Canter Bridge

It would be difficult to uncover a biblical passage more densely constructed with the elements of hope than the ‘new covenant’ chapters of the book of Jeremiah. With good reason chapters 30-33 are sometimes styled the ‘book of comfort’. With less justification did classic 20th-century biblical criticism separate this section from the work of the historical prophet by virtue of the alleged incompatibility of their persistent hopefulness with the rather more curmudgeonly material that was understood to derive more directly from the ‘weeping prophet’ himself.

Jeremiah’s famous prophetic action is to throw caution to the wind and exercise his right to purchase a field whose ancestrally-privileged deed has fallen to him. This transaction occurs during one of recorded history’s great real estate busts, making Jeremiah appear artfully symbolic or hopelessly naive. The book’s shapers clearly saw in this deal the virtue of prophetic insight rather than the vice of financial ignorance.

Jeremiah glimpses a future for Judah even as the Babylonians pound at the gates.

Such is the background drama that lends depth to the poignant alternative to despair that is articulated in these lines. Only if ‘the decrees of moon and stars’ should ‘vanish from my sight … will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me’, YHWH declares in this text.

Over against the certain destruction of Jerusalem by an aroused superpower, ‘Houses, field, and vineyards will again be bought in this land’, he declares.

Even this daringly anthropomorphic glimpse into the divine heart:

Is not Ephraim my dear son,
the child in whom I delight?
Though I often speak against him,
I still remember him.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I have great compassion for him’
declares the Lord.

The rhetoric is deeply reminiscent of Second Isaiah, leading many scholars to see in that book a studied rearticulation of language that emerged in the first instance in Jeremiah circles. The motif of divine ‘comforting’ of Israel, the recurrent employment of the Hebrew word ‘od (‘again’ or ‘once more’) to reference a future that only YHWH could disclose with sufficient guarantory power to overcome the self-evident crumbling of a nation that was taking place before worried eyes. These are some of the powerful commonalities between national hope as it is expressed in the books of, respectively, Isaiah and Jeremiah.

One must ask why such historically embedded rhetoric should come to form a constituent part of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Why is it judged worthy of our attention? Why should its relevance extend beyond the historical circumstances in which it first saw light?

The impulse that drives such reverential preservation of the text for a community that will all too soon have lost its grip on the historical origins must surely be didactic. It is a lesson, to use an antiquated term, regarding YHWH and his enduring relationship with a rebellious people whom he simply cannot abandon to their willful fate. This Israel of exilic trauma will find itself reconstituted ‘in days to come’ in a manner that will faciliate a deep, genetic solidarity with the Israel that suffered Babylon’s rage.

When she recalls her antecedents—one might best say, ‘As we recall our antecedents’—she will find YHWH’s ‘od an ever-renewable posture. He will again restore, will again struggle against a visceral love for his errant child.

Israel will again find mercy. When she has added her ‘amen’ to the narrative of Israel’s guilt that is so central to Jeremiah’s theodicy, she will experience the astonishing kindness of a divine turning towards her.

Perhaps not endlessly, certainly not with mechanical predictability as though in the cycle of moral awareness one can count on a periodized amnesty.

Yet, as is the manner of grace, when she has reckoned that this time no mercy can possibly be forthcoming. That is to say, ‘od.

Over and over again.