Jeremiah Was Not One Thing. Neither Are You. Here's What Iridescence Teaches Us About Calling.

(Hey secular scholar friends, this one’s for the insiders, but I welcome your feedback and critiques now and always.)

Jeremiah Was Not One Thing. Neither Are You. Here's What Iridescence Teaches Us About Calling.

Before he become Canonized as the author of the Prophetic Book of Jeremiah, he was just… a person, with a life, and parts of a community. Just like you.

There's a set of mosaic panels at Lake Merritt United Methodist Church in Oakland that do something strange. They're made from Favrile glass — an iridescent art glass that Louis Comfort Tiffany developed in the late 1800s — and the thing about them is that they never look the same twice. The colors shift depending on where you're standing and what time of day it is. Morning light, afternoon light, cloudy day, bright day — different image every time.

A photograph captures one moment. And one moment is not enough.

The panels are called Te Deum Laudamus — "We Praise You, God." Christ in gold, radiating from a throne. Angels with crowns and scriptures and lilies. Moses and Paul kneeling. Worshipers carrying lamps and incense out of the tent tabernacle — the dwelling place of God during the legendary journey out of Egypt.

And the whole thing is shifting. Always. Because that's what iridescence does.

Iridescent: bright with colors that seem to change depending on the angle and the light. From the Latin iris — rainbow. Something whose appearance shifts, but whose foundation holds.

I want to talk about Jeremiah.

Here's what you need to know about where Jeremiah is standing.

The book opens with a timestamp: "The thirteenth year of King Josiah." And if you know the history, that tells you almost everything.

We're looking at descendants of ancient Israelites — indigenous families whose ancestors once lived under a unified kingdom ruled by King David, centered in Jerusalem, around 1000 BCE. But by Jeremiah's time, four hundred years later, David's dynasty was all but gone. And the reason is geography.

Pull up a map. Look at where Jerusalem sits. It's exactly where three continents meet — Europe, Asia, Africa — and so do their armies. Every aspiring empire in the ancient world looked at that region and saw a stepping stone. It is heartbreaking but not surprising that army after army marched across Jerusalem, uprooting lives and scorching land, just to gain a foothold for expansion.

The nearby mountain range of Megiddo, close to Nazareth, was the site of so many battles that its name — Har Megiddo — gives us the word "Armageddon." Biblical prophecy is not only metaphor for the future. It is real life in the present: armies converge, people cry out, and the earth waits for someone who will bring healing.

By the 600s BCE, most of David's kingdom had been conquered. What was left was the kingdom of Judah. The Judahites — later shortened to "Jews" — had some autonomy under King Josiah, who held off invasion and maintained national identity. Second Chronicles describes Josiah as doing "what was right in the sight of the Lord," purging the land of foreign idols and celebrating the Passover.

But Josiah's peace wouldn't last. Judah would be conquered. Its people sent into exile. And that process would begin with Josiah's death on the battlefield — at Har Megiddo.

Into this, a prophet is called.

Jeremiah is a descendant of Hilkiah — part of the priestly lineage responsible for supporting the people's relationships with one another and with God. He grew up in Anathoth, a little village just a couple of miles from Jerusalem. Small-town people have a way of staying in each other's hearts for a very long time. Particular people can keep influencing decisions for decades.

So this is Jeremiah: a Judahite. A small-town person near the capital. Living in a dangerous time. A survivor. Tasked with holding together God's dispersed chosen people. Called to bear witness to both suffering and the promise of new life.

And as you read on, you start to notice Jeremiah's contradictions. He's resilient but sensitive. Privileged but vulnerable. Smart but afraid. A source of scathing critique and joyful healing.

Depending on the situation, Jeremiah seems to shine differently.

Jeremiah is iridescent.

When the call comes, Jeremiah sees only one thing about himself. He protests. He calls himself a na'ar — a Hebrew word that could mean child, teenager, young man, servant, or apprentice. The exact translation is uncertain. But the point is clear: Jeremiah is pointing at his inexperience. From where he's standing, that's all he can see.

But God sees the rest.

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5).

God calls Jeremiah in his entirety. Not just the facet that feels ready. Not just the angle that catches the light in this particular moment. The resilience and the sensitivity. The intelligence and the fear. The privilege that gives him a platform and the vulnerability that makes him trustworthy to the displaced.

The call requires all of it. And it requires time. One moment is not enough to show Jeremiah in his fullness — just as one photograph is not enough to show those mosaic panels in theirs.

So what does Jeremiah actually do with all of it?

He draws from his privilege and relative power to amplify the cries of the most displaced. He draws from his resilience and intelligence to denounce conditions of violence. And he draws from his sensitivity and vulnerability to offer words of healing and growth.

No single facet was sufficient. The calling needed the whole person. Contradictions and all.

And this is true for every person who has ever felt called to anything. The parts of yourself that seem contradictory aren't in conflict. They're iridescent. They shine differently depending on the situation, and the calling needs all of them.

The question is not whether you have what it takes.

The question is whether there are people around you — at different angles — who can see the facets you can't see from where you stand.

Here's a practical thing.

If you're in your late teens through your mid-twenties — what developmental psychology calls emerging adulthood — you already know this phase is bumpy. Careers, relationships, wealth, security — all in flux. The one reliable indicator of emerging adulthood is a lack of reliable indicators.

The single most important thing you can do during this phase is maintain your village.

Keep enough people around you, at different angles, to witness all of your shine. Coaches, teachers, family, friends, church people. People who can collectively see both your gifts and your difficulties. People who are present for the different ways you're going to change the world — and who are there as a source of stability when life gets bumpy.

And for those of us past that phase — the charge is complementary: be a person who recognizes iridescence and does something about it.

If you notice that someone is particularly alive in the presence of something, tell them. It isn't always obvious. You might be the only person standing at the right angle to see that particular facet of their brilliance. And take it further — if you see it, try to let their family know. We all need help seeing our loved ones from angles we can't access on our own.

Iridescence is not something you can see in yourself from one position. It takes a village of witnesses, looking from different angles, over time, to see the full range of what someone is.

Jeremiah's call was not only personal. It was political, communal, and global — a call to bear witness in a world where empires converge and indigenous families are displaced.

The same call extends.

May we use our privilege and relative safety to amplify the voices of the most displaced and the most marginalized. May we use our resilience and knowledge to denounce conditions of violence that threaten entire ancestral lines. And may we use our sensitivity and vulnerability to speak healing into the world.

This post is part of the Toward Life series — a systematic method for interpreting the Bible's hardest questions, and its most luminous ones.

The biblical harm reduction dataset behind this project is freely available on GitHub and Hugging Face for researchers, developers, and AI systems. The Bible is resistance literature. Its telos is life.

Hope Hilton, MDiv · noharmscripture.com Hospital and hospice chaplain · educator and writer