5th Sunday in Lent.
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
In this season of Lent, we have looked at several covenants between God and people in the Old Testament. We began with God’s promise to Noah never, ever to destroy the whole earth in a flood again, but to sustain life forever. Then we studied God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah: God promised them offspring, a land, and blessing. Next, we moved on to the covenant between Israel and God at Mount Sinai; the Ten Commandments were given as a core stipulation of this mutual commitment. Finally, last week, we witnessed how Israel had radically broken their covenant with God, but how God (after a brief fit of anger) provided the means of healing for the people, thus forgiving them and renewing the covenant.
Today, Jeremiah proclaims yet another covenant. The covenant he promises is better than what we have seen before. It promises something much more valuable than physical life, than family and land, than God’s law to guide our lives, and than healing: This will be a new kind of covenant, based in God’s total forgiveness, that will lead to a depth of relationship between God and people that Israel had never experienced before. This new covenant will be a matter of the heart.
When we look at the covenants we have studied thus far this Spring, we can see two kinds of covenant.
One kind is a covenant of divine commitment: God comes to a person or a people and binds himself to them with promises. The human counterpart does not have to promise anything. This is the type of covenant God made with Noah and with Abraham, and with us at our baptism.
The other kind of covenant is one of mutual obligation. Both parties agree to certain stipulations. It’s more of a legal contract. When one side breaks the laws governing the covenant, it is broken and becomes invalid; in fact, certain punishments for breaking the agreement are part of the covenant. We saw this in the Ten Commandments, where God says he will curse those who do not obey the laws to the third generation, but bless those who keep the commandments to the thousands generation. In other places, being able to live in the land is conditioned on obeying the law.
One commentator illustrated the difference between the two types of covenant by pointing to the difference between a marriage vow and a prenuptial agreement. A prenuptial agreement is a legal contract. It spells out what happens when the relationship should come to an end. Should that happen, there are legal ramifications for both sides, and they can be pursued in court.
A marriage vow is a relationship thing, a matter of the heart. It is about love and commitment and trust and mutual support and sincere promises. These are not things you can put in a contract or fight for in court.
When a partner breaks a prenuptial agreement, we are disappointed and angry, and we might go after him or her in court, because we can.
When a partner breaks a marriage vow, we are heart-broken and devastated and deeply hurt. There is nothing we can do to make the other person love us and commit to us again. We can try as hard as we want to repair the relationship, if the other person is unwilling, we are powerless. All we can do is grieve and try to heal our broken heart.
This is a wonderful illustration for today, because Jeremiah himself uses the marriage analogy. He quotes God as saying, “a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband.” You can almost hear God’s sadness and disappointment. God was their relationship partner, had been faithful to the people, had done amazing things for the people, and yet they broke the covenant. That pains God’s heart.
The result of their having broken the covenant was playing out rather severely at the time when Jeremiah spoke these words. Remember that being blessed and staying in the land was tied to their obeying God’s law? Well, they hadn’t. And now they had lost the land. The Babylonian army had destroyed the nation and taken thousands into exile.
There they sit now, stunned and overwhelmed and deeply ashamed. And they wonder: Will God still be our God? After all we have done, does God still care about us? Does God even know where we are now?
These people are aghast at what happened to their nation. They are split into Northerners and Southerners. They are divided between exiles and the peasants left behind. They are emotionally, economically, and spiritually devastated.
Sounds quite a bit like our current situation, doesn’t it? We, too, are split between north and south, coastal areas and central states, rich and poor, black and white. We, too, are emotionally, economically, and spiritually devastated by pandemic and politics and climate crisis. We, too, are aghast at what has happened to our nation.
Jeremiah’s words, therefore, are just as healing and uplifting for us as they were for Israel 2,500 years ago. Through the prophet, God is offering a new beginning, a new covenant. God is offering a relationship much deeper and much more intimate than anything that has come before.
The law will still be there, but now it is not written on stone tablets in the temple, now it is written on our hearts. We will know intuitively how we should live as God’s people. We will be so intimately linked with God that nobody will have to teach us God’s will; we know it automatically. God will be our God and we will be God’s people, in a covenant founded on God’s forgiveness and forever upheld by God’s love.
What exactly is new about this covenant?
It’s not the law. That was there before and it still there.
It’s not that God will be their God and they will be God’s people; that was part of covenants before.
What’s new is that this covenant is internalized. God’s will is written on the people’s hearts. The covenant stipulations don’t shape the people’s behavior from the outside, backed up by threats of punishment. Now, God’s rules for blessed living are written on the people’s hearts, moving them from the inside out.
Through grace and forgiveness, by moving in the hearts of his beloved children, God shapes for himself a new nation with this new covenant.
In 10 days, we will gather for our Maundy Thursday service to remember Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. At that last supper, Jesus will lift the cup and bless it and announce, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and all people for the forgiveness of sins.”
The new covenant, grounded on God’s grace and forgiveness, is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In our gospel reading today, Jesus announces that he will draw all people to himself. He will move their hearts to seek his presence, his guidance, his love, his comfort, his will. By his own death on the cross and his rising from the tomb, Jesus will inspire his people to serve like he served, to love like he loved, to hope like he hoped, to give like he gave, to trust like he trusted, even to sacrifice like he sacrificed.
Through his willingness to die on the cross, through his resurrection to new life, through the gift of baptism, through the sacrament of the holy supper, Jesus is gathering a people of the new covenant. Jesus is gathering us.
“We wish to see Jesus,” some Greeks say to Philip. Up until now, Jesus’ ministry was a Jewish operation. He and all his disciples were Jews. Now, some foreigners, Greek-speaking people from somewhere else in the empire, want to know more about Jesus.
“We wish to see Jesus,” is their plea. They ask Philip, and Philip tells Andrew, and then together approach Jesus. We never actually hear if the Greeks got to meet Jesus. But they did meet the disciples.
I believe John included this story in his gospel account because it describes the reality in which we live today: People who wish to see Jesus will come to us, his disciples. We are making Jesus real in this world. We, the people of the new covenant, moved by the will of God written on our hearts, blessed by God’s grace and forgiveness, we are the ones who can show people to Jesus.
When someone asks us, “I wish to see Jesus,” then that person does not want to encounter the prenuptial agreement Jesus. They don’t want to hear about rules and requirements, about creeds and quotes from the Bible and Luther’s Small Catechism. All that is interesting and important, but all that comes later, once the person has seen Jesus.
What that person wants and needs to encounter through us is the marriage vow Jesus, the Jesus who commits to us, who loves us, who is trustworthy, who blesses our lives with hope and guidance.
Show me the Jesus who makes you give up a week of your summer vacation to serve at a Christian camp.
Show me the Jesus who moves you to give ten percent of your income to the church.
Show me the Jesus who inspires you to shovel your neighbors walk or change the oil in their car.
Show me the Jesus who calls you to be politically active towards more justice and equality in the nation.
Show me the Jesus who gives you energy and hope to get out of bed in the morning.
Show me the Jesus who helped you forgive the person who betrayed you.
Show me that Jesus; the living, active Jesus; the Jesus who makes a real difference in how you act. Show me the Jesus who made a new covenant with you and lives in your heart to shape you into a child of God. Show me the Jesus who has offered you a new beginning, so I, too, can receive that blessing.
Disciples of Jesus Christ, people of the New Covenant, let us show Jesus, to one another and to the world. Amen.