Jeremiah was a bullfrog, he was good friend of mine / I never understood a single word he said . . . [Creedence Clearwater Revival]
I’ve known about penknives all my life – the kind of folding knife you can keep in your pocket for various uses. I especially remember using it to play mumbley-peg with other teen age caddies back in the early 40’s while waiting for our caddy master to summon me to carry some golfer’s bag. But why it was called a penknife never occurred to me until I was informed that back through time, when the standard writing instrument was a bird’s quill, a handy pen-knife was used to sharpen the quill’s point for clearer script.
Indeed such a penknife shows up in the 7th century BC Book of Jeremiah. The story goes that the prophet, distressed over the influence of paganized religious practices plus the greed and chancy diplomacy of Judah’s leadership, dictated divine warnings to his secretary Baruch – who copied them on a papyrus scroll. Baruch was then commissioned to read the scroll to the powers that be. What they heard were complaints like: Be appalled, O heavens, . . . be shocked . . . says the Lord, for my people have . . . forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water . . . Small and great alike, all are greedy for gain; prophet and priest, all practice fraud. They have treated lightly the injury to my people: “Peace, peace!” they say, though there is no peace.
How was this received? The reigning king of Judah, warming himself by a winter fire, called for a penknife and as he heard three or four columns of the scroll read he cut them from the scroll and threw them into the fire – until the whole scroll, the whole warning of Jeremiah’s God, was consumed. And it says: Yet neither the king, nor any of his servants . . . was afraid, nor did they rend their garments.
It’s hard for us to understand the politics of those times though it had a lot to do with polytheism versus monotheism, materialism versus justice. But closer to home, imagine George III upon hearing the Declaration of Independence (which was as much a prophecy as a declaration) asking for a pocketknife to excise such immortal words as: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . . . The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States . . . Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us – – –
And now recent news suggests that our own current Pope Francis may be a new Jeremiah, whose encyclical on the environment challenges the careless habits of our throw-away society – words such as: The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future . . . It is not enough . . . to think of different species merely as potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves . . . Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right. And yet, as with the original Jeremiah, do I not see poised many an open penknife, ready to shred any sections of this encyclical that sound like a threat to business as usual?