Jeremiah 31:31–34
Today’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah promises a “new covenant,” one “not like the covenant with our ancestors, which they broke.”
The promise of the new covenant to Jeremiah is of a closer relationship than God has ever had before with God’s people. It is also, explicitly, the promise of a covenant different than the Deuteronomic one. Why the difference?
Reading this through the lens of accountability over punishment suggests an interpretation of the difference: a renewed understanding of the covenant in terms of restoration and accountability instead of punishment.
The Deuteronomic history in the Bible (Deuteronomy, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings) shows the cycle of covenant-breaking, punishment, and return. This cycle points to the complexity of accountability: the dialectic of punishment and return is an attempt, perhaps, to convey the difficulties of building spaces for accountability; the pain of taking accountability, even in a non-punitive context; the fundamental disruption of power relations that comes with holding space for accountability. In the Deuteronomic history, bad kings are overthrown — and that’s good! But at the same time, the Deuteronomic portrayal of God shows us a God who still relies on retribution, even if that punishment is aimed toward restoration. I am not saying we should entertain the anti-Jewish claim that “the Old Testament God is retributive and the New Testament God is not” or anything like that. Indeed, we must reject such claims! Rather the Deuteronomic portrayal of justice is an approximation of God’s justice, an approximation of the hard but life-giving and restorative work of accountability, and the (still Old Testament!) promise to Jeremiah is part of refining that approximation toward a better understanding.
Perhaps this refinement is one way in which the new covenant promised to Jeremiah is different. In the new covenant, God tells Jeremiah, “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest”; “I will forgive their iniquity”; “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The image here is of a new way of practicing accountability to the covenant.
No longer will punishment be part of an attempt to approximate accountability, God tells us. Instead, we can imagine accountability free of punishment. No longer will exclusion be an attempt to approximate justice: instead, God’s commitment to us and our commitment to one another in community will be the basis of accountability work because “we shall all know God.” The promise that God’s law shall be written on our hearts is an image of the kind of personal transformation that is ultimately the goal of accountability work: to become the kind of person who won’t do the same harm again. This sort of accountability work is close to the Jewish concept of teshuvah, as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg explains.
What do we learn if we interpret the new covenant as a new way of imagining accountability and justice — not as a rejection of what came before, but as a realistic assessment of the ways in which it approximated justice, and a corrective to bring us closer and closer to a non-punitive understanding of accountability? How might we live out that accountability, and be partakers of the new covenant, today?
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for the Abolition of Prisons.