Origen's sermon reading Jeremiah's 'wood into his bread' and the men of Anathoth as veiled prophecies of Jesus' crucifixion and the Jews' rejection of him.
This homily is one of Origen's sermons on the book of Jeremiah, delivered to a congregation and preserved in Greek. He opens by insisting that God alone is the true teacher of scripture, working through Christ, the Holy Spirit, or human teachers like Paul, and that anyone who explains the oracles rightly does so only because God has 'made himself known' to them. From there he turns to Jeremiah's obscure line about the prophet's enemies plotting to 'cast wood into his bread' and blot out his name, and reads it as a coded prophecy: the wood is the cross, the bread is Jesus' teaching, and just as wood thrown into bitter water in the story of Moses sweetened it, so the wood of the passion coming into the word has made the teaching sweeter and let it spread throughout the earth.
Origen then works through Jeremiah's oracles against the men of Anathoth who wanted to silence the prophet, treating them as a type of the Jewish authorities who told Jesus 'you shall not prophesy' and who, in his reading, brought on themselves the famine 'not of bread... but of the word of the Lord' - the loss of active prophecy after Jesus. He explains the wheat-grain saying (a seed must die to bear fruit) as Jesus foreseeing that his own death, rather than ending his name, would multiply it many times over, and prays through Jeremiah's words for vindication against those who crucified him.
The homily closes with a cosmological digression: Origen argues that the land, water, air, and fire are each assigned a guardian angel, and that when Jeremiah says 'the land mourns' this refers to the angel over the land grieving at human sin. He then reads Jeremiah's image of Jerusalem as a lion's den or hyena's den handed over to wild beasts as God's judgment abandoning a hardened people to hostile powers, and ends with a pastoral appeal: confess your sins now, so that you are handed to comforting angels rather than to beasts, in Christ Jesus 'to whom is the power and the glory forever.'
“For "he who teaches man knowledge" is God, as is also written in the Psalms.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 10 · read this chapter →
“I take an example from the law of Moses: the wood thrown into the bitter water made it sweet.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 10 · read this chapter →
“unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 10 · read this chapter →
“The death of Jesus bore fruit in all these; but if the death bore fruit in so many, how many will the resurrection bear fruit in?”
— Homily on Jeremiah 10 · read this chapter →
“Let us confess our transgressions in repentance, and we will not be handed over to the wild beasts, but to holy angels who will be our nurses”
— Homily on Jeremiah 10 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon in which Origen reads several obscure verses of Jeremiah as veiled prophecies of Jesus' crucifixion and its aftermath, especially the line about enemies plotting to 'cast wood into his bread.' He interprets that wood as the cross entering Jesus' teaching, and closes with an allegory of angels over the elements and an appeal to repentance.
He reads the wood as the cross and the bread as Jesus' teaching, arguing that just as wood thrown into bitter water sweetened it in the story of Moses, the wood of the passion entering the word made Jesus' teaching sweeter and let it spread across the earth.
He connects it to Jeremiah's enemies who wanted to blot out the prophet's name, arguing that Jesus knew his death would not erase his name but, like a grain of wheat falling into the ground, would bear abundant fruit rather than leaving him alone.
Yes, in this homily he explicitly proposes that the earth, water, air, and fire each have an angel appointed over them, and that Jeremiah's image of 'the land mourns' refers to that angel grieving over human sin rather than to the physical land itself.
Jeremiah's persecutors from his hometown of Anathoth, who told him not to prophesy, are read by Origen as a type of the Jewish authorities who silenced Jesus, an act he says brought on them a 'famine... of the word of the Lord.'
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