Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 2, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s a remarkable passage. A new covenant, written on our hearts. It’s remarkable in its own terms, but it’s even more remarkable when you understand its historical context. The prophet Jeremiah was writing in the 580s BCE during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem, including the Temple that was, as they saw it, the indispensable center of the Jewish faith. The siege resulted in the exile of most of the people to the land of their Gentile captors hundreds of miles away across the desert on the banks of the Euphrates. It was a time of death and of the destruction of everything Jeremiah’s people held dear. It was a time of despair and desperation. It was a time when hope seemed impossible. Many of the people believed that the Babylonian assault was God’s punishment for their having broken God’s law by oppressing the poor and worshipping other gods. That certainly was the message of the great Hebrew prophets of Jeremiah’s time and before. The people believed the Lord their God had abandoned them and delivered them up to their enemies for destruction. Their covenant with God was over, and they were lost; or so it seemed.

Into the midst of all this death, destruction, and despair came the prophet Jeremiah. He came speaking a new word, a word of impossible hope, a word that was too good to be true--except that it was. Jeremiah told the people that although God was indeed punishing them for their sin, the Lord had not in fact abandoned them, not forever anyway, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Jeremiah, claiming to speak for God, said: In the days that surely will come, God will make a new covenant with the people. Now, even if this passage said nothing else, this promise alone would be astounding under the circumstances. It is a profound confession of faith. It is a profound expression of trust. It is the profound good news that God will not in the end abandon and forsake God’s people.

But the even more remarkable thing is that this is not all that the passage says. The promise of a new covenant after the destruction of the old one would be radical enough, but that promise doesn’t begin to exhaust the radical new word of the Lord that Jeremiah brought to the people. Rather, Jeremiah leads his audience into the even more radical part of his message. He says this new covenant that God will make with them will be different. He says this new covenant won’t be like the covenant God made with the people’s ancestors when God "took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt...." The reference of course is to the Exodus and to the covenant God made with the people at that time through Moses. That covenant is the covenant of the Mosaic law, the Torah law, with its 613 specific, written commandments and prohibitions. Every one of Jeremiah’s listeners would have known immediately that that’s what he was talking about. They would hear that this new covenant is not going to be like the Mosaic covenant. It’s not going to be a covenant of numerous, complex, written laws, although just what the new covenant will be Jeremiah hasn’t yet told them.

Jeremiah then attributes to God a reason why this new covenant has to be different from the old one. The reason is that although the Lord was the people’s "husband," or in other translations their "master," the people broke the Mosaic covenant. They didn’t keep their end of the bargain. They broke those laws, neither did they live according to the spirit of those laws. The old covenant of the law didn’t work. The law didn’t lead the people to live the way God intended.

So God is going to try something else. The way of objective, external laws didn’t work, so God is going to try a subjective, inner way. Jeremiah has God say, or if you prefer God had Jeremiah say: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts...." There are some more terms of the covenant, and I’ll mention one of them in a bit; but I want now to look at this one, the one that makes the new covenant inner and subjective, not outer and objective. What does it mean for a covenant between God and God’s people to be an internal rather than an external covenant, for God’s law to be put within us and to be written on our hearts?

One thing we know for sure. This covenant is not going to be like the Mosaic covenant between Yahweh and the Hebrew people, which only makes sense. This is an internal covenant, and a covenant that involves 613 specific laws would be pretty hard to internalize. I’m sure there are people who’ve memorized all those laws, but when they do they put something that is inherently external in their minds, not in their hearts; and the heart not the mind is the seat of the new covenant. A law code is by nature external. It is a place where you go to look things up. It is a matter of the mind not of the heart.

But Jeremiah says that in the new covenant God will put "God’s law" within us and write it on our hearts. That reference to God’s law, however, cannot mean that all of those 613 Mosaic laws are going to end up on our hearts. They aren’t heart material, they’re head material. So God and Jeremiah must mean something different by the law that we will internalize. But what, exactly, do they mean?

To get at what their words mean for us, let’s ask about the meaning of the phrase the begins our passage from Jeremiah, namely, "the time is surely coming, says the Lord, when I will...." For us Christians the time for this new internal, subjective covenant surely came with the coming of Jesus Christ. It’s different for God’s Jewish, Muslim, and other children; but for us Christians the new inner covenant is the new covenant in Christ. Without diminishing in any way God’s relationship with people of other faith, we Christians can look to Jesus for the meaning of the new covenant. Is there something that we know about Jesus that can help us understand what this internalized law of the new covenant in Jesus actually is? Yes, of course, there is. I find that something particularly in the account of the Great Commandment in the Gospel of Matthew. There Jesus says: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.... And...you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Matt. 22:37-39 Here we have all of the elements of Jeremiah’s new covenant--the heart, the law, and the prophets--combined in one great commandment. This, I believe, is the law that God wants to put within us and write on our hearts, the great law of love.

The law of love, love of God, neighbor, and self, is heart stuff. Our heads can come up with all kinds of reasons not to love God, our neighbors, or ourselves. Our minds, our reason, see love as soft and ineffective. Our heads say be tough, be mad, play angry to get ahead; but our hearts know better. Our hearts know God’s law of love. God’s law of love fits in our hearts. Our hearts know what it means. The internal law of love is always available, always at hand. We don’t have to look it up in a law book. You don’t need a law library. Just look to your hearts. The law of love is within you. You know what it requires of you. You know what the Lord requires of you. St. Augustine did. He said: "Love, and do what you want." Love is our covenant with God internalized. Jesus’ Great Commandment is the law of the new covenant written on our hearts.

That law and that covenant are indeed different from the old Mosaic covenant. The law of love is a general principle not a penal code. The covenant of love is a covenant of freedom, not a straightjacket of rules and prohibitions. In this covenant God trusts God’s people just as God calls the people to trust God. God trusts us to respond to God’s love by loving all of God’s people and all of God’s creation. In this covenant God doesn’t dictate, God calls. In this covenant we are not children needing firm rules but adults making our own judgments in response to God’s love and grace.

And so many of us can’t handle it. Freedom is scary. Freedom can make us feel insecure. Making our own decisions is hard. We might make mistakes. Indeed, we’re bound to make mistakes. We are after all only human. And so throughout the history of the church Christians have rejected the new internal covenant of love and run back to the former covenant of law. They keep trying to turn Christ’s law of love back into a law code, a set of specific rules and prohibitions. Christians today in their millions run back to the law of Moses, especially some of the rules of sexual behavior in the book of Leviticus, because those rules feel so safe, they are so specific, so certain. Therefore many Christians prefer the security of law to the risks of freedom in Christ.

Jeremiah knew better, and so do we. We are people of the new covenant. We are people of love and grace and not of law. Living in love is an awesome privilege and an awesome responsibility. It is the way God wants it. It is the way of the internal covenant. It is the way of Christ. So let us embrace the privilege and the responsibility. We can do that with confidence because we know that God loves us and will, to go back to the last line of our passage from Jeremiah, forgive our iniquity and remember our sin no more. So let us with confidence trust in God, look to our hearts, and live in love. It is the way of the new covenant in Christ. It is the way written on our hearts. Amen.