of us carry an inner narrator that is really a recording of someone else’s careless sentence, replayed for years until it sounds like our own conclusion. Sarah very nearly believed the maid. Test the voice that tells you what you are. If it sounds like the maid in Ecbatana, it is not the voice of God.
In prayer. There is an old inversion of Samuel’s prayer that describes most of us rather well: “Listen, Lord, for your servant is speaking.” Jeremiah 7:23 invites the original order — “Speak, for your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10). Prayer that begins with hearing will, sooner or later, ask something of your feet. That is how you will know it was heard.
A Rise & Inspire Moment
A slogan is a word that asks nothing of your feet.
The crowd at the Temple gate had one: the temple of the LORD. The second son in this Sunday’s parable had one: “I go, sir.” Both were perfectly good sentences. Neither one moved anybody anywhere.
God’s voice never works that way. Every time it speaks in Scripture, somebody moves. “Go from your country” — and Abraham went (Genesis 12:1–4). “Follow me” — and Matthew got up from his tax booth. Even Sarah’s answer, when it came, came walking along a road towards her.
When God speaks, someone walks.
So here is a test you can carry all week. If what you call your faith has never once changed the direction of your feet, it may be a slogan.
Listen until something is asked of your feet. Then you will know you have heard.
Living the Passage This Week
1. Keep a one-day ledger of your words. Matthew 12:36 speaks the language of accounts, so take it literally for a single day. Choose one day this week. That night, write down three things you said that day that did no good work — careless, cutting, idle, or simply empty — and one thing you said that did real good. No self-punishment; this is an audit, not a trial. The next day, repair one of the three.
2. Pray five minutes before you speak. Read Jeremiah 7:23 aloud once. Then set a timer for five minutes and do not say anything to God at all — no requests, no explanations. When the time is up, ask only one question: “Where are you asking my feet to go this week?” Test whatever comes against the plain commands of the passage itself: justice for one another, care for the stranger, the orphan and the widow, no innocent blood, no other gods (Jeremiah 7:5–6). If it fits, do it before Friday.
3. Retire one slogan. Identify one religious or reassuring phrase you use to close a matter rather than to act on it — “God will take care of it,” “I’ve forgiven him,” “I’ll pray about it.” This week, either make it true with a specific action, or stop saying it. Be the first son in the parable: let your feet correct your words.
4. Give back someone’s dignity. Sarah asked God for respect and an end to reproach. Think of one person you have labelled — at home, at work, in your parish — whether aloud or only in your head. Do the reverse of what the maid did: say one true, honouring sentence to them or about them, in the same company where the label was spoken. If the reproach was public, let the respect be public too.
5. Name your waiting, and your side-road. Write down, in one line, what you are waiting for from God. Underneath it, write the shortcut you are most tempted by. Then, each morning this week, before you look at your phone, pray Psalm 68:19 slowly: “Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up.” You are not being asked to carry the whole wait. Only today — and even today, you are being carried.
Questions for Personal Reflection
- What does Jeremiah 7:23 actually ask for, and in what order? Read it again and notice what stands in the middle of the verse, between the hearing and the walking.
- Whose sentence have I been walking along for years? Who spoke it, and did God ever say it?
- What slogan do I use to feel safe while my feet go their own way? Where am I saying “I go, sir”and not going?
- Whose road have my words been laying? Is there someone walking, even now, along a sentence I spoke carelessly — and what would it take to change its direction?
- Where is God’s voice asking my feet to go this week, and on what day will I go?
Prayerful Response
God who rises early to speak,
You have been talking to me for a long time, and I have been talking over you. I have said the right things about you — in church, at table, to myself — and called it listening.
Forgive the words I have spoken that did no good work: the careless ones, the clever ones, and the true ones I used as charms. Forgive the roads my sentences have laid under other people’s feet. Where I have shamed anyone, give them back their dignity — and let me be the one who gives it.
I do not know how to guard my own mouth. Set the guard yourself. Put your seal on my lips, and open them only when there is something worth releasing.
Teach me to wait for your mercy without wandering off in search of a shorter road. And where I have already wandered, let your if only reach me as an invitation and not a verdict.
Blessed are you, who daily bear us up. Thank you for every mile you carried me when I thought I was walking alone.
Speak now, and let me hear you with my feet. I do not ask to see the whole way. I ask only to be carried through today.
Through Christ our Lord, the Word who walked the road to the end. Amen.
Key Takeaway
Listen until the voice asks something of your feet — then walk, because the One who calls you to the road carries you all the way.
Closing
This week began with a tax collector and ends with two sons.
Matthew heard two words — “Follow me” — and his feet answered before his mouth did. The two sons in this Sunday’s Gospel did it the other way round. One had a perfect sentence and went nowhere. The other said entirely the wrong thing — “I will not” — and then, the text says, changed his mind and went.
There is great mercy in that parable. The Gospel does not ask which son had the better sentence. It asks which one did the will of his father. And it tells us that the son who said the wrong thing still had time to walk the right way.
So do, this week, what Jeremiah’s hearers would not. Say a little less. Listen a little longer. Let your words be fewer and truer, and watch whose roads they are laying. And when you hear something that asks something of your feet — however small, however inconvenient — get up from the booth.
He has been rising early to speak for a very long time.
Tomorrow morning, rise early to listen.
Which passage of Scripture would you like us to study together in a future Sunday Series? Tell us — the passages our readers are wrestling with are usually the ones worth a whole Sunday.
Rise & Inspire — Sunday Bible Series Depth over speed. Understanding over volume. Formation over information.
Written by John Britto Kurusumuthu.
The verses shared each morning by His Excellency, Rt. Rev. Dr. Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur, are collected over seven days. These seven verses together form the basis for the weekly Sunday Bible Series.
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