Lectionary Commentaries for October 27, 2024
Reformation Sunday

If you are somewhat taken aback by the announcement of something “new” in the book of Jeremiah, you are probably not alone. For chapters on end, Jeremiah announces coming judgment and destruction upon the people as a result of their refusal to turn from idolatry, political corruption, and social injustice.¹ At several junctures, God even tells Jeremiah not to pray for the people, or simply says that prayers from neither will be heard (7:16; 11:11; 14:11–12; 15:1). How could anything new come from this?

Nevertheless, we find ourselves here within four chapters (Jeremiah 30–33) in the middle of the book that exhibit a marked shift toward future hope.² Further, the first two chapters of this section are a literary unit known as the Book of Consolation.³ Despite Israel’s refusal to repent, and the resulting punishment of exile, God does in fact have something new in store for the remnant—a new covenant.

Covenant is a major theological motif in the book of Jeremiah—highlighted largely by Israel’s breaking of the covenant God had made with them. However, covenant also receives definition by God’s faithfulness to it despite Israel’s lack thereof. The Book of Consolation (and the larger unit of Jeremiah 30–33) demonstrates that God has not abandoned Israel, nor God’s covenant with them. If that were the case, judgment would have been the last word and these chapters would not be here.

Instead, we come to discover that God is not done with this people or this covenant. The phrase “The days are surely coming” not only directs attention toward the future, but gives a certainty to what is about to be announced.⁴ That this will be a “new” covenant by no means indicates that the previous one is being tossed—the baby is not going out with the bathwater here. We moderns would have a tendency to think that is the case, since increasingly, to get something new in our society means the disposal of the “old” thing. This is not the case with the Hebrew notion of “newness” as expressed here.

To be sure, this covenant “will not be like the covenant that [God] made with their ancestors” (verse 32). The difference lies in the fact not that the old one is being completely dumped, but that God is doing some retooling, so to speak. As verse 32 continues, we find that one of the things about the previous covenant that will not characterize the new one is the people’s breaking of it. They had been unable to abide by the statutes and ordinances God had given on stone and other media.

So how will this new covenant be less prone to breakage by the people? Will God encourage them to just try harder this time? No. The newness, the difference is nothing short of a miraculous divine act. God will take the law from stone or papyrus or other material and write it on the people’s hearts, thus putting it within them (verse 33). In so doing, God seeks to remedy the failure of the previous covenant—God took the people by the hand and was their husband, but they broke that covenant (verse 32). Now, with the law internalized via the people’s hearts, the Lord will be their God and they will be God’s people.

In other words, the covenant relationship will be sustainable, not only by God as it always had been, but by the people as well. God’s word will be such a part of the fiber of the people that there will no longer be a need for anyone to say to another, “Know the LORD”—because everyone will already know the Lord! (verse 34).

Commensurate with the characteristics of covenant, knowing the Lord means more than possessing intellectual knowledge or data. Typically, knowing something, or especially someone, in Hebrew parlance indicates intimate knowledge—the kind of knowledge shared between companions in a covenant relationship. So Israel is not being called to memorize information. That has been shown not to work. No, the covenant relationship must be deeper than that. They must know the Lord so deep down in themselves that their lives flow out of that knowing. God seeks to enable that with the writing of the law on the covenant partners’ hearts.

To further facilitate this relationship, God declares, “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (verse 34). A nuance will again be helpful. Forgiveness is not the same as pretending that something never happened. Forgiveness is striving to sustain a relationship despite what happened. This is the kind of covenant faithfulness and determination we see in God, and that God wants to see in us.

Further, not remembering does not mean forgetting in the same way as erasing data from a hard drive. Not remembering something in this case means not letting that thing dominate and determine the direction and life of the relationship—not letting it dictate the reality of the present and future. This is not a cheap grace that God is offering, but one that requires determination and work.

So, have these days come? Has the new covenant been fully realized? It would not seem so, because there is still very much the need to say to one another, “Know the Lord,” and because God’s law does not appear to be fully internalized in human hearts. This does not mean the promise was or is empty. Jeremiah did not give a timeline.⁵ We can still affirm with Jeremiah that these days are coming. Just because we are not there yet does not mean God is not at work moving us in that direction.

In 2014, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America launched a ministry campaign titled “Always Being Made New.” It seems that this is a good spirit in which to read these verses of Jeremiah. We are being made new in all the mighty acts of God across the salvation history of the Old Testament. We have been and are still being made new by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are being made new thanks to the work of Martin Luther and numerous other reformers. We are being made new when we are baptized and when we partake of the Eucharist. We are indeed always being made new. And the day will come when all newness will be made complete.

Notes

1. See, for instance, the Temple Sermon of chapter 7.
2. Patrick D. Miller, “The Book of Jeremiah: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary 6 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), 797.
3. Jeremiah is not without words of consolation elsewhere (for example, 29:11), but never to the sustained degree found in these chapters.
4. The certainty comes not from “surely” in the New Revised Standard Version, for there is no corresponding word in the Hebrew. It does come, however, from the fact that God is the one making the proclamation (“says the LORD”).
5. Instead, chapter 30 ends with the prophet acknowledging that we would not see or understand all that God is doing right away, but that someday we would.

Type “Psalm 46” in the Working Preacher search box and you’ll discover that there are 11 other scholars whose commentaries on this psalm have been posted (or re-posted) a total of 19 times!¹ We are indeed “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.” Their insights into the language, contexts, and message of the psalm provide a firm foundation for our exposition of a classic Reformation Day scripture, making it difficult to imagine adding anything new to their discussion.  

That said, I was struck by the fact that the other commentaries were composed prior to 2020. Of course, God’s word does not change and its history of interpretation carries forward, but the last three years have brought enormous grief, anxiety, and uncertainty.

I think of the continually morphing Covid pandemic with over 6 million deaths worldwide. Political strife divides many nations, evidenced most painfully by an attack on the US Capitol. In the US, we are beset by never-ending gun violence, especially mass shootings in schools. There have been acts of racial injustice too numerous to count. We wage a desperate and contentious struggle with global climate change. A brazen Russian invasion of Ukraine destabilizes the world’s economy and brings the world to the brink of war.

Then I turn back to Psalm 46’s defiant profession on behalf of Israel, “We will not fear” (verse 2). Can we say the same today?

Psalm 46 does not provide us with a similarly specific list of historical crises. To be sure, the psalm is realistic, referring to a particular city (Jerusalem) and assuming a tragic history of natural and national disasters. Underlying this poetic realism is an ancient, symbolic world of chaotic elements that can “shake” and “totter” the earth’s very foundations.² Far from eliciting fear, however, these varied circumstances gave Israel an occasion to celebrate God’s presence, strength, and help in this psalm. Israel can joyfully trust YHWH to be with them and declare what Clinton McCann calls “a proclamation of God’s universal reign.”³

I’d like to explore the challenge of connecting that abiding theological truth to our historical and cultural moment. Is there a way for our congregations to name the angst that besets our age and interrogate the fear and dread that weaken our faith and work in the world? We can begin by addressing Psalm 46’s conceptual distinction between God’s relationship with nature and God’s relationship to the nations within human history.

In verses 2–4, natural features (for example, earth, waters, mountains, river) are the subjects of verbs. But in verses 5–11, God’s agency dominates the psalm: God is present, speaks, and acts, especially to stop the violence of war. The psalm does not suggest God causes the natural events or intervenes to stop them. Yes, “[God] utters his voice, the earth melts” (verse 6b), but commentators typically identify a structure for Psalm 46 that links that expression with the “nations” and “kingdoms” of verse 6a.⁴  

The overall rhetoric of Psalm 46 is to declare God’s presence and refuge, not to explain cosmic tumult. When beset by fear in the face of tragedies and disasters, it is tempting to jump to some immediate, divine causation. Although the Bible frequently describes God sovereignly acting in the natural order, Genesis 1 clearly teaches that God intended for the created order to have its own laws and mechanisms. To be sure, we are increasingly aware of the profound impact the human community has had on the created order, and it is now difficult to separate the sphere of human history from the workings of nature.⁵ 

But what about massive natural disasters such as the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, responsible for the loss of a quarter million people? It is completely normal to ask, “Where was God in the Tsunami?” as David Bentley Hart does in the subtitle of his compelling theological essay “The Doors of the Sea.” This topic is, of course, part of a much larger exploration of the existence of evil and efforts to explain it in light of the goodness and power of God.

Hart wrestles with various theological responses to the tsunami, and while he rejects connecting every event with “a positive determination of God’s will,” he maintains the classic doctrine of providence.⁶ Hart believes that “all Christians must affirm God’s transcendent governance of everything, even fallen history and nature, and must believe that by that governance he will defeat evil and bring the final good of all things out of the darkness of ‘this age.’” In conversation with Psalm 46, a doctrine of providence moves us from a state of fear to one of deeper faith, which itself begets a profound hope for the future.

As I write this in July 2022, a war rages in Ukraine. Looking at Psalm 46:9–10, it is difficult not to wonder when God will cause that war to “cease,” when God will “shatter” and “break” the weapons of the aggressor. Some recent commentaries caution applying Psalm 46 to modern nation-states and “their own martial actions against other people.”⁷ Ellen Charry states that, far from encouraging violence, “this antiwar poem counsels Israel to desist from military action and to wait for God to deal with foreign enemies.”⁸

Indeed, YHWH commands the nations, “Be still, and know that I am God!” (verse 10a). The Hebrew root for “still” (rph) in this instance likely means to “stop” or “refrain from.” Another Hebrew root (dmm), however, speaks a similar word to us: “Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7).

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website October 30, 2022.
2. For pertinent ancient Near Eastern references, see Nancy deClaissé-Walford, “Psalm 46,” The Book of Psalms (Eerdmans, 2014), 422–23.
3.  J. Clinton McCann, “Commentary on Psalm 46,” Working Preacher, October 28, 2012, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/reformation-day/commentary-on-psalm-46-3.
4. See Rolf Jacobson for a careful discussion: “Psalm 46: Translation, Structure, and Theology,” Word and World 40 (2020):308–20.
5. A readable, journalistic account based on the latest climate science is David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Duggan Books, 2019).
6. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans, 2005), 85.
7. Walter Brueggemann and William Bellinger, Psalms (Cambridge, 2014), 219.
8.  Ellen Charry, Psalms 1–50 (Brazos, 2015), 237.

Many preachers, especially those in Lutheran and Reformed traditions, will feel at home with the familiar themes in these verses from Romans 3. In fact, this familiarity in itself is a preaching challenge: How can we bring to life its taken-for-granted claims among listeners who’ve heard it all before? 

Yet a quick comparison of various contemporary English versions of these verses reveals a striking array of translation choices—something more like an argument than a consensus. 

Maybe this is the week to take our listeners “behind the curtain,” so to speak, and explore with them how different translation choices can yield quite diverse—and enlightening!—theological insights.

One of these debated translation sites occurs in verse 22. There,  a genitive phrase connecting “faith”/”faithfulness” with Jesus can be translated either “through faith in Jesus” or “through the faithfulness of Jesus.” The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and New International Version (NIV)—two of the translations most likely to be read from the pulpit on Reformation Sunday—follow longstanding tradition: God’s righteousness “comes through faith in Jesus.” 

This way of understanding the phrase was mostly uncontested until Barth upset the apple cart with his choice of “faithfulness of Jesus,” not “faith in Jesus,” in the second edition of his commentary The Epistle to the Romans, published in 1920 (English translation 1931). This created a ruckus in German theological circles. Barth defended his choice. He sought to guard against any notion that our “faith in” Jesus somehow gains us access to God’s righteous, utterly gratuitous decision for sinners’ justification. Barth maintained that even our capacity to trust in God’s promise is sheer grace and gift. 

The Common English Bible (CEB), published in 2011, essentially follows Barth’s lead. Romans 3:25 reads, “God’s righteousness comes through the faithfulness of Jesus.” The CEB reflects a growing consensus that this is the better reading.

Of course, we don’t take to the pulpit to show off our scholarship and dangle interesting translational tidbits in front of the congregation. This difference in translation releases fresh theological insights, as Barth maintained. And this is what we want to explore with our listeners.

The CEB suggests, first of all, that in word and action, Jesus faithfully reveals the healing and liberating will and way of God. Jesus persists in enacting God’s healing mercy and liberating justice in the face of opposition and condemnation. He touches lepers, liberates those overtaken by forces of evil, and heals on Sabbath days. Ultimately, it is precisely Jesus’ unswerving fidelity to the righteous ways of God that leads to his crucifixion. 

Alternatively, a preacher might choose to explore the strikingly diverse translations of a rare New Testament word, hilasterion, in verse 25. Occurring just twice in the New Testament—here, and in Hebrews 9:5 in an allegorical treatment of the furnishings of the Jewish temple—hilarion literally means “mercy seat.” A literal translation of verse 25 would include the phrase “God put forward Jesus [as] a mercy seat.” 

Jewish readers of Paul would have had no trouble recognizing the reference. The mercy seat was the space at the top of the ark of the covenant. Overshadowed by the wings of two golden cherubim at either side, the mercy seat was the location to which the Divine Presence descended to communicate with the people of Israel through their priests (Exodus 22:25; 30:6).

Leviticus details the role of the mercy seat in ritual action undertaken on the Day of Atonement. The mercy seat, along with other tabernacle/temple furnishings, was sprinkled with the blood of animals sacrificed on the altar that stood in the temple courtyard. This sprinkling of sacred objects and spaces was a symbolic sanctification, the “covering” or setting apart of these objects and spaces from the “uncleanness” of the people of Israel (Leviticus 16:1–20a). After this ritual sanctification, the sins of the people were symbolically laid on a live goat, which was not sacrificed but driven out into the wilderness (Leviticus 16:20b–22).

Perhaps the ritual of sprinkled blood prompted both NRSV and NIV translators to replace  “mercy seat” with “sacrifice of atonement.” It seems an odd choice; the mercy seat was not an altar of sacrifice but the sanctified space of divine visitation. Did a compulsion to establish a transactional theology of sacrificial atonement superimpose itself on this text? The evocative metaphor of Jesus as the mercy seat, the blood-sanctified place of divine visitation, is completely eclipsed.

The CEB does a better job of letting the Old Testament background of the mercy seat come through, using the phrase “a place … where mercy is found,” although these translators, too, insert “of sacrifice” in the middle—again implying that the mercy seat is a place of sacrifice.

Barth chose “propitiation,” meaning “appeasement” or “offering that makes peace.” But then Barth turns to fully embrace and explore the startling metaphor “Jesus is the mercy seat.” Barth preaches! Jesus is the mercy seat, the once-for-all, blood-spattered place in the world where all of sinful humanity is met with God’s just mercy and merciful justice.

We, too, can turn loose this striking metaphor and explore the fresh theological insights it releases. Condemned to execution for his unswerving fidelity to God’s righteous ways, it is Jesus—God made one of us—whose blood spatters the mercy seat. Jesus is that blood-sanctified place where God is present, taking on human death to defeat death, so that we may inherit life. 

Exploring diverse readings of familiar verses can be illuminating for our listeners on multiple levels. We pull back the curtain on the back-stage work of translation, bringing into view the way communities of the past have struggled to hear the promptings of the Spirit. When our preaching invites listeners to consider fresh theological insights, we encourage theological curiosity, flexibility, and generosity. This is “re-formation” at its best.