5th Sunday in Lent March 29, 2009 “Series B”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for all your many blessings upon us – for the gift of life; for the fellowship that we share with one another; and for all that sustains us from day to day. But we especially thank you for the gift of your Son, Jesus the Christ, through whom you have revealed your unmerited, forgiving love, and called us into a new covenant relationship with you, our Creator, as your redeemed children. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, strengthen our faith, that we might prove to be worthy disciples of Christ. This we ask in his holy name. Amen.
In our first lesson for this morning, the Prophet Jeremiah, speaks God’s Word, saying: “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…” To be sure, this “New Covenant” language was picked up and utilized by the early Christians, including some of the authors of the New Testament, to express the redeemed relationship that God established with us through our faith and baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection.
The fact that our Christian Bible is divided into the writings of the Old and New Testaments is a clear indication that those who have come to faith in Jesus the Christ, believe that through his death and resurrection, God has established a new covenant with his creation. The word “Testament” actually means “Covenant.” It is a word that describes the terms of our relationship with God.
But is it fair to assume, that Jeremiah, writing nearly six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, spoke these words as a foreshadowing of the new relationship that God would establish with his people, through Jesus’ death and resurrection? According to most of the commentaries that I read on this text, it is highly unlikely. Thus, I would like to begin my message this morning, by exploring this text from Jeremiah.
As Daniel N. Schowalter points out in his commentary, “The people of Jerusalem were probably sick of hearing from Jeremiah by the time he speaks this oracle we read this morning. In fact, the king and his court grow so tired of the prophet’s message, that they stuck him in a cistern. The reason is that Jeremiah has long been warning the king and the people about the danger of ignoring God and his covenant, claiming that their disobedience to God’s law would result in the destruction of the kingdom.” End quote. [New Proclamation, Fortress Press, 2005]
In other words, Jeremiah has, up until this point, been preaching gloom and doom for Israel. And that gloom and doom was about to happen, as the Babylonians were closing in on Israel, and Jerusalem. But suddenly, before Jerusalem was captured, the Temple burned, and with its demise, bringing to an end to the ritual center of Israel’s practice of offering sacrifice to appease for their sins, Jeremiah offers this vision of hope. By this time in the faith of Israel, the Temple had become the center of their worship and religious life. It was the place were God’s presence was thought to dwell among the people. The people of Israel living in outlying regions made yearly pilgrimages to the Temple, like many Arabs do today to Mecca.
Just think of the devastation those people must have felt, as Schowalter points out, “when the people look out at the army of the Babylonians laying siege to their city, or to the survivors of that attack, as they leave behind the smoldering ruins of the Temple, to be led off into captivity.” End quote. Their faith would have been devastated along with the destruction of their holy city. They would have been devoid of all hope for the future, even questioning the covenant relationship that God had long ago made with them.
It is here that Jeremiah’s message about a new covenant offers hope to the people of Israel, and forms the basis for a new understanding of their covenantal faith. Jeremiah had not only predicted an end to the kingdom, but also to the need for the cultic ritual centered in the Temple. Listen to this new covenant that Jeremiah says God will make with Israel: “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel, after those days,” [in other words, after they had been led into captivity by the Babylonians] “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 central point of Jeremiah’s “New Covenant” is that it makes all people of Israel “individually responsible for maintaining their covenant relationship with God. Unlike the broken communal covenant, this new agreement will be written on their hearts of individuals. As a result,” according to Schowalter, “this vision is a sharp rebuke of the existing hierarchy of Jerusalem and the Temple cultic practice… The result is, that God will go with the people who are taken into exile. Even though their nation and their Temple had been destroyed, God would not abandon them.”
Several months ago, I had one of those theological conversations with Pastor Blair, that, I must admit, takes some time to sink in to this dense brain of mine. Now without going into even more background to this detailed sermon, let me just sum up by saying that it was Jeremiah’s talk about this “New Covenant” that led to the development of synagogues, and localized centers of Israel’s faith where their covenant relationship with God was given expression.
The loss of the Temple as the center of Israel’s faith, didn’t matter for many of the faithful, especially the Pharisees and Scribes, who emerged from the Exile as formative leaders of Israel. Some, however, like the priests, still longed to return to their cultic roots. But covenantal faith, as a result of Jeremiah’s description of this “New Covenant,” became a personal commitment between the individual and God.
Thus, I would say that this passage from Jeremiah about God establishing a “New Covenant,” does not directly refer to the New Covenant that we experience as a result of our faith and baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. But it does set the stage for our ability to understand the new relationship that we experience with God through our faith in Jesus the Christ.
First, what took place as a result of Jeremiah’s proclamation of hope, in the establishment of local synagogues as the place where God’s Word is taught and people are nourished in faith, paved the way for the church to adopt that idea in establishing local congregations as the center of our faith. It is here, in our local gathering of the faithful, that we learn from one another, and are supported by one another to live in covenant with God.
I must admit that I have really enjoyed participating with St. Mark’s in our Lenten study this year. And it is not just because we have enjoyed having 25 to 30 participants at our meetings. Nor is it simply because we have enjoyed the fellowship of our brothers and sisters in Christ from another congregation. But I have enjoyed this study series because Pastor Mark and I made the decision to ask a lot of questions, and grow in our own faith as a result of the faith of our members. Although we may, as pastors, have some background to share, we still learn from the faith of each other.
But most importantly, I believe that the shift in Jeremiah’s proclamation that offered Israel hope in the midst of their most depressing period of history, give us hope to embrace the truly new covenant that God makes with us through Christ’s death and resurrection.
Jesus says in our Gospel lesson, “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.” This is a clear indication that this new covenant that God makes with us through our relationship with Jesus, is ultimately a personal covenant, one that we embrace in our hearts. For this, we owe Jeremiah credit.
But as Christians, we are not left to embrace simply the terms of the Old Covenant to which Jeremiah reformed. God has established a totally New Covenant with his people, through the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. And we need not look any further than to our Lord’s words of institution for the new meal he offers to replace the Passover, when Jesus takes the cup and says, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and for many, for the forgiveness of your sins.”
For the Christian, the Temple system has been destroyed once and for all. Jesus’ death on the cross has brought to fruition, what Jeremiah had only an inkling of what God was about to do. And it is my hope, that through the power of God’s Spirit, we might have our own hearts open to see this progression of understanding of God’s grace, to redeem us from sin and death. For God has, throughout the history of his establishing a covenant with his people, remained faithful, and promised to be with us, even in the darkest hours, and the midst of our pain.
Amen.
