Jeremiah 31:7-14 Commentary

Commentary:

A Bittersweet Moment

The first Sunday of the new year can feel like a bittersweet time for people who have just prepared for Christmas—baking, hosting, buying, wrapping, sending—within an inch of their lives.  I’m mindful of empty nesters whose homes were a little less empty. For families who rarely see one another traveling, being together and the glow of the good memories, even as the house aches with quiet again.  Or, perhaps, the elderly parents who wanted all of their children under the same roof but couldn’t quite make it happen. Or the family that got together only to have old wounds, political difference, sharp opinions intrude on the hoped-for merriment. The disappointment that come when the anxious anticipation has been unwrapped, you can see the Christmas tree skirt again and the stockings lie limp against the mantle.

And then these people come to church and hear a passage dedicated to the joy of gathering. The CEB Study Bible summarizes this text: “Images of homecoming and boundless joy…a poetic sequence of verbs expresses God’s bountiful grace: gather, keep, shepherd, rescue, and deliver.” Sadly, I can imagine about half a dozen ways these words will land as a wrong note instead of a comfort: when the gathered have gone, when we cannot keep the magic of the holiday alive all year, when our hopes for family togetherness are thwarted by distance, death and division.

So it strikes me as important that we spend some time not just with the promise of joyful gathering but also with verse 9, which acknowledges the complex feelings that would have been associated with the people’s return from exile.  “They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back.” Robert Alter suggests that “the probably meaning, in keeping with the interpretation of several medieval exegetes, is the as the people returns, it weeps and implores God to forgive it for its previous misdeeds.” Even the return of exiles to their own people and land is complicated by guilt, regret, disappointment and longing for those who would never see this day.  And, into our tenderness, God offers healing, into this weariness, God offers refreshing in the promise of streams of water and level ground.  Again, from Alter: “The terrain that the people must cross in their long trek from exile in the east is largely parched desert, so leading them along watercourses is a necessary part of the redemption.”

New Year, New You

Alongside those in the pews already nostalgic for the holidays that have just past, you also have the strongly motivated, high achievers who are eager for a message about living up to the (likely impossible) New Year’s Resolutions they have set for themselves. They may be captured by the imagery of the later verses in this text: “the grain, the new wine and the olive oil, the young of the flocks and hearts.”  Those returning from exile will be like “a well-watered garden.” There will be dancing, gladness, comfort and joy. Over all of this, the promise of God “I will satisfy the priests with abundance.” You can imagine someone throwing a fist in the air like, “That’s what I’m talking about! Let’s DO this!”

For these parishioners, the difficult reminder lies in the bookends of this promised flourishing in verses 12 and 14. “They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; they will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord…my people will be filled with my bounty.” The goodness we often strive for in our own determination—resolutions about health, about relational investment, acts of charity, etc.—is only ever the bounty that God gives as gifts to God’s people. The CEB Study Bible acknowledges, “The central confession of faith says that God will rescue the weak from the clutches of the powerful.” In other words, nowhere in this text is there mention of bootstraps or picking oneself up by one’s own. This is a celebration of God’s grace and generosity, all the way down to the most central, hard-to-identify part of our selves.

Verse 12 includes a Hebrew word that can mean many things and has never landed quite rightly in English translations.  The NIV simply translates the line: “They will be like a well-watered garden.”  The CEB suggests something a little closer to the original “Their lives will be like a much garden.”  The Hebrew word translated, simply, “they” or “their lives” is the word nefesh.  Robert Alter calls this a “tricky Hebrew noun” that is “multivalent,” meaning complex or multifaceted. “It does not mean ‘soul’ as many translators continue to render it. The core meaning is ‘life-breath’…Nefesh also often implies ‘essential self.’ It sometimes means ‘throat’ or ‘gullet’ (by metonymy because the throat is a passageway for the breath), and that is the probable sense (here), where the satisfaction of appetite is invoked.”

Even the breath in our lungs is a gift from God.  Everything that we build on top of that, then, is necessarily dependent on God’s generous gifts, God’s grace.  Perhaps, in this way, the whole passage holds together, even for disparate audiences. For those forgotten, disappointed or lonely by the passing of the holiday, God is as near to them as their very breath.  God has not forgotten them. God is present with them in each inhalation and exhalation.  For those eager to knock 2026 out of the park on the basis of their strength and determination, all of it is built on the breath in their lungs, which is purely a generous gift of God.

Worship Ideas

• As I reflected on this passage, a song came to mind that summarizes this last point quite well. Great Are You Lord
• Breath Prayers are an ancient practice with contemporary resurgence.

The earliest creed of the church was a breath prayer:

inhale: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God,

exhale: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

A simple verse of Scripture also works to center and ground us.

inhale: I will turn their mourning into gladness;

exhale: I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow.

More recently, the author Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh started offering beautiful breath prayers on social media during the pandemic.  At a time when breath was literally dangerous, Riley suggested a practice that reconnected us to this central part of ourselves, our humanity, our nefesh.