33:14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
33:15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
33:16 In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Who should be in charge? What makes for a good ruler? These are questions that our text from Jeremiah addresses as it anticipates God fulfilling a promise made to David. They are also questions that our society has wrestled with during an election year. Jeremiah suggests that God will fulfill this promise in a surprising way. According to the prophet, a ruler’s “fitness” to lead is not a question of their pedigree, but their commitment to establish justice and righteousness.
The last decades of the Judean monarchy were unstable and chaotic. One good king was killed in a war (2 Kings 23:29), two of his successors were deported or executed by foreign armies (2 Kings 23:34; 24:8–12), and two other rulers were installed as puppets for imperial overlords (2 Kings 23:34; 24:17). These kings’ disastrous foreign policy decisions led to the destruction of the royal city itself. Old ways of social life were gone, and new ways forward were yet unclear.
Jeremiah was written during this period of political turmoil, and unsurprisingly the book is not very positive about kings. This particular section of Jeremiah is hopeful and optimistic, but it quotes from an earlier passage in the book that is relentlessly critical of the last kings of Judah. One king is doomed to die in captivity (Jeremiah 22:11–12); one is denounced for his rampant criminality and injustice (22:13–19); and one is condemned to die without a son to succeed him (22:24–30).
Like a preacher taking a scriptural text and explaining its message for a new audience, the book reuses an earlier text in Jeremiah 23:5–6 in a hopeful sermon about the future. Sometime later, after the disasters caused by those hapless kings, this sermon hopes for new leadership under whom the nation can flourish. While it uses the normal, traditional language of royal rulers, the text subtly shifts its message of hope away from ruling elites and toward the people living in community.
Several prophetic texts, along with this one in Jeremiah, describe their hopes for the Davidic dynasty like an arborist or a botanist. Rulers grow like saplings from a stump (Isaiah 11:1), and are like branches of a tree (Zechariah 3:18; 6:12). Even with language steeped in royal tradition, Jeremiah shifts typical ideas ever so slightly. Where Jeremiah 23:5 looked toward a “righteous branch” (ṣemaḥ ṣaddiq) of a ruler, it was hoping for a legitimate ruler — unlike those puppets installed by foreign empires. However, in the sermon of 33:15, the hope for a “righteous branch” (ṣemaḥ ṣǝdāqâ) is for a good ruler. His righteousness will not come from birth, but the justice with which he rules.
When Christians read this text on the first Sunday of Advent, they see Jesus of Nazareth as the answer to Jeremiah’s hope for a righteous branch springing up from David. The language used in early Judaism to describe a messiah comes from the language used to describe kings in the Hebrew Bible. In this way, many texts in the New Testament describe Jesus as a “blue-blooded” messiah, as Matthew Novenson puts it in his book The Grammar of Messianism. Part of Jesus’ legitimacy as a messiah comes from his ancestry: the “son of David” (Matthew 1:1), the “root of Jesse” (Romans 15:11), and “the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David” (Revelation 5:5).
And yet, while New Testament writers do highlight Jesus’ pedigree as a messiah, the gospels do not depict him as a typically blue-blooded heir in a promised lineage. He was born in humble, working-class circumstances (Luke 2:7; Mark 6:3). He kept company with everyday people, those the well-to-do might regard as “deplorables” and “garbage” (cf. Matthew 11:19). He was quick to call others his friends (John 15:14), and happy to call his followers his brothers and sisters (Mark 3:34–35). And unlike the brutal demands many kings and dictators place on their subjects, his “yoke is easy and [his] burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). Jesus is hailed as the “righteous branch” of David not just because he is legitimate but also because he is good.
As I read this text in the United States, this particular Advent season resembles the chaotic instability of Jeremiah’s day. Like Jeremiah’s hope for new growth out of his country’s Davidic royal heritage, American political discourse consists of a battle between two visions for America’s future based on rival versions of its past. Both, ironically, point to their own kinds of “blue-blood” credentials. One is built on a coalition of wealthy donors, beautiful celebrities, and the well-educated elite. The other is led by a famous billionaire with his own cadre of wealthy benefactors and the richest man alive as his “First Buddy.” One seeks to preserve the traditions and norms of democracy, the other seeks to revive an era of glory and greatness.
The tragedy of this November’s election is that neither of America’s two main political parties offered a vision of leadership that would extend Jeremiah’s concern for justice and righteousness for all. Under the incoming Trump Administration, “inequality will explode” as wealth is redistributed upwards under the false cover of populism, the threats posed by a changing climate will be ignored, and a militarized immigration enforcement regime threatens massive displacement and suffering. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party seems to have lost primarily because it abandoned the working class, failed to address popular concerns about inflation and cost of living, and refused to take any meaningful action to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza. A campaign slogan of “people first” rang hollow when, for example, an Uber executive was making sure to water down Harris’ economic policy so that it would benefit the wealthy.
So we return to the same question we started with: who should be in charge? No modern-day nation-state can legitimately claim God’s promise to David, invoked by Jeremiah, and applied by Christians to Jesus during Advent. Politics can be a dangerous vehicle for religious hope, and no American political blue-bloods are messiahs. Even still, Jeremiah’s hope for the safe, secure flourishing of his nation can inspire a contemporary reader to think about how theirs might do so too.
There is one additional shift in the way that Jeremiah uses the political idioms of his day. After announcing the coming of this “righteous Branch,” one would expect the text to give this individual a name. However, the text gives a new name for the city of Jerusalem rather than the king. What’s more, this announcement makes a pun with the name of the last king of Judah. His name, Zedekiah, can mean either “Yahweh is righteousness” or “My righteousness is Yahweh.” This idea is made plural in the city’s new name: “Yahweh is our righteousness” (Jeremiah 33:16). The text is saying that God’s righteousness is not bound up in the singular rule of one king — who most recently was hapless or corrupt anyway — but it is found in the community of God who share that righteousness together.
Jeremiah articulates a kind of hope that is built on a non-elite vision of politics. This hope is less focused on the individual ruler, and goes beyond questions about whether or not someone is “fit” to lead. It is based instead on whether or not whether there is a society-wide commitment to generosity and charity shared with the most vulnerable. In practical terms, this means a safe home to live in, a decent job, good education for children, affordable medical care, and provision for retirement. This is a righteousness that abounds for all. The city is named with a plural, our righteousness is not “trickle down” righteousness. Adopting a hope like Jeremiah’s entails a change in political perspective, a shift of attention away from the elite and toward the everyday.
What would it mean for a nation, city, or community, to echo the spirit of our text from Jeremiah and proclaim “Yahweh is our righteousness”? How can an abstract idea like “righteousness” be made concrete? In the context of American electoral politics, as Gabriel Winant recently argued, this will require the Democratic party to treat its left flank “as an ally and a source of strength” rather than seek to suppress it. Only social movements built from below — perhaps beginning with a union, or a cooperative, or a church — can respond to threats as large as the predatory American oligarchic class or the climate crisis.
In everyday life, the idea of building a social movement feels like an insurmountable task. One act of generosity or kindness, one instance of solidarity, one household filled with love and joy — these may seem so insignificant and small. On the first Sunday of Advent, consider how small a child refugee sleeping in a stable in Palestine seemed too.
