Catholic Commentary
God's Mercy and the Promise of Restoration (Part 2)
35And I will make an everlasting covenant with them to be their God, and they will be my people. I will no more remove my people Israel out of the land that I have given them.”
Baruch 2:35 presents God's promise to establish an everlasting covenant with Israel, guaranteeing them permanent relationship as God's people and unrevocable possession of their ancestral land despite exile. This promise emphasizes that divine mercy, not human merit, restores the covenant and assures ultimate restoration.
God speaks the covenant's permanence into being, not as a renegotiated deal but as an absolute promise: belonging to Him is forever, and exile — personal or spiritual — is temporary.
At the literal-historical level, this is a promise of physical return — the restoration prophesied in Jeremiah 29–33, partially fulfilled under Cyrus (Ezra 1). But the typological sense, richly developed in Catholic tradition, reads the promised land as a figure of something greater. The earthly Canaan prefigures the heavenly homeland (Hebrews 11:14–16), and the Church — the new Israel gathered from every nation — inherits the spiritual substance of this promise. The "land" is ultimately the Kingdom of God, into which the baptized are incorporated and from which they can never be exiled except by their own apostasy. Even then, the Church's penitential tradition (reflected in the entire prayer of Baruch 1–3) holds open the path of return through repentance.
Catholic tradition reads Baruch 2:35 as one of the Old Testament's clearest prophetic anticipations of the New Covenant theology that reaches its fullness in Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the economy of the Old Testament was deliberately so orientated that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ" (CCC 122), and this verse exemplifies precisely that forward orientation.
Covenant and Eucharist: The phrase "everlasting covenant" finds its New Testament fulfillment in Christ's words at the Last Supper — "This cup is the new covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25). The Church Fathers, notably St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. John Chrysostom, consistently read the prophetic berît ʿôlām ("everlasting covenant") of the Hebrew prophets as pointing to the Eucharist, in which the covenant bond between God and his people is renewed and deepened at every Mass. The CCC affirms: "The Eucharist is the new and everlasting covenant" (CCC 1365).
The Church as New Israel: St. Augustine in The City of God (Book XVIII) and Origen in his Homilies on Jeremiah both interpret the "people" of the restored covenant typologically as encompassing all who believe in Christ — Jew and Gentile — gathered into the one Body. Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (§9) directly applies this formula — "I will be their God and they shall be my people" — to the Church, describing her as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people." This is not a replacement of Israel but a fulfillment that encompasses and elevates the original promise.
Indefectibility and Perseverance: The "everlasting" character of the covenant grounds the Catholic dogma of the Church's indefectibility (CCC 869). God's unilateral fidelity, proclaimed in Baruch 2:35, means the Church — despite the sins of her members — cannot ultimately fail or be abandoned.
Baruch 2:35 speaks with piercing directness to Catholics who live through experiences of personal, ecclesial, or cultural exile — seasons when God seems absent and the covenant seems broken. The verse's structure is its message: God speaks first, and what he says is irrevocable belonging.
For the Catholic who has drifted from the sacraments, perhaps for years, this verse cuts through the lie that the bond has been dissolved. The covenant is everlasting — it awaits their return, not their re-application. The penitential prayer of Baruch 1–3, which this verse crowns, models the path: honest acknowledgment of sin (2:11–14), humble appeal to God's mercy (2:15–19), and finally reception of this astounding promise.
At a communal level, Catholics grieved by scandal, institutional failure, or cultural marginalization of the faith can hear in this verse the Church's indefectibility proclaimed prophetically from the sixth century BC. The land will not be permanently forfeited. Practically, this passage invites daily renewal of covenant consciousness — particularly at Mass, where "the new and everlasting covenant" is made present on the altar — asking: Do I live as someone who belongs to God, and to whom God belongs?
Commentary
Verse 35a — "And I will make an everlasting covenant with them to be their God, and they will be my people."
The verse opens with divine initiative — "I will make" — emphatically placing the source of restoration not in Israel's merit or renewed fidelity, but solely in God's sovereign will and fidelity to his own promises. This is theologically decisive: the covenant Baruch envisions is not a renegotiated contract between two parties of equal standing, but a unilateral gift flowing from God's mercy, previously invoked throughout Baruch 2:11–34.
The phrase "everlasting covenant" (berît ʿôlām in the Hebrew conceptual background underlying this deuterocanonical Greek text) resonates across the entire sweep of salvation history. It deliberately echoes the covenant formulas of Genesis 17:7 (with Abraham), Jeremiah 31:31–33 (the new covenant written on the heart), and Ezekiel 37:26–27 (the covenant of peace). In the context of Baruch, written against the backdrop of the Babylonian exile, this promise functions as a counter-word to the apparent dissolution of the Sinai covenant through Israel's infidelity and the catastrophe of 587 BC. The people have broken their side; God refuses to abandon his.
The mutual-belonging formula — "to be their God, and they will be my people" — is a formal covenant refrain appearing throughout the Old Testament (Leviticus 26:12; Jeremiah 7:23; 11:4; Ezekiel 11:20; 36:28; Hosea 2:23). Its repetition here is not mere literary convention but a deliberate invocation of covenant memory: God is not creating something entirely new so much as restoring and deepening what was always his intention from the time of Abraham and Moses. The ʿôlām ("everlasting") qualifier, however, marks a crucial escalation — this renewed covenant will have a permanence that the Mosaic covenant, conditioned on Israel's obedience, did not structurally guarantee. Catholic exegesis sees in this "everlasting" quality a direct prophetic anticipation of the New Covenant inaugurated in Christ's blood (Luke 22:20).
Verse 35b — "I will no more remove my people Israel out of the land that I have given them."
The second part of the verse addresses the immediate, concrete experience of exile with an equally concrete promise: the land-gift, first given to the patriarchs and actualized under Joshua, will not ultimately be revoked. The phrase "the land that I have given them" echoes the gift-language of Deuteronomy and Joshua, affirming that the land remains God's enduring grant even while the people are displaced from it. The exile was punishment, but not annulment of the gift.