Charles Hawkins

Christmas 2 Year A   Jeremiah 31:7–14   1. Historical Context   This passage belongs to the so-called Book of Consolation (Jeremiah 30–33), widely understood as a collection of hope-filled oracles addressed to Judah and Israel in the aftermath—or anticipated end—of exile. Whether composed during the Babylonian exile or shaped shortly thereafter, the text responds to communal trauma: displacement, loss of land, temple, and political autonomy. Against Jeremiah’s earlier oracles of judgment, these chapters articulate a theological conviction that exile is not the final word. Restoration is imagined not as human achievement but as divine initiative.   2. Literary Form and Structure   The passage is a poetic proclamation combining exhortation (“Sing aloud”), divine promise (“I am going to bring them”), and doxological vision (“They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion”). It moves from summons to praise, through images of return, to a culminating portrait o...

The readings appointed for this Sunday after Christmas do not rush us back to sentiment or sweetness. They linger instead in a space the Church knows well: the space between promise and fulfillment, between homecoming and continued wandering, between joy that has been announced and grief that has not yet been fully healed. Jeremiah speaks to a people who know exile from the inside. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is gone. Land, memory, and identity have all been fractured. And yet—precisely there—Jeremiah dares to speak consolation. Not denial. Not nostalgia. Consolation. He summons the people to sing before there is any visible reason to do so. He speaks of gathering before the scattered have actually returned. He imagines abundance while the trauma is still close to the surface. What matters is not simply that God promises restoration, but how that restoration is imagined. God does not gather only the strong, the fit, or the spiritually impressive. The prophet is explicit: the blind...