The Rev. Kristin Krantz
Lent 5, 3/21/2021
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:1-13
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33
I will put my law within in, and I will write it on their hearts;
and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
The image of God writing on our hearts is one of my favorite images in all of scripture. Fun story, this passage from Jeremiah was the focus of my very first academic paper in seminary.
In today’s reading, the prophet was writing to a people in exile – a people who had watched the very center of their universe – Jerusalem – be destroyed as they were led away to captivity in chains.
It was in this time of exile that God, through Jeremiah, made sweeping promises to the people of Israel – promises of restoration and return, and most importantly, of restored relationship.
Now the first 30 chapters of Jeremiah is full of the prophet scolding the people for their sin and lack of faithfulness in God. But where we pick up today, he begins a new message – bringing good news, comfort, and hope. God once again has seen the suffering of God’s people, and God’s heart has been touched: God forgives them. This forgiveness was proclaimed through a declaration of a new covenant.
There are multiple stories about covenants throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Ones that immediately come to mind are probably Noah and the rainbow, and of course Moses and the stone tablets.
As in previous covenant stories, here in Jeremiah God again promised to be in relationship with the people, even declaring that they would belong to each other.
Jeremiah used the phrase “new covenant,” but it is more accurately understood to be a renewal of earlier covenants, especially the covenant God made with them back in the desert at Sinai with the Ten Commandments.
The great scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures Walter Breuggeman called this cycle of covenanting the “core memory” of Israel about God: the trust that God will do today, in this bad circumstance, what God has done in the past. God will give new covenant, a new relationship, a new creation.[1]
And here in Jeremiah, it is a thing of the heart. Not external like the rainbow or the stone tablets, but inscribed deep within the heart of every person – something that cannot be lost.
What a breathtaking image. The intimacy of God touching our hearts so that we can never lose our connection and our way back to God.
It’s interesting how often people will contrast the God of the “Old Testament” and the God of the “New Testament,” with the former usually being depicted as harsh, punishing, angry, and wrathful – and the latter as kind, gentle, and loving – the Good Shepherd.
And yet this story in Jeremiah, alongside so many others in the Hebrew Scriptures, shows a God that has abiding love and compassion for a people who try to be faithful, but keep falling to sin and temptation.
God’s love is always at the center of it all. It is in fact what connects all of our sacred stories.
And this love is what is at the heart of our most sacred story as Christians – the story we will enter again next Sunday with the procession into Jerusalem and the events following that led to Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension.
We claim love as the center of that story because of the resurrection, where we see that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death. We are an Easter people we proudly say.
And yet we are not only Easter people – we are also Good Friday people. We can’t have the reconciliation of Easter without the experience of exile found in Good Friday.
Yet biblical scholar Kathryn Matthews writes that the day that falls between those two, Holy Saturday, is perhaps the place we live most of our lives.
Holy Saturday is often skipped over in our Holy Week observances. It is an empty day. Christ is in the tomb, and all creation waits. It is sometimes called the longest day. It is a not-yet, in-between time that in many ways describes our lives.[2]
We know about Good Friday, the cross, sorrow, and death – we’ve had these experiences in our own lives. We also know about Easter hope, trust in promises, and the hint of resurrection for all of us because Jesus is risen from the dead.[3]
But our lives are not all about Good Friday or Easter Day. In between birth and death and what’s beyond, we live. And so, we wait and we understand a little more why faith is best described as trust.[4]
This is why words of comfort, like those found in Jeremiah today, are so important – they are reminders to continue trusting in the midst of it all.
We live in a time of great change and uncertainty, and the whole last year has been like one long Holy Saturday with all the waiting we’ve had to do. But when anxiety and fear rise up, we need only remember that God’s covenant is written on our hearts. God’s love is abiding – there is nothing we can do to make God love us more, there is nothing we can do to make God love us less, there is nothing we can do to separate ourselves from God’s love.
Next week we enter Holy Week, encountering the story that is at the heart of our faith as Christians. While this year our services will look different than in previous years because of the pandemic, I invite you to attend as many of the services as you are able. The journey through those holy days is like no other for deepening our faith and trust. And so I pray our hearts may be fixed on God just as God is inscribed in our hearts. Amen.
[1] Kathryn Matthews, Weekly Seeds, www.ucc.org/weekly_seeds.
[2] Kathryn Matthews, Weekly Seeds, www.ucc.org/weekly_seeds.
[3] Kathryn Matthews, Weekly Seeds, www.ucc.org/weekly_seeds.
[4] Kathryn Matthews, Weekly Seeds, www.ucc.org/weekly_seeds.