Image: "Ruth" from The Minimum Bible by Joseph A. Novak. Purchase prints here.
In May of 2020, I quit Facebook—at least in a personal capacity. While the final push came from a colleague’s public decision to leave the platform, I had been unhappy with it for some time. I found it to be driven primarily by fear and hatred, which is true for much of the media we consume. There were conspiracy theories about COVID. There were hateful posts about the upcoming election. And there were memes elevating one group of people over another group. Many of these memes consisted of baby boomers and millennials complaining about how awful the other generation was. The way these memes went, you would think these generations were to blame for all the problems in the world! Here are a couple lighter examples. I assure you, they got meaner than this:
“My generation will start a revolution!” “Your generation can’t start a lawnmower!”
“I had to set up your WiFi and delete all the viruses from your PC.” “There were too many buttons!”
But the generational blame game is nothing new. Older and younger generations have complained about each other since the dawn of civilization. And we have such an example in our reading from Jeremiah.
This time, it’s the younger generation that’s pointing the finger. The proverb, which is perhaps better translated, “The fathers have eaten unripe fruit and the sons’ teeth are blunted,”[1] reflects a deep sense of despair among the residents of Jerusalem and the exiles after the Babylonian disaster. Surely, many of them felt that previous generations had set Jerusalem’s eventual destruction into motion, and with good reason! Throughout the Old Testament, both kings and people are excoriated by the prophets for their disregard of God’s instruction, from generation to generation. The exiles and those remaining in the land surely felt they had been dealt a bad hand. How could they have changed upcoming events? The trajectory seemed set. They must have felt they were paying the price for their parents’ bad choices.
For those of us who are parents, we know there’s some truth in this. No matter how good our parents were, there was some trauma we absorbed and bad behaviors we learned. And no matter how skilled we are at parenting, we know that some of the impact we have on our children will be negative. That’s as good of a way to describe original sin as any—the transmission of destructive thoughts and actions from one generation to the next.
But there comes a time when blaming Mom and Dad, our children, or anyone else doesn’t work anymore. As long as we keep blaming, we can’t grow. We can’t change. We can’t take responsibility for our own choices. We can’t use the Spirit-given power we’ve been given at baptism to effect real transformation in the world. If you look at our history, refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions is one of the roots of the world’s misery.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. And God won’t let it be that way. God promises to make a new covenant with God’s people that will empower people to grow into the divine image.
Now, a brief review of covenants. A covenant is simply an agreement between two or more parties. Party A contributes something, party B contributes something, and so on. But with God, all covenants are unequal. We might call some of them promises rather than covenants: God promises to make a great nation from Abraham and Sarah; God promises King David a descendant on the throne for all time. Neither of these promises require anything on the human side of the equation. Even those that require something from God’s people hardly require an equal contribution. On Sinai, God gave instructions for how to live as a free people and the people promised to follow those instructions. Not exactly an equal trade. Even so, things didn’t work out very well. We know that failure from our own sinfulness, our own distorted desire to do things our way, our distorted thinking that imagines we know better than God how to live free. Whenever human beings have entered into a contract with God, we have not lived up to our end of the bargain.
But God gives a new covenant, and this time, its fulfillment is totally on God. God promises to write God’s instruction on the hearts of His people! On a personal note, I can’t wait for such a day to come to completion for everyone, even though it would put me out of a job! God promises that everyone will know Him, no matter who they are and no matter what their status is. Not only will they know what God expects without instruction or training, they will know the Giver of those expectations intimately.
For us who belong to Jesus the Messiah, he is the fulfillment of this new covenant. Jesus is the embodiment of not only the new covenant between God and humanity, but of the new humanity itself that knows God intimately. In Jesus, we not only see the image of the invisible God. We also see the future humanity; the humanity that has cast off the old ways of shaming and blaming. Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man most frequently in the gospels, and for good reason. He is our future and our hope. He is the new humanity that has succeeded where the rest of us have failed. He has kept God’s way when the rest of us have wandered down our own paths, even to the point of dying and rising again. And most importantly, he has been faithful to us in the face of the world’s faithlessness. In the last prayer before his arrest in John’s Gospel, we see this faithfulness in his prayer for his disciples. Jesus has faithfully given to them (and to us contemporary disciples) what his Father gave to him.
And what Jesus has given to us is power—the power to live differently. Jesus gives us power from the Holy Spirit in our baptism. While we still struggle with sin in this realm of existence, we know that in Jesus that sin has lost its ultimate power. In Jesus, we know God intimately and fully. And in Jesus, we have a new way of life. And this life is no longer known by cycles of blame and shame. It is no longer known by generational trauma. It is known by God’s mercy and love for all, shown to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
© 2025, David M. Fleener. Permission granted to copy and adapt original material herein for non-commercial purposes with appropriate credit given.
[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Kindle edition, 3961.
