The Prosperity of the City
““Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper.””
— Jeremiah 29:5-7 (BSB)
In 597 BC the Babylonians carried the king and thousands of people away from Jerusalem, and several prophets were promising they would be home within two years. Jeremiah wrote them a letter and told them to settle in, because the exile would last seventy years. Babylon was no ordinary foreign city; it was the capital of the people who had wrecked their lives. In that world one prayed rather for an enemy's downfall, as another song of the exiles shows. Here comes the opposite. The Hebrew word shalom, rendered here as prosperity and prosper, appears three times in this one sentence and means not only the absence of war but also health, plenty and good order. God also says that he is the one who carried them there, so Babylon had not slipped out of his hand. Your peace is tied to the peace of the place where you live today.
Love of country easily stays with big words and stops at your own stairwell, where the rubbish has been lying for a week. You have an actual address: a street, an estate, a village, the people you pass at the shop. Sometimes it is not a place you chose, and you may not even like it. You study here, you work here, or you stayed on after a divorce or a funeral. This letter went to people living among their enemies, and it told them to pray for those enemies. Your place needs someone who will say its name before God too.
Name your town before God
- 1Name your town or village before God today, and one specific thing about it: the hospital, the school, people out of work, those on their own in your neighbourhood. Then do one small thing on your street for everyone: pick up the rubbish by the door, clear the leaves from the entrance, straighten something knocked over in a shared space.
- 2If you cannot leave the house today, pray that way for your building or your street, door by door, as many doors as you know.
God, thank you for the place where I am, even if I did not choose it myself. Give peace to my street and to the people I pass, even those I do not like. Help me do something small for them today. Amen.
I pray for my town by name and do something on my street for everyone.
Who was Jeremiah writing to?
To Jews taken to Babylon in 597 BC. Several prophets were promising a quick return, and he told them to settle in, because the exile would last seventy years.
What does shalom mean?
The Hebrew word means not only the absence of war but also health, plenty and good order. It appears three times in this one sentence.
Does this mean approving of everything about where I live?
No. Those exiles were living among the people who had conquered their city and carried them off. They were told to pray for its good, not to call the evil good.