Jeremiah 31:31-34 is a beloved text. In all of Scripture there are few texts which are as full of promise as this one. This is the First Reading appointed for the 5th Sunday in Lent in the Year of Mark. It is paired with the text from John 12:20-33 where Jesus announces to his disciples that "a grain of wheat must die" to bear fruit. This is also a text full of promise. It will be the preacher's text to proclaim these promises.
(The following questions have been developed to explore the function of the Word in a text, a central concern of Law and Gospel preaching. These questions are not meant to be exhaustive, and are best used in conjunction with other fine sets of questions available to exegetes. For more on this method and on Law and Gospel preaching in general see my brief guide, Afflicting the Comfortable, Comforting the Afflicted, available from wipfandstock.com or amazon.)
1. How does the Word function in the text? The Word functions as pure Gospel here. Yahweh is telling the people of God of the new thing that God is doing. It is a remarkable text in that God is admitting that the marital covenant between them they have broken, and yet God is coming with another covenant.
2. How is the Word not functioning in the text? There are all sorts of allusions to the sins and foibles of God's people, but yet the Law is not really functioning as such here. There is no call to repentance, no word which exposes the need for a Savior.
3. With whom are you identifying in the text? We are those who have broken the covenant. We are those whose hearts are in need of God writing upon them. We are those whose iniquity God remembers no more.
4. What, if any, call to obedience is there in this text? There is no explicit call to obedience here, but the promises are so grand that one cannot but help believe that an implicit call is the one to praise God for the mercy shown.
5. What Law/Gospel couplet is suggested by this text? There are a number of phrases that one can use in this text to produce couplets. Some suggestions: broken covenant/new covenant; without God/embraced by God; no people/God's people; unforgiven/forgiven.
6. Exegetical work: Scholars have called Jeremiah 30:1-31:40 The Book of Comfort, or the Book of Consolation. (Lutheran Study Bible). If one peruses these verses it can be seen that indeed they are full of words of consolation and comfort. This section departs so starkly from Jeremiah's typical sermons of doom that "many scholars believe that someone other than Jeremiah wrote this section in the prophet's name.." (Ibid., p 1271). An extensive discussion of the Hebrew term berith (covenant) in Botterweck and Ringgren's Theological Dictionary gives us some insight into this new covenant. They make it clear that this 'new' covenant is indeed of a different sort than the one God made with Israel at Sinai. "In the Deuteronomic covenant... it is the oath that validates the covenant, and no mention is made of a sacrifice or a meal." "In contradistinction to the Mosaic covenants, which are of an obligatory type, the covenants with Abraham and David belong to the promissory type... Although their loyalty to God is presupposed, it does not occur as a condition for keeping the promise. On the contrary, the Davidic promise... contains a clause in which the unconditional nature of the gift is stated explicitly:...'when he commits iniquity, I will chasten him... but I will not take my steadfast love from him.' (II Sam. 7:13-15)." (Theological Dictionary of the OT, Vol. II, p. 270). It seems clear that the covenant announced in this text is of this nature. It does not make demands as a condition, but rather makes unconditional promises of a steadfast love. ('hesed). This is very much akin to how we understand the baptismal covenant. God simply makes promises and we respond to those promises. It is not a Mosaic covenant, based on Law.
7. How does the Crossings Community model work with this text? Steve Albertin does a nice job of picking up on the language of forgetting and remembering in this text. Our penchant is to remember sins; God's is to forget them. Our penchant is to forget those who offend us; God's is to remember them. See Albertin's entire 2020 analysis archived under its reference at crossings.org/text-study.
Blessings on your proclamation!
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