Jeremiah 31:31-34
March 17, 2024
The
movie, Return to Me, is a sweet story
about a new heart; literally. Bob and Elizabeth, a young couple very much in
love, are on their way home from an award gala when they are involved in a terrible
car crash. Elizabeth is killed, and the decision is made to donate her organs.
Her heart is given to a young woman named Grace, who without Elizabeth’s heart
would have surely died herself.
Grace’s transplant is successful.
She lives. Not only does she manage to keep breathing, but she also rides a
bike, sings at her grandfather’s restaurant, and does many other things she
wasn’t able to before this new heart began to beat within her. With this new
heart, Grace lives more fully than she had ever been able to in the past. But
she cannot forget that the life she is now living so completely came at a cost
to someone else. It was because of someone else’s death that she now lives. Her
family’s rejoicing over her new heart and her newly found life walks
hand-in-hand with another family’s grief and tragedy. Grace wants to somehow
thank the family of her donor. She wants to honor their loss, so she writes the
woman’s family a letter. The donor and donor family were anonymous, so she had
no names or personal information beyond an address. But she writes the letter
regardless. The letter reaches Bob, the widower in the story. However in his
grief he is unable to open it, so the letter sits on his desk, unread, and is
eventually covered by other mail.
To make a long story short, Bob and
Grace eventually meet and fall in love; Elizabeth’s heart beating in Grace’s
body connects them in an unexpected way. They find their own happy ending,
complete with the twists and turns that make for good cinema. But it was this gift
of a new heart that created a new life for them both.
A new heart. A new life.
Although the word of the Lord given
to Jeremiah is not exactly about a heart transplant, it is about something new
– a new covenant. The Law, which was once written on tablets of stone, will now
be written on the hearts of the people.
“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. No longer shall they teach one another, or
say to each other, ‘know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least
of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity and
remember their sin no more.”
Verse 31 begins, “The days are
surely coming …” and then we hear these powerful words of hope and assurance
that come with this new covenant, this new promise God will make with his
people. God has forgotten the promise breaking of the past. God has forgotten
how the people have forgotten him in the past. Now is the time for the new – a
new covenant, new life, new hope.
Forgetting
is a dominant theme in these verses in Jeremiah. As I understand the larger
context of this passage and this prophet, the people have been paying for the
sins of their ancestors. Their complaint has been that God never forgets the
sins of the past – even the sins committed by others. New generations continue
to pay for the transgressions of the old. When will they stop being punished
for the sins of their parents? When will God finally forget?
In the verses immediately preceding
our passage, God assures the people that, indeed, he has forgotten. No more will the people be
judged for the sins of those who went before them. No more will a child’s teeth
be set on edge because a parent ate sour grapes. From now on, God tells them,
there will be new life in your midst. Humans and animals will once again
multiply. Judgment was brought on them for wrongdoing, but blessings will be
bestowed as well. God tells them that he has plucked up, but he will also
plant. One commentator wrote that God is reversing the previous relationship
with Judah and Israel. No longer will their relationship with God be based on
disobedience; instead it will be based on a new covenant, a new promise, a new
heart.
Jeremiah
is not known for being a joyful book. Jeremiah puts into words the heartbreak
of the people’s broken promises to God, the heartbreak of their time in exile.
Yet these verses before us are filled with joy and hope, beauty and comfort.
That is probably why these are some of the most recognized verses from
Jeremiah. Some scholars see this as the gospel before the gospel. This covenant
that God promises will not be like the old one. Before, God took
them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. Before, God led them
like a parent leads a small child. Before, God carefully showed
them the way they were supposed to live. Before, God gave them
the Law, but the people broke the Law over and over, and broke their
relationship with God over and over.
But now, in this new
covenant, the Law will be more than words that can be too easily forgotten or
overlooked. The Law was once written on stone tablets, but now the Law will be
written on their hearts. The Law will live within them. They will no longer
need to teach or instruct one another on the Law. It will no longer be a course
of study. Instead the people will fully and absolutely know the Lord. They will
finally and completely be God’s people, and he will be their God. All people –
learned and unlearned, rich and poor, strong and weak – will know God in both
heart and mind. In the days that are surely coming, they will know the Lord,
and the Lord will forgive their iniquity, remembering their sins no more. With
this new covenant, God is giving the people a new promise, a new life, and a
new heart.
The language of these verses in
Jeremiah is so beautiful, so poetic, that it is easy for me to get caught up in
the sound and the emotion of them, without really understanding in a practical
way what they mean. But what do they mean? God promises the people that he will
make a new covenant with them. It will be unlike the covenant of the past. It
will not only be words on paper – or stone – it will be something that lives
within them. When God tells them that they will know him, it seems to me that
this will be an innate knowledge; instinctive, intuitive. The estrangement
between God and God’s people, the connective cord between them that sin severs,
will be restored and refashioned. The people will know the Lord in a new way
because they have been given a new covenant.
What is a covenant? A covenant is a
promise rather than a contract. A contract specifies failure. If I fail to pay
my car payment, which is a contract that I signed with the financing company,
then I will be in breach of contract. A contract specifies failure. But a
covenant does not specify failure, it specifies faithfulness. God promises
again and again to be faithful to his people. God promises that despite our
failure to be faithful, God will not fail. God will remain faithful to
us, even when we have not been faithful to God. In these words of covenant, God
promises to forgive our sins and forget them as well. But this is not one-sided.
We have our side of the covenant to uphold. Our side of the covenant calls us
to love. We are called to love God, to love neighbor, to give our whole lives
to living out the love God has for us. We are called to trust that God is
faithful and to be faithful to God in return by loving others and all creation.
While contracts have a time limit,
covenants do not. The covenant God made with Abraham did not end with the
covenant God made with David. The Davidic covenant did not end with the
covenant we find in our passage from Jeremiah. The covenants of God flow one
into another, finding their final fulfillment with the coming of Jesus -- God’s
promise made flesh – into our midst.
Contracts remain fixed between
certain people, but covenants expand to welcome others. It is unfair to the
context and nature of these words in Jeremiah to make them merely an allegory
of the Christian life to come. Still we, the descendants of Gentiles, are here
because we were welcomed into the expanding promise of God. We too have
received a new heart.
There are those beautiful words
again – new heart – but what does that mean? Is it about seeing God’s world and
God’s people with new eyes? Is it about living a life grounded in love – the
love that works for peace and acts for justice? Is it just some sort of
spiritual transplant?
Or do we find that new hearts are
beating within us when our old hearts are broken wide open? In the second verse
of the hymn, Here I Am, Lord, there is a line that reads “I will break
their hearts of stone, give them hearts for love alone.” I tried to think of
one concise illustration of a heart of stone being broken so that the heart
could exist for love alone. There are plenty of examples out there, thousands
of them. But I realized that sometimes the best example is the one that is
ours. So, rather than tell you about someone receiving a new heart, I am going
to ask you to do something that feels very un-Presbyterian. I am going to ask
you to close your eyes for a moment and think about a time when your heart has
been broken open, when you’ve seen a person or a situation or something else in
a new way with new eyes. Maybe it was a moment when someone who thinks
differently from you shared something that you hadn’t considered before. Maybe
it was a moment when your child asked you a difficult question that you didn’t
know how to answer. Maybe it was a moment when you saw something you could not
unsee. I know those moments exist for you just as they do for me. So, close
your eyes and think. Close your eyes and remember.
Maybe in that moment that we’re
remembering, our old hearts were being chipped away. Maybe in that moment, God
was working on our hearts, breaking hearts of stone and giving us hearts for
love alone. Maybe in those moments God was writing his love on our hearts, so that
we will know, intuitively, instinctively, innately, and forever, the love of
God that is the true law of God. In those moments, and in many more moments to
come, God is writing his love on our hearts. Thanks be to God.
Let all God’s children say, “Amen.”
Amen.
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