Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B
(Proper 24, Year C)
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Rev.
Dr. Stan G. B. Duncan
Background to Jeremiah 31
This is a beautiful and theologically powerful passage,
and it contains numerous themes and allusions which could work well with a
Jubilee message for the day. However, perhaps the first thing to be emphasized
in interpreting it is that its reference to “old” and “new” covenants does not refer either to the Old and New
Testaments, or to the Eucharistic words of Jesus. It is certainly clear that
the Christian Bible compilers had Jeremiah in mind when they separated the two
testaments (or testamentum, “covenants”),
as did Jesus (or at least his biographers) at the last supper. But to say, as
commentators across the centuries often have, that Jeremiah was prophesying the
division of the Bible into old and new testaments, or that the words of Jesus
did that, is to diminish the very important (and Jewish) message that Jeremiah
was in fact trying to convey.[1]
In terms of its background, this section is a part of a
larger collection of writings, chs. 30-31, sometimes known as the “Book of
Comfort” or “Book of Consolation.” There is some debate as to whether portions
of this collection (including today’s text) were authored by Jeremiah himself
or one of his followers. The reason is that they were written during the latter
days of the Babylonian exile and Jeremiah would have been extremely old by that
time if he was their author. However, the language and message is very compatible
with that of Jeremiah (see the very
similar message found in ch. 32:37-41 and 24:7), so if they were in fact
composed by a later writer, that writer believed that he or she was writing
within Jeremiah’s point of view.[2] Also, the purpose of this section was to promise hope
and a renewal of the covenant to the beleaguered and depressed Hebrew community
living in Babylonia , and for our purposes,
that message is important regardless of the author.
The New Covenant
In this text Jeremiah has Yahweh promise both a new day and a new covenant for the exiled houses of Judah
and Israel
Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why
do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light…
as
if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear;
or
went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a
snake.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not
light,
and
gloom with no brightness in it?
Some scholars believe that before Amos the people of Israel
In any case, in this passage, for the first time in
generations, Jeremiah pulls the concept of the day back to its positive,
hopeful roots. Here in the “Book of Consolation” (chapters 30-31), for the
first time in generations the image is presented as the time of God’s favor,
the time of rescue and redemption.[3]
It’s interesting that in the Isaiah 61 Jubilee passage,
which we will discuss in more detail below, Isaiah not only links the coming
Jubilee to the day of the LORD, but—in case anyone might misunderstand—he expands the
term by calling it “the year of the LORD’s favor.”[4]
The new covenant
that Jeremiah offers refers back to that which was forged between Yahweh and
the Hebrew people in their liberation from bondage, “when I took them by the
hand to bring them out of the land
of Egypt Babylonia , and now God is promising to try it
again, this time placing it within them and writing it on their hearts.
To illustrate to your parishioners what this offer of a
new covenant might have meant theologically to Israel
(and to us today), you might reflect with them on the meaning of the original
covenant Yahweh made with Moses at Mt.
Sinai
Deuteronomy contains a number of statements of this
theology. For example, why should you love a stranger? “You shall...love the
stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt land
of Egypt Egypt
However, as numerous prophetic voices point out, the
Hebrew people repeatedly broke their end of the covenant, following after other
gods and oppressing their neighbors.
They know no limits in deeds of wickedness;
they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan,
to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
Shall I not punish them for
these things?
says the LORD? (Jer. 5:27b-28)
[T]hey sell the righteous (or “the innocent”)
for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals---
they who trample the head of the poor into the
dust of the earth,
and push the afflicted out of the way. (Amos 2:6-7a)
And in a brutal world, why were these crimes so important?
Because God had liberated them and they were supposed to act different.
I brought you up out of the land
of Egypt
and led you forty years in the
wilderness
to possess the land of the Amorites.
And I raised up some of your
children to be prophets
and some of your youths to be nazirites (priests).
Is it not indeed so, O people of Israel
says the LORD. (Amos 2:10-11)
To the Israelites, the clear result of breaking the covenant
was punishment and a return to bondage in Babylonia, which for them became a
new “Egypt
This (the exile) occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against
the LORD their God, who had brought them up
out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had
worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations....(2 Kings
17:7-8a. Cf. 2 Kings 21:14-15, 23:26-27, 24:3-4)
In his famous “Temple Sermon
...[I]f you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act
justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the
widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other
gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land
that I gave of old to your ancestors forever and ever. (Jer 7:5-7)
But, of course, they did not hold up their end of the
covenant.
...[Y]ou steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to
Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand
before me in this house which is called by my name, and say, “we are safe!”—only
to go on doing all of these abominations. [Therefore] I will bring to an end
the sound of mirth and gladness, the voice of the bride and bridegroom in the
cities of Judah and in the
streets of Jerusalem
With that background, we can return now to chapter 31,
and understand how important this “new” covenant was to be. God had liberated
them from slavery and delivered them to a promised land so that they would be
different from their neighbors. They would create a community of justice in
which the weak (widows, orphans, resident aliens, and “the poor”) would be
cared for. Deuteronomy 15, Exodus 12, and Leviticus 25 (the latter of which containing
the Jubilee laws) describe a kingdom with radically just values, the values of
a world as God intended it. Slavery of your neighbors (which in Israel
On Their Hearts
The result of all of this for Jeremiah (and others) was
that God responded to their violation of the covenant by delivering them into a
second slavery, this time in Babylonia . In
597, with the surrender of Jehoiachin of Judah, and again in 587, with the fall
of Jerusalem itself, the wealthy, the powerful,
and the royal families of Israel
were all deported to Babylon
The heart, for Jeremiah, is the seat of the will. It was
not a geographical location, but a volitional one. When the heart was evil, one
turned from God and did evil. When the heart was good, one turned to God and
did good. But according to Jeremiah the hearts of the people of Israel
[T]his people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and
gone away.
they do not say in their hearts,
let us fear the LORD our God,
who gives rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us
the weeks appointed for the harvest.
(5:23-24)
In a prophesy calling upon the people of Jerusalem
A Jubilee sermon could be based solely on the notion of
the ways in which we have broken the covenant of worship toward God and justice
toward others. The central ethical principle of the Hebrew Scriptures and
echoed in the Christian scriptures is that God has liberated (saved, redeemed)
us and now we should liberate and redeem others. What it means to be a
religious person is to liberate slaves. And that means slaves of psychic demons
in abusive homes, and it means physical demons of countries so enmeshed in the
depths of debt repayments that their children starve and die in infancy. But
God, in spite of our perpetual inclination to break the covenant, comes to us
in these words of Jeremiah and offers us a second (and third and fourth)
chance. “Renew the covenant, and have it written on your hearts, where it will
emanate out from you rather than being imposed from outside onto you.” God is
always calling us back to the basics of worship and justice. God is always
offering us a chance to come home from Babylon
Knowledge of God
According to Jeremiah, for those who respond to this new
covenant written on the heart, two radical things will occur. First they will
no longer need to learn of God from others, for they will now “know the LORD” from
the inside, “from the least of them to the greatest” (31:34b). An important
point to make here is that for Jeremiah, to know the LORD, is
not a mere act of religious education. It isn’t a list of facts that one can
memorize for confirmation class (you do, however, have kids memorize things in
Confirmation class, don’t you?). For Jeremiah to know God is to do acts of
justice. When criticizing King Jehoiakim, he compares his wicked reign with the
good one of his father Josiah. He first attacks him for using slave labor to
build himself a palace during a time of war and tremendous deprivation.
Woe to him (Jehoiakim) who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by
injustice;
who makes his neighbors work for nothing,
and does not give them their
wages...
(Jeremiah
22:13)
In the ancient world there were typically two ways that
one acquired a slave: as a captive during war, and through loaning money to the
poor at usurious rates and then foreclosing on their freedom when they could
not pay up (cf. Nehemiah 5:1-13; Matthew 18:21-35, the parable of the Unforgiving
Slave). It’s interesting for a sermon that touches on the brutality of debt
burdens around the world, that since Israel seldom won a war, they had very few
military slaves, but a crisis-level number of debt slaves, especially during
times of economic distress. Therefore, when both the Hebrew and Christian
scriptures refer to a “slave,” it is almost always synonymous with “debtor.”
So, among other things, Jeremiah is criticizing Jehoiakim for enslaving the
poor for their debts and then using them to build a palatial home for him. It
is being built with unrighteousness and injustice. By contrast, he then compares
Jehoiakim with his father, Josiah:
He (Josiah) judged the cause of the poor and needy;
then it was well.
Is this not to know me?
says the LORD.
But your eyes and heart (Jehoiakim’s)
are only on your
dishonest gain,
for shedding innocent blood;
and for practicing oppression
and violence.
(Jer.
22:16-17 Italics added)
A Jubilee sermon could be based on the justice demands
of the notion of the “knowledge of God.” Walter Brueggemann, commenting on this
passage, argues that one cannot know God without being attentive to the needs
of the poor and the weak. And he says it is not that one is derived intellectually
from the other, “rather, the two are synonymous. One could scarcely imagine a
more radical and subversive theological claim.”[5] This is very similar to the claims about loving God in
the New Testament. See for example the blunt words of 1 John 4:20-21: “Those
who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.”
Hosea, a contemporary of Jeremiah, reports that when
“there is no knowledge of God in the land, swearing, lying, and murder, and
stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the
land mourns, and all who live in it languish....” (4:1b-3a). The Peruvian theologian
Gustavo Gutiérrez makes the point that God is encountered in concrete acts of
justice an mercy to others. So if justice is not present, then God is not
present. “To know Yahweh...is to establish just relationships among persons, it
is to recognize the rights of the poor. The God of Biblical revelation is known
through interhuman justice. When justice does not exist, God is not known; God
is absent.”[6] Robert McAfee
Brown, in a sermon on a related passage in Jeremiah, gives these examples of
the same point:
So, to know God might mean working in a political party to overthrow a modern Jehoiakim. It might mean saying no to economic or religious structures that provide privileges for the rich at the expense of the poor. It might mean joining a labor union in areas where labor unions are outlawed, since in no other way would the poor be able to gain enough power to demand just working conditions and just wages.[7]
Forgive Their Iniquity
The second thing which will happen to those who respond
to the new covenant is that they will receive forgiveness. “I will forgive
their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (v. 34c cf. 1 Kings 8:46-53).
The phrase hangs on the key introductory word, ki, “because.” All of the above will happen because I forgive their iniquity. Everything in the new covenant
and all sense of beginning again anew depends entirely on Yahweh’s forgiveness.
Accept it and a new life opens up. Reject it and you have rejected the covenant
itself.[8]
It’s probably too great a leap to move straight from
God’s forgiveness of the iniquity of the Babylonian captives to the forgiveness
of debts in the third world, though it is true that by the time of Jesus “debt”
and “sin” had become almost synonymous (consider the interchangeability of the
words debts and sins in Luke’s version of the “Lord’s Prayer”). However, there
are two elements in Yahweh’s forgiveness which touch on the debt crisis. First,
true forgiveness will “remember their sin no more.” True forgiveness does not
cover up the past, but lets it go. The misguided (even “sinful”) loans of the
1970s which caused the wretched conditions of today were caused by the rich of
both the first world and the third world. But today it is only the third world
who is being asked to pay for those sins. To be more precise, it is the poor of
the third world who see money for public education, health care, and roads
being spent on repaying loans made to their grand parents twenty-five years
ago, who are paying for the sins. The rich can afford private health care and
private education, and always have the tiny infrastructure budgets spent on
their communities.
Second, true
forgiveness redistributes power.[9] The corollary of the new “Golden Rule” stated above is,
“the one has the gold gets to make the rules.” This is uncannily true in the
workings of such financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund, and
the World Trade Organization, that have the power to set global rules for
finance and trade and then force third world countries to comply, even if it
means impoverishing their own people. In true forgiveness, the one who truly
forgives, forgets the past and shares the gold. Jesus was despised by his the
power brokers who were his contemporaries, because he understood this. “Whoever
wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be
first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served
but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43-45).
Now Behave
Archbishop
Desmond Tutu once told a story of teaching a confirmation class years ago in
which he outlined the meaning of the Mosaic Covenant. He went step by step
through it, explaining the promise of God, that God would rescue the Hebrew
people from slavery and that they would worship only God and then act in ways
that show themselves to be liberated people. And he showed them how that
principle showed up in the teaching of Jesus later on. When finished he asked
them as a review to tell him what he had just said. He got a variety of attempts,
some close some not. Then one little boy raised his hand and put it better than
any theologian could have. He said (quoting God), “I saved your butts, so now
you go behave.”
[1]A case strongly made by Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on
Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, revised), pp.
291-295.
[2] Gerhard Von Rad sees these two passages as
different versions of the same message delivered on separate occasions, and
therefore evidence that both are from Jeremiah. The Message of the Prophets, tr. D.M.G. Stalker (New York: Harper
& Row: 1965), p. 181.
[3] Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Baventa, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary
Based on the NRSV - Year C (Louisville: John knox, 1994), p. 557.
[4] Jesus also uses
the larger expression in his appropriation of Isaiah 61 in his Jubilee sermon
at Nazareth
[5] Brueggemann, “Covenant as a Subversive Paradigm,”
A Social Reading
of the Old Testament: Prophetic Approaches to Israel
[6] A
Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, tr. Sr. Caridad
Inda and John Eagleson (New York: Maryknoll: 1988, revised ed.), p. 110-111.
[7] Unexpected
News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 68.
[8] Brueggemann, Jeremiah,
p. 294.
[9] See Brueggemann, “Covenant as a Subversive Paradigm,”
p. 50, for more on this.
