All Y’all

Scripture — Jeremiah 31:27-34 (NRSV)

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say:

“The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: 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. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

Devotion

If you don’t know any other verse from Jeremiah well, you probably know two of the most famous ones: Jeremiah 29:11 (rendered in the NRSV, “ For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope”) and Jeremiah 31:33, above: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: 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.” (For people connected to the faith and work movement, I could probably throw in Jeremiah 29:5-7 as well.)

If you grew up as even remotely evangelical, you have heard these two verses put forward as models of faith. Models, I suspect, of individual faith: God has a plan for individual you to give you a future with hope and, if you accept Jesus into your heart, God will write the law on your individual heart.

I wrote about this in 2024 during Lent when Jeremiah 31 previously came up in the lectionary; most of the time, any “you” that you hear in the Bible, unless addressed to a specific person, is a collective, plural “you.” In many other languages that maintain the distinction between singular and plural forms of the pronoun “you,” this distinction is easier to see. But if you are dealing with standard written formal English, you have to do the mental gymnastics yourself.

Luckily, I live in Kentucky, and we have a word for this: “y’all.”

“Y’all” is not limited to Kentucky, of course—it’s a standard feature of informal English in the Southern parts of the United States. As someone who moved here as an adult, it’s one of the Southern speech patterns that has permanently embedded itself in my speaking. And it’s really useful for Biblical interpretation.

Take these passages from Jeremiah: the plural “you” and the continuous use of “them” clearly mean that God is making a plan for God’s historic people to give those people a future and that God is writing God’s law on the hearts of those same people. I believe that we can apply these verses to the Christian life of faith today—but not without forgetting the plural. We shouldn’t individualize their message just because we have translated it across centuries. Community is as important in the twenty-first century as it was hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Try it:

And just as I have watched over y’all to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over y’all to build and to plant. . .I will put my law within y’all, and I will write it on y’all’s hearts [yes, this is really a word around here]; and I will be y’all’s God, and y’all shall be my people.

In fact, we don’t just say “y’all” around here; we do sometimes also say “all y’all.” “You” is one person. “Y’all” is more than one person. “All y’all” is really everybody. The whole community. And that is actually what I think the scripture means here: not just y’all but all y’all. God isn’t writing the law of love on individual hearts, even the individual hearts of multiple people. God is writing the law of love on our hearts as a community. A community that encompasses everyone, whether we want it to or not. . .a community made up of all y’all.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The Goodness of Work Restored (Jeremiah 30-33).