No More Teachers? Reflections on Jeremiah 31:27-34, Pentecost 19, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Saturday, June 21, 2025

         Today’s text from Jeremiah offers to us two distinct ideas, each of which could serve for a deeper reflection. The first is found in vss.27-30. It refers to a long-held notion that children always must be held accountable by the sins of their forebears, a kind of original sin made especially popular in Christianity by the early influential theologian, Augustine, in the 4th century CE. I doubt many of you still ascribe to such a viewpoint that says due to the “original sin” of Adam and Eve in the garden, all humanity is doomed to a life and death plagued by sin, only relieved by the saving act of Jesus Christ on the cross (I simplify mightily, of course, but that is the gist of the matter). Jeremiah, in contrast says here that in “days surely coming,” i.e. some future time, “all will die for their own sins,” not being judged guilty by the sins of others (Jer.31:30). This idea of generational evil must have been a prominent one (Ezekiel mentions it, too), forcing many to refuse to accept individual responsibility for their own actions. Jeremiah promises a time when that will no longer be possible; all will need to take responsibility for their own behaviors. It might be said that in this ancient idea, we find the germ of the modern conception of taking seriously how and when we act for ourselves, not blaming others. Those few comments will be all I say about that in this essay.

         My major interest is to be found in the more famous vss.31-34. Once again, Jeremiah offers a look into the future and finds there a completely different idea concerning the relationship between God and God’s people. Multiple implications have been drawn from this rich passage. It has been termed the “new covenant” text, from which derives the notion of an “old” covenant” and a “new”one. That suggests to some readers the existence of an Old Testament and a New Testament, the latter in certain ways overcoming or even superseding the former. Such an idea has led to any number of pernicious conclusions concerning the relationships between the two testaments of our Bible—after all “new” is by definition better than “old.” I do not have time in this brief essay to spell out the many ways I find this conception both dangerous and false, but you may wish to explore that construction further.

         I am more engaged today with the really quite extraordinary metaphor that Jeremiah plays with in the text, namely that of great divine surgery. YHWH has had a divine fill of all the ways in which the recalcitrant people have avoided, degraded, and smashed the wonderful covenant YHWH first made with them, and proposes to give them a new one. Who better than Jeremiah would come to this thought, after forty years of ministry among people who simply fail to listen to and heed what YHWH has said through the faithful prophet. Enough! There must be a new covenant, says Jeremiah. The new covenant will not be like the old one, “when I seized them by the hand and brought them out of Egypt, that covenant they shattered, even though I was their baal, says YHWH” (Jer.31:32). Jeremiah employs an interesting and provocative word to describe YHWH here, baal. It is a Hebrew word with many meanings. It can mean “husband,” as the NRSV reads it; it can also mean “master;” and most obviously, it is the name of the Canaanite god, well-known in Israel, and even worshipped by many, as Jeremiah says again and again in his oracles. YHWH is the only true “baal,” says the prophet, but Israel broke the covenant anyway. 

         “For this is the covenant that I will cut (the typical verb used in describing covenant making) with the house of Israel after these days, says YHWH. I will place my Torah inside them; I will write it on their hearts, so that I will be God for them, and they will be my people. No longer will one teach neighbor or sibling, saying ‘Know YHWH,’ because all will know me, from the least to the greatest, says YHWH, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more” (Jer.31:33-34). It could be said that these lines are either among the most wonderful in our scripture or among the very saddest. That may sound decidedly odd, but consider their possible implications. 

         YHWH’s promise may be seen as grand, if we take that promise to mean that God will eventually write directly on every heart the demands and gifts of Torah in such a way that there will be no need again for anyone to teach Torah to anyone else, because all will know God completely. Some New Testament believers imagined that that was the gift of Jesus, this intimate and immediate knowledge of God through the work of the Christ. However, it must be noted that after 2000 years of the knowledge of Jesus, the gifts and demands of YHWH’s Torah appear no closer to being known by all—a few perhaps, but all, hardly. 

         What makes this metaphor of great divine surgery sad is that it is needed at all! After millennia of teaching—work that I have been engaged in for about 50 years—we still apparently need God to crack open each heart and write the Torah directly on it, since all our teaching, all my teaching, has not made much of a dent in God’s will for Torah for all. Well, what does that imply for those of us still at the work of teaching Torah and attempting to live it as well? I guess we have to keep at it! Hence, your preaching and teaching; hence, my continuous construction of these weekly lectionary reflections. It is finally all we can do, until the divine surgeon brings his loving scalpel closer to our chests and does what we all need in the end. God’s action will put us all out of work, we teachers and preachers—but clearly not yet!