Origen's sermon on Jeremiah 11:1-10, reading 'the men of Judah' as Christians and arguing the Word came to the prophets before the Incarnation.
Homily on Jeremiah 9 is one of Origen's surviving sermons on the book of Jeremiah, delivered to a congregation and preserved through later transcription. Taking as his text Jeremiah 11:1-10 ("Hear the words of this covenant... Cursed is the man who will not hear"), Origen opens with a meditation on John's prologue: the Word that "tabernacled among us" bodily in Christ is the same Word that "came to Jeremiah," to Isaiah, to Ezekiel, and to Moses long before the Incarnation. Christ, he insists, was always coming to the righteous, even before his visible historical arrival, so that the same God is author of both the Law and the Gospel.
From there Origen works through the passage clause by clause in his characteristic allegorical method. "The men of Judah" become believers in Christ, since disbelieving Jews "will not be Jews" while believing gentiles inherit the name; "the land flowing with milk and honey" is reinterpreted away from the literal territory toward the promise of the meek inheriting the earth; the exodus from "the iron furnace" of Egypt becomes an exodus from the spiritual Egypt where the Lord was crucified, per Revelation's language about Sodom and Egypt. Origen dwells at length on the curious phrase "the injustices of their fathers, the former ones," using it to distinguish two kinds of fathers a Christian has: the devil, father of all who sin (per 1 John), and God, father of the reborn. He closes with a striking theological point about eternal begetting, using Proverbs' "before all the hills he begets me" (present, not past tense) to argue the Son is not begotten once for all but is always being begotten by the Father, just as the righteous person is always being begotten a child of God through their deeds.
The homily matters as a compact example of Origen's preaching practice: verse-by-verse close reading of the Greek and Septuagint wording (he flags a textual gap in the Hebrew patriarch list), constant cross-referencing between Old and New Testaments to argue for one God across both, and a move from exegesis to a metaphysical claim about the Son's eternal generation that anticipates later Trinitarian doctrine.
“he was present earlier too, even if not bodily, in each of the saints, and that after this visible coming of his he comes to us again”
— Homily on Jeremiah 9 · read this chapter →
“those who disbelieve in Christ will not be Jews, but we who believe in Christ will be”
— Homily on Jeremiah 9 · read this chapter →
“everyone who commits sin has been begotten of the devil”
— Homily on Jeremiah 9 · read this chapter →
“before all the hills he begets me”
— Homily on Jeremiah 9 · read this chapter →
“The church is the desolate one—desolate of the law, she was desolate of God.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 9 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon on Jeremiah 11:1-10 in which Origen argues that the divine Word who became flesh in Christ had already been coming to the prophets - Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah - before the Incarnation. He then allegorizes the passage's warnings to 'the men of Judah' as addressed to the church.
He reads it as referring to Christian believers rather than ethnic Jews, arguing that those who disbelieve in Christ 'will not be Jews' while believers, gentile or otherwise, inherit the name of Judah through Christ's descent from that tribe.
Citing Proverbs' present-tense phrase 'before all the hills he begets me,' Origen argues the Father did not beget the Son once in the past and stop, but is always begetting him, just as the righteous person is continually begotten a child of God through good deeds.
Origen distinguishes the devil, whom he calls the father of everyone who sins (citing 1 John), from God, the father of those reborn in Christ, using this distinction to explain Jeremiah's phrase about turning back to 'the injustices of their fathers, the former ones.'
Yes - the homily explicitly opposes those who 'cut off the divinity that is older than the Savior's coming from the divinity proclaimed by Jesus Christ,' insisting on 'one God both then and now, one Christ both then and now.'
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