Jeremiah 7:1-7 (8-15)

“Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?” (Jeremiah 7:11)

This is the temple sermon, delivered in the gateway of the temple itself. The parallel account in chapter 26 dates it to the accession of Jehoiakim, around 609 BC, and reports that it nearly cost the prophet his life (26:8-11). Jeremiah quotes back a slogan, the threefold “the temple of the LORD” of v. 4, which expresses the confidence that the building guarantees the city; the sermon’s whole burden is that the guarantee is conditional. The conditions are covenantal rather than cultic, justice for the resident alien, the orphan and the widow (v. 6), and v. 9 recites the second table of the Decalogue as a list of what the worshipers do before coming to stand in the house. The historic Tenth Sunday after Trinity reads this beside Luke 19:41-48, where Jesus clears the temple court and quotes v. 11 against it, so the prophet’s question is put twice about the same courts, six centuries apart.

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