Origen's sermon on Jeremiah 5:3, allegorizing God's eyes upon faith and the soul's numbness to divine scourging.
Homily on Jeremiah 6 is one of Origen's surviving sermons on the book of Jeremiah, preached to a congregation and built verse by verse around Jeremiah 5:3, "Lord, your eyes are upon faith." Origen treats the single phrase as a launching point, extending it by scriptural analogy to hope, love, power, self-control, and righteousness, arguing that God's gaze rests on every virtue in turn and that a person who cultivates virtue draws that divine attention to himself.
The bulk of the homily turns to the second half of the verse, "you scourged them and they did not feel pain," which Origen uses as an occasion to distinguish two kinds of sinners: those who feel the sting of a correcting word and are thereby brought toward repentance, and those whose souls have gone numb, like a paralyzed limb that no longer registers a wound. He draws the comparison out at length, using bodily analogies (dead flesh that feels no burn) to argue that spiritual insensitivity to reproof is worse than the pain of correction itself, and that a soul which still hurts under discipline is in better condition than one that has stopped hurting altogether.
Origen closes by working through the later clauses of the verse - the people who made their faces harder than rock, refused instruction, and were called "poor" for not knowing the way of the Lord - reading the prophet's language of hardened faces and poverty as descriptions of an untaught soul, and ending with a prayer that the hearers receive greatness and understanding in Christ. The homily is a compact example of Origen's method: taking a plain historical statement from Jeremiah and mining it clause by clause for a theology of conscience, correction, and the moral life.
“your eyes are upon faith" just as "the Lord's eyes rest upon the righteous”
— Homily on Jeremiah 6 · read this chapter →
“these three remain, faith, hope, love; and the greatest of these is love”
— Homily on Jeremiah 6 · read this chapter →
“the scourges of God are of such a kind that some of those scourged feel pain, while others of those scourged do not feel pain”
— Homily on Jeremiah 6 · read this chapter →
“they made their faces harder than rock”
— Homily on Jeremiah 6 · read this chapter →
“they did not know the way of the Lord and the judgment of God”
— Homily on Jeremiah 6 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon built on Jeremiah 5:3, "Lord, your eyes are upon faith, you scourged them and they did not feel pain." Origen uses the verse to argue that God's attention rests on every virtue, and that the real danger for a sinner is not feeling God's corrective scourges at all.
He compares it to a deadened limb that no longer registers a burn: some sinners still feel the sting of a reproving word and are moved toward repentance, while others have grown spiritually numb and are unaffected by correction, which Origen treats as the worse condition.
He extends "the Lord's eyes are upon faith" by analogy to Paul's triad of faith, hope, and love, and to the list of virtues in 2 Timothy (power, love, self-control), arguing God's gaze rests on each virtue in the same way.
Origen reads it as a description of a soul that refuses to be shaped or moved by a reproving word, comparing it to Pharaoh's hardened heart, which stood opposed to what was announced to it.
Origen takes Jeremiah's line "I will go to the great ones and speak to them" as referring to souls of genuine moral and intellectual greatness, people who pursue serious purposes and right reason rather than lowly or small concerns.
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