Lectionary Commentaries for October 26, 2025
Reformation Sunday
from WorkingPreacher.org
Gospel
Commentary on John 8:31-36
Jason Ripley
First Reading
Commentary on Jeremiah 31:31-34
Kristin J. Wendland
This familiar and beautiful passage is assigned every year on Reformation Sunday. Its themes of newness in covenant and community fit well with a day set aside to reflect on the ways God is always making new the body of Christ.
This still-in-the-future new covenant in Jeremiah’s prophecy will be predicated upon the Lord writing upon the hearts of the people and on the Lord’s forgiveness of past sin. It is important here not to slip into language that associates the old covenant with the Old Testament and the promise of forgiveness with the New Testament. Confessions of God’s mercifulness and announcements of divine forgiveness are found throughout the Hebrew Bible as the relationship between God and the people moves through disobedience and repentance, judgment and salvation, at multiple points. In Christian faith, Jesus is always the fullest expression of these things, but Jeremiah and the oracle are knowable to the people to whom Jeremiah is speaking in their own time and place.
The days are surely coming
The oracle opens with the phrase “The days are surely coming.” The Hebrew phrase occurs 14 times in the book of Jeremiah, though it is translated in various ways depending on the context. Sometimes the phrase signals coming judgment, like the distress or devastation associated with the Babylonian conquest and exile or with judgment on Judah’s enemies. Other times, as here, the phrase signals the salvation and new creation the Lord would bring following both conquest and exile. In each case, the phrase refers to a change within a historical timeline rather than to an eschatological promise.
Proclamation, though, is more than a history lesson. The context is important insofar as it witnesses to the mighty acts of God for our ancestors in the faith and calls us forward to identify God’s work in our own midst. A sermon on this text might, particularly on Reformation Sunday, wonder with the congregation about the mighty acts God is doing in the midst of their lives. Jeremiah’s salvific prophecies about a new future come in the midst of a book overwhelmingly filled with oracles of judgment, the fall of a holy city, and the movement of people into exile. Into this reality, God’s gift of newness comes. How is that experienced in our own time and place?
A new covenant
Jeremiah’s emphasis in this passage is on a new covenant. “Covenant” is not a synonym for “law,” though the two are clearly connected. When Jeremiah refers to the covenant, he means the Sinai covenant, the formalized agreement—or treaty or contract—that the Lord made with the Hebrew people after bringing them up out of Egypt. The law codes found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy form stipulations of this covenant, but the covenant itself is a sign of the fullness of relationship between the Lord and the people.
Verse 32 is a retrospective in which the Lord recounts the old covenant. Here, the old covenant is described with the metaphor of marriage, as the Lord laments that Israel and Judah broke the old covenant, although the Lord was their husband (Hebrew: ba’al). The Hebrew could be translated as either “lord” or “husband.” While an argument can be made for a lord leading subjects up out of the land of Egypt, the breaking of a marital covenant fits both the relational and the contractual metaphors operative throughout.
In verse 33, the Lord states that there will be a new covenant and a new law (Hebrew: torah, instruction). Within the law codes of the Hebrew Bible, the law adapts to different times and places. One need only notice differences in the Decalogue to see how Exodus and Deuteronomy spin it differently. Yet, Jeremiah spends no time discussing changes to the law itself. One can surmise that basic themes of things like true worship, justice, and care for the vulnerable—the acts of loving God and neighbor that emanate from knowing the Lord—will continue. What will be new is the way the people will come to know the law and to know the Lord.
New community
Central to this new covenant is the way it will reform the relationship between God and Israel. This new covenant, Jeremiah prophesies, will be within them, written on their heart. The English phrase “know by heart” fits here, as it typically means something more than rote memorization but, rather, an internalization that includes intellectual and often emotional aspects. God’s instruction will be known in the people’s hearts, precisely because they will know the Lord.
The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition translates “hearts” in the plural, surmising a heart for each person teaching and learning from one another in verse 34. This is undoubtedly correct, given the context. However, the Hebrew may be read in the singular, that the Lord will write the law on the metaphorical heart of the people. It is not only individuals who will be made new, but the community as a whole.
The relationship between God and Israel predated the covenant in the book of Exodus. God brought the people up out of Egypt before the making of the Sinai covenant—not to mention the generations alongside Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their families. Yet, the giving of the covenant in Exodus, as with the renewal of the covenant in Deuteronomy, does formalize that relationship in a particular way. In a way, it gives shape to an ongoing relationship that now includes a new covenant for a new community.
Psalm
Commentary on Psalm 46
Mark Throntveit
Luther was right!1
Psalm 46 is usually classified as a Song of Zion that, along with Psalms 48, 76, 84, 87, and 122, delights in the special place reserved for Jerusalem as the center of the world, chosen by God as the earthly center of the divine presence. That this is so may be seen from the phrases “the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city” (verses 4–5). But the psalm seems to be concerned with more than this.
Others, of a more literalistic bent, unconvinced of the classification Song of Zion since neither Jerusalem nor Zion is explicitly mentioned, regard Psalm 46 as a Hymn of Confidence, in which the psalmist expresses trust in God in the midst of adversity. This can be seen in the phrase “we will not fear” (verse 2). But, again, the psalm, which does not follow the usual outline of the hymn, seems to be concerned with more than this.
Martin Luther, in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” his momentous paraphrase of the initial verses of Psalm 46, draws our attention away from both the city of Jerusalem and the trusting response of the people and focuses upon the activity of the “Mighty Fortress” that is our God.
We sing this psalm to the praise of God, because He is with us and powerfully and miraculously preserves and defends His church and His word against all fanatical spirits, against the gates of hell, against the implacable hatred of the devil, and against all the assaults of the world, the flesh, and sin.2
Even a cursory reading of the psalm, paying attention to its own structural markers, suggests that Luther has correctly discerned the essence of this powerful hymn. First, we must account for the repetitions that so often provide the structural matrix of the text:
“Change” [verse 2, New Revised Standard Version], “move” (verse 5), and “totter” (verse 6) are all mot, “totter”
“Earth” (verses 2, 6, 9) is erets
“In/on the earth” (verses 8, 10) is baarets
“Roar” (verse 2) and “in an uproar” (verse 6) are from hamah, “roar”
“Our” (verses 1, 7, 11) is lanu
When it is recognized that “refuge,” machaseh (verse 1), and “refuge,” misgav (verses 7, 11), are a common word pair in poetic texts, we can dispense with Gunkel’s earlier proposal, followed by the Lutheran Book of Worship, the New American Bible, and the New Jerusalem Bible, that we insert the “refrain” of verses 7 and 11 after verse 3; then the following structure presents itself:
God is our refuge (machaseh, “refuge”; lanu, “our”) – verse 1
We will not fear natural calamities (mot, “totter”; hamah, “roar”; erets, “earth”) – verses 2–3
The city will not totter because God is there (mot, “totter”) – verses 4–5
We will not fear political calamities (mot, “totter”; hamah, “roar”; erets, “earth”) – verse 6
God is our refuge (misgav, “refuge”; lanu, “our”) – verse 7
See what God has done on the earth (Imperative; “on the earth”) – verse 8
War and weapons destroyed my God (erets, “earth”) – verse 9
Know that God is exalted in the earth (Imperative; “in the earth”) – verse 10
God is our refuge (misgav, “refuge”; lanu,“our”) – verse 11
The first section, verses 1–7, framed by “our refuge,” depicts a secure city that will not “totter” (verses 4–5), further framed by the “tottering” terrors of nature (verses 2–3) and the “tottering” kingdoms that surround it (verse 6). The steadfast declaration of the opening verse coupled with the presence of God in verse 7 explains the serene nature of the city unthreatened by the (insert your choice of natural disaster here—whether tsunami, volcano, or earthquake) below or the political plots and conspiracies that dissolve even as God speaks. These terrors of nature reflect current or future threats to the city, not the biblical creation traditions or the primordial chaos battles of the ancient Near East that are frequently seen in these verses. There is no battle here, no mention of creation, and the people declare, “We will not fear” (verse 2a), supposedly when and if these events occur. The machinations of history depicted in verse 6a are similarly concerned to portray God as the God of history.
If water, both as a destructive and a positive force, was the dominant metaphor of the first section, the second section, verses 7–11, again framed by “our refuge,” centers on the fiery destruction of earth’s weaponry as a means of abolishing “earth’s” warfare (verse 9), further framed by the imperative to “come, see … God’s desolations ‘in the earth’” (verse 8) and the imperative to “desist and know that [God] is God … ‘in the earth’” (verse 10).
But to whom are these commands addressed? Israel, or the nations? The negative character of the horrors they are commanded to see, as well as the tenor of the Hiphil of raphah—“desist, abandon, leave off” (not the pious “be still” of the translations)—suggests that the nations are being called to task before God is exalted by them (verse 10b; see 66:5). The staggering portrayal of smoking destruction is apocalyptic, or at least eschatological, suggesting that the psalm speaks of God’s final victory over nature and the nations.
Yes, Luther was right. The psalm is best seen as a psalm about God and the divine presence, not Jerusalem. It functions as a declaration to God’s people concerning the unimaginable source of strength that is theirs, and ours, in God—or, as Luther’s hymn makes clear, in Christ.
Notes
- Commentary previously published on this website for October 25, 2015.
- Martin Luther, A Manual of the Book of Psalms, or, The Subject-Contents of All the Psalms; now first translated into English by Henry Cole (London: R.B. Seeley & W. Burnside, 1837), 132.
Second Reading
Commentary on Romans 3:19-28
Sze-kar Wan
Our lectionary reading is part of an answer to the question, “What advantage does the Jew have? Or what is the value of circumcision?” (Romans 3:1). The question is not directed toward “self-righteous Jews,” a misreading ever since the Reformation. We now know Paul’s Jewish contemporaries did not suffer from a collective “works righteousness” but were believers in a divine election founded on God’s faithfulness toward people of the covenant.
The question itself gives it away: Jews had no need to be convinced of the circumcision’s value; it was part of being born, albeit for male members only. Circumcision became an issue only when outsiders criticized it or when newcomers to Judaism paid it undue attention. In Romans 3, Paul answers why he dispenses with requiring circumcision for converts (to Judaism) and whether, in so doing, he abandons the Torah. He concludes this discussion with a resounding affirmation: “We uphold the Torah!” (3:31).
How does Paul reach this conclusion? He deftly shifts the meaning of “Torah” to address two different issues. First, he uses it to mean commandments and precepts by which a particular action can be judged right or wrong (3:19–20). In this case, the Torah’s primary function is to prevent wrongdoing; in highlighting misdeeds, it introduces a “knowledge of sin” (3:20) but does not produce life in itself. Doing “works of the Torah” should therefore be understood as an attempt to use commandments and precepts to earn acceptance into God’s covenant.
Lest we think Paul accuses Jews of “works righteousness,” he insists that the application of the Torah is universal, so that “every mouth is sealed and the whole world is indicted” (3:19). Those “under the Torah” turn out to be both Jews and gentiles! The letter of Romans was, after all, written to address gentile converts to Judaism who thought a fastidious adherence to the Torah would net them benefits.
In addition to a passive function of naming sin, Paul goes on, the Torah has a second, active meaning of bearing witness to the “disclosure” of the righteousness of God (Romans 3:21–22). “The Torah and the Prophets” (3:21) is a shorthand for scripture, following the well-known rabbinic dictum that “the Torah consists of the Torah, Prophets, and Writings,” the threefold division of the Tanakh. Paul stresses the Torah’s divine origins to remind his readers that the Jewish people have been entrusted with “the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2).
If that’s the case, however, how can this righteousness be disclosed now as if for the first time? This inconsistency resolves itself when we remember that Paul is addressing gentile converts, for whom faith represents a new access to God’s righteousness.
What Paul reminds these gentiles about is old news to the covenantal people with whom God forged a relationship, and that relationship is based on faith—that is, the faithfulness of God and the people’s faithfulness to the covenant. Now, God reveals to outsiders this faithfulness—except it is now expressed as Christ’s faithfulness. They are one and the same: The new is the old, since God is one.
The same covenant is established for all, Jews and gentiles alike—“there is no distinction” (3:22)—in the same way that “all have sinned” (3:23). The Reformers were right: It’s all about faith! Not, however, our personal trust in a higher power or a particular belief system, but God’s faithfulness in safeguarding the integrity of the covenant and in making it available for erstwhile rebels against God, those “without the Torah” (3:21).
Faith depends, first and foremost, on God’s initiative, for it is freely given (Romans 3:24–25). Not only “are we made right by [God’s] grace as a free gift” (3:24)—the redundancy is intentional—but outsiders can gain access to a covenant that had excluded them because of “redemption” (3:24). The term apolytrōsis has been subject to much dogmatic contortion, but Paul’s gentile audience would immediately recognize it as payment for deliverance from captivity or slavery. Paul spells out its exact referent in 3:24–25a by presenting Jesus’ death as cleansing the “mercy seat” (hilastērion, 3:25a) in order to allow full access for all to the temple.
Sacrificial language is a rarity in the undisputed letters of Paul, which is why there is growing consensus that these lines were borrowed from the theological sketch of the early Jesus movement. In the temple cult, a priest must cleanse the mercy seat before proper sacrifice for people’s sins, commonly in the form of a burned offering, could proceed. Paul made these words his own by adding “through faith” (3:25; New Revised Standard Version “effective through faith”), to single out the common thread tying the ancient covenant that was established and maintained by God’s unfailing faithfulness to the current rendition that is based on the same faithfulness, now instantiated by the sacrifice of Christ Jesus on the cross.
This new expression of faithfulness results in the covenant being made accessible to gentiles (Romans 3:25b–26). “Former sins” (3:25b) are those committed by gentiles when they had no access to the covenant and no recourse for remission. Now, “in the present season” (3:26), with the cleansing of the mercy seat, God’s righteousness is disclosed.
Make no mistake: God takes the initiative in reconciling erstwhile rebels to God’s self, out of divine faithfulness, by overlooking their previous sins. Atonement is conciliatory and epochal: “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10; full discussion of reconciliation at the cosmic level is found in 2 Corinthians 5:18, 21). With this decisive act, the true nature of the Torah can reemerge: It has never been about performance (“works”); it has always centered on faith (“Torah of faith,” 3:27).
What is God’s motive for reconciling with the enemies? Paul presents a tautology: for the purpose of providing “proof of [God’s] righteousness,” but also for the purpose that God be righteous. Reconciling the world to God’s self, in short, is its own justification.
What is truth? This question, posed by Pilate in his discussions with Jesus before having him crucified (John 18:38), is no less relevant today than when the Gospel of John was written. Around the world, we find populations divided into separate media-crafted realities, from the last election in the United States to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Christians are equally divided, marshaling scripture to advance Christian nationalism from Washington, DC, to Moscow, with religious transpositions in Tel Aviv, Gaza, and a divided Jerusalem.
This week’s passage, touching on truth and freedom, is as politically and religiously fraught as modern debates today, and the passage as a whole has all the vitriol of a social media flame war, culminating in an attempt to kill Jesus. Literary context shapes the meaning of this lectionary passage, and this section concludes a series of teachings, debates, and conflicts in John 7:1–8:59 involving Jesus’ brothers, the Pharisees, chief priests, temple police, crowds, and “Judeans” (Ioudaioi). (Since all groups involved here are Jews, yet representing distinct and opposing postures/positions, Ioudaioi is best translated here as “Judeans,” rather than “Jews” as found in the New Revised Standard Version and New International Version.)
In terms of sacred time, this debate (see also 7:2) happens during the Festival of Booths, or Sukkot (see also Leviticus 23), commemorating the ancient Hebrews’ liminal period of sojourning in the desert after liberation from Egypt but before the conquest of the promised land—an ancient theme especially relevant during this period of Roman occupation, giving the debates over whether Jesus is the anointed king (Messiah) or the prophet who will liberate them from Rome a charged urgency (see also 6:15; 7:40–44). In terms of setting, these debates take place in the sacred space of the temple (John 7:14, 28; 8:20, 59), the epicenter of social, political, economic (8:20), and religious power in ancient Judea.
Historical context also shapes the meaning of our passage. Most scholars believe that John was composed sometime between 70 and 135 CE, the dates marking the first and last wars between Judea and Rome. Living in the rubble (literal, social, political, and theological) of the destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 CE and hurtling toward the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of Jews that resulted from the end of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, John’s Gospel finds itself enmeshed in the turbulence and tumult of the interwar period. For orientation and guidance, it returns to the story of Jesus in Judea to chart the way forward, tailoring its narrative to speak to the issues of its time.
In the memories of John’s readers, Sukkot was frequently a time of violence,1 ranging from the uprisings associated with the Hasmonean takeover of the high priesthood,2 to Herod’s murder of the high priest,3 to the beginnings of the first war with Rome,4 among other events. One can imagine memories of this violence being as fresh in the minds of John’s readers as 9/11 and October 7 are for many readers today. Thus, sacred time, space, and recent history align here to invest these debates with supreme existential importance. The key issue of “What is our character as the people of God?” saturates this passage.
Here, the immediate interlocutors are “the Judeans who believed in [Jesus]” (8:31), a characterization that is both surprising and confusing. Attention to the social dynamics in John 7:1–8:59 is crucial to identifying Jesus’ interlocutors in this passage, especially vis-à-vis the other Jewish groups mentioned and their differing postures toward Roman rule. While these Judeans seem united with Jesus in their opposition both to Roman hegemony (“we have never been slaves to anyone”; 8:33) and to Rome’s chief priestly collaborators (who affirm, “We have no king but the emperor”; 19:15), the debate that follows reveals sharp differences both in what they stand for and in how they think true freedom is to be achieved.
Jesus here stages an epistemic intervention, a disruption of constructions of reality that are wedded to social domination and militaristic violence. Implicit in Jesus’ claim that “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (8:32) is an interrogation of the imperial “truth” that the gods have given Rome to rule the heavens and the earth,5 the revolutionary “truth” that liberation from the perceived slavery of Roman rule requires armed violence (for example, the Judeans clamor for the insurrectionist Barabbas; 18:40), and the deeper shared “truths” about the nature of power and the deceptions of redemptive violence.
In response, these Judeans prioritize their ethnic allegiance (“We are descendants of Abraham”) as the basis of their freedom (8:33; see also 8:39). Jesus affirms their shared ethnic identity (“I know that you are descendents of Abraham”; 8:37), but points to their embrace of violence as the enslaving sin that distinguishes his path of freedom from theirs (“Yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word”; 8:36–37])—a violence that has its origins in murderous evil itself (8:44) and stands contrary to Jesus’ way of life (8:51).
In this debate over the character of the God of Abraham, Jesus stands firm in what he has heard in the presence of the Father and exhorts these Judean followers to do likewise (8:38), but to no avail, as the pericope ends with an attempt to stone Jesus—the prescribed punishment for one perceived as blaspheming the Lord’s name (Leviticus 24:16), which Jesus invoked in 8:58.
This text and conflicted debate is an apt selection for Reformation Sunday, as it speaks directly and forcefully to the need for ongoing reformation—indeed, transformation—of the peoples of God and descendants of Abraham. The ongoing (ab)use of this pericope to justify Christian violence against Jews, from Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies” to the murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh (October 27, 2018), points to the pressing urgency today of Jesus’ prophetic, nonviolent resistance and his sharp critique of the slavery to violence and ethno-religious nationalism, even when biblically based. Will we finally find a place in us for his word (8:37)?
Notes