March 17, 2024
Psalm 51:1-12
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Ah, Jeremiah. Such a cheerful fellow.
Kelly J. Murphy writes at Working Preacher, “This is the prophet who cries, ‘Therefore thus says the LORD: See, I am laying before this people stumbling blocks against which they shall stumble; parents and children together, neighbor and friend shall perish’ (Jeremiah 6:21) and ‘Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!’ (Jeremiah 23:1). It’s no wonder that Jeremiah is often called the ‘Weeping Prophet.’”
All right. Perhaps not so cheerful.
Jeremiah lived through troubled times. At the beginning of his prophetic ministry, he experienced the reforms of King Josiah, which promised to bring the nation of Judah closer to its covenant with God. His hopes were dashed when Josiah died in battle and his successors abandoned the reforms. Each one received the gloomy judgement of the authors of 2 Kings: “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, just as his ancestors had done.”
Jeremiah aggressively criticized the worship of other gods, the gods introduced by foreign nations, which had grown among the Israelites over the years. He wrote things like this:
As a thief is shamed when caught,
so the house of Israel shall be shamed:
they, their kings, their officials,
their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, “You are my father,”
and to a stone, “You gave me birth.”
For they have turned their backs to me
and not their faces.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
“Come and save us!”
– Jeremiah 2:26-27
Jeremiah didn’t just condemn idolatry. He condemned fraud and lies. He condemned the failure to care for orphans and the needy. He condemned greed among the elite. He stood before the Temple and asked if it had become a den of robbers. You might remember that Jesus said something similar about six hundred years later. Jeremiah warned that the inevitable result of this level of faithlessness and sin was the breaking of the nation’s covenant with God, and without God’s protection, the tiny nation would not survive violent encounters with the great empires of Assyria or Babylon, which hovered to the north, or with Egypt, which lurked to the south.
The nation did not survive.
In 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon besieged Jerusalem. King Jeconiah surrendered. The Babylonians took the king and a number of civic and religious leaders to Babylon in exile, including a member of the priesthood named Ezekiel. Ezekiel began writing his book of prophecy after arriving in Babylon.
The Babylonians put Jeconiah’s uncle, Zedekiah, on the throne. Ten years later, Zedekiah attempted rebellion, which Jeremiah also condemned. Zedekiah was wrong; Jeremiah was right. The city fell in 587 to the Babylonian army, the Temple was destroyed, and the nation of Judah perished.
It was the unimaginable calamity. The nation that God had founded and promised to protect died.
And Jeremiah’s message changed.
“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.”
The “Weeping Prophet” found and declared a new hope.
In the future, he said, there would be a new covenant.
It has to be said that this would not be the first new covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham. It wouldn’t even be the second. God restated the covenant with Abraham, made a covenant with the people through Moses and then had to make it again when it was swiftly broken. God reshaped that covenant as the nation chose to empower a monarchy and did it again when the portable tabernacle found a permanent home in the Jerusalem Temple.
In the context of the fall of Jerusalem, however, the announcement of this new covenant must have astonished its hearers. Wil Gafney writes at Working Preacher, “The passage ends with a commitment from God to forget their sin for all time. These words promised desperately-needed hope to the survivors of the invasion. The God of Creation would re-create them. The God of Exodus would embrace them again. The merciful, tender loving God would forgive all their sin and absolve them of the sins of their ancestors. The sin that led God to surrender Judah and Jerusalem to the Babylonians would be forgiven.”
Standing literally in the wreckage of their hopes, Jeremiah offered hope once more.
Nearly three millennia later, how do we understand this hope?
First, the exiles of Judah did return from Babylon – or at least, their descendants did, seventy years after their parents and grandparents were taken away from Jerusalem. I can’t say, however, that they experienced this promise of the law being written on their hearts. They continued to teach one another to know the LORD. We know this because they kept writing books about knowing the LORD, many of which became Scripture for Jews and for us. What do we use Scripture for? To teach about God.
As Terence Fretheim writes at Working Preacher, “Even from a Christian perspective this text has not been fully fulfilled. We still need to encourage others to ‘know the Lord.’ And the claim that ‘all know me, from the least of them to the greatest’ remains a promise for the future.”
It’s not hard to come to that conclusion. We organize our families, our society, and our nation around the assumption that people need to be taught to do what is right, and good, and fit. We spend the early years of children’s lives teaching them not to grab. We have organized educational programs, both secular and sacred, to teach children what we think they should know and to behave as we think they should behave.
Among adults, we devote a good deal of resources to discouraging certain kinds of behavior, primarily versions of theft and levels of violence. We empower people to determine what behaviors should be tolerated and what behaviors should be punished: legislators. We give other people the privilege to investigate forbidden behavior and to use force – which is otherwise prohibited – to stop people from continuing those behaviors: law enforcement. Further resources go to determining the truth or falsehood of accusations, and to applying consequences for engaging in forbidden behavior: courts and judges. Again, those consequences – imprisonment, primarily – are ordinarily forbidden behaviors themselves.
Would this be necessary among a people in whose hearts God had written the law?
Well. Maybe. Maybe not.
In Jeremiah’s day, he could point to specific elements of the covenant with God and say, “These things you’re doing violate the covenant.” In our day, we can do much the same. “You know what is right and wrong,” we can say, “and you’ve chosen what is wrong.”
Knowledge of God’s guidance, knowledge of God’s wishes, knowledge of God’s will doesn’t appear to be enough to prevent people from doing what God doesn’t want them to do. If it’s written upon the heart, would that make a difference? Wouldn’t you and I, with full knowledge of God’s direction, still need to decide for ourselves that we will do what is good, and right, and fit, and not do what is bad, and wrong, and unfit?
Of course we would. It’s no different from our situation now, when we have been taught what we know, and still have to choose.
Jeremiah’s new covenant reinforces God’s ancient commitment to the people of Israel, and by extension to the people of the Earth, not to fully abandon us even when we betray God’s trust. “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This caught the attention of the author of Hebrews, who connected Jesus’ supreme gift of forgiveness with this ancient promise. “What is imagined here,” writes Margaret Odell at Working Preacher, “is a resilient relationship of trust and mutuality, in which Israel responds to God from the heart, and God accepts Israel freely, with mercy and forgiveness. But what makes the new covenant possible is what had always been true but needed to be learned again. ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.’ This love, suggests Jeremiah, is nothing new.”
The Scriptures contain abundant stories of people disappointing God, both individual people and entire societies. The Scriptures describe many times when God seems to have given up in disgust and walked away.
The Scriptures also assert that for each one of those times and many more times God has come back, started over, offered a new covenant, extended forgiveness, welcomed a new relationship. That’s been true for great big groups of people and it’s been true for individuals like you and I.
The law may or may not be written on our hearts. What you will find written there is the steadfast love of God, and it has not, will not, and cannot be erased.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric revises his prepared sermon while preaching. Sometimes it’s an improvement.
The image is The Prophets Jeremiah and Baruch (btw 1600 & 1639) by Rutilio di Lorenzo Manetti – Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122066973.
