Out with the Old and In with the New
Why does the church exist? The answer is two fold: 1) First, because of a message, the message of God’s radical grace that we have received. We exist because we were told of God’s radical, unconditional, unmerited love for hurting people like us through his Son Jesus Christ, and we need to hear that same message again every week, every day!, all the time. Like one of my friends once preached in our church years ago in Pittsburgh, our need for this message is just like a child’s need for love from their parent. You don’t just tell your child you love them once and they’re good for the rest of their lives. They need to hear over and over again every day that they are loved. A simple truth, but incredibly profound. We have the same need as children of God. We need to hear his radical love for us again and again every day. Being loved never gets old, never.
2) And this leads to the second part of why the church exists: because we want to share that same message with other people just like us. People that have been skeptical that such love exists and that carry wounds from looking for such a love in all the wrong places, as the song goes. We may not look the same. We may come from completely different backgrounds and have completely different stories, but when it comes down to it we have the same need. We can all relate to each other because no matter what our story is it has skepticism and pain in it. We are all skeptical, wounded, and probably exhausted in some way shape or form because we are all human, and humans all have the same desperate need for love. It is the great unifier, the great universal.
So it’s this message of radical love from God in Jesus Christ that defines us, this message of grace. It is why I am here writing to you today, and whether you have realized it yet or not, it is why you are here reading this. And I begin this way today because of the passage from Jeremiah 31 that is one of the readings in the Anglican Church this week. It is acclaimed as one of the most important passages in all of the Old Testament (OT), and I think a strong argument could be made for it being the single-most important passage in all of the OT because it states more clearly than anywhere else in the OT God’s radical grace for broken people. It is what so many of the New Testament writers drew upon when looking back at the OT after the events of Jesus’ cross and resurrection. It helped make sense of it all.
In it Jeremiah tells us of the new covenant between God and his people. In fact, this is only place in the Old Testament where the phrase “new covenant” is used. It’s described in a lot of other places, but never explicitly named as Jeremiah does here. A covenant is an agreement between two parties that basically defines or stipulates the nature of their relationship. So this is like God’s DTR (define the relationship) talk with us. He’s passing a note to us in class through Jeremiah. If you were ever wondering or worrying about what your relationship was with God, if you were unsure about the signals he was sending, or what he meant by that thing that he said that one time over the phone, remember Jeremiah. Jeremiah is like, “Oh my God, He is like so in to you!!!”
Thankfully, he was even more specific than that about this new covenant with us. And interestingly in order to tell us what this new covenant is like he has to contrast it with the old covenant. God says through Jeremiah, “[This covenant is] not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord.” He is contrasting this new covenant that he is making with his people with the Mosaic covenant, the covenant made through Moses with his people in the book of Exodus. Yes, Exodus was a book many millennia before it was a movie starring Christian Bale. That covenant was based on merit and works. It was a covenant of law. In that covenant God basically echoed the song from the movie Once and said to his people, “If you want me, satisfy me.” If you want to be in a relationship with me, then you better satisfy me, you have to obey me and here are the rules written on tablets of stone. The 10 Commandments.
SO, right off the bat the Lord is saying this new covenant I am making with you is NOT like the old one. It is NOT about works. In other words, my relationship with you is NOT about you being a good person. It is NOT about how you perform. It is NOT about how you behave. Hear that again. This is God’s DTR with us and he is saying it is NOT about your performance. It is NOT about you satisfying him. I repeat it because none of us think that way. Not even right now, after I just told you that it is not that way. You still think that it is. So do I. We do not think that is true. We are like Will at the end of Good Will Hunting. Our first response to this message is just like his, “Yeah, I know.” But we don’t. We need it to be repeated again and again. Just like Robin Williams’ character, Sean, does. He keeps saying to Will, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And it makes Will terribly uncomfortable because he’s been burned before. He’s been hurt so many times and told so many times the lie that it was all on him that his defenses were always up. We are just like that. If you want to understand us, if you want to understand the human reaction to grace, to real radical grace watch that scene again here (warning there is some language in it, but it’s so appropriate for what’s going on) from Good Will Hunting. We get defensive. We get angry. We don’t believe it, and we even lash out against it because it just can’t be true. For so long we have lived under something else, a different message. A message of demand. A message of conditions. A message of “If you want me, satisfy me.” Perform! Be better! Do more! That’s not enough! Work harder! Satisfy me.
And the first thing that God says here as he defines our relationship with him is, “It is not like that.” It’s not up to you. It’s not up to you. It’s not up to you. It’s not up to you. And just like Will, our defenses cannot stand up against this unrelenting message of love, and we are undone. We break down into tears and fall into his arms finally crying out over all of the pain we have been carrying. Finally letting it out…as we are held for the first time in forever. I want you to hear that word, that your relationship with God is NOT like that old law-based covenant. That one was based on our performance and effort, and we could not do it. We could never do it. We could never keep it. The law was never able to enable us to do it. It was just written there lifeless on tablets on stone.
That old covenant, which we continually think we are under, leaves us singing with the Cold War Kids, in their song “Saint John”: “Yours truly on trial, I testify, I got to keep on running till the well runs dry!” We are always on trial under the law. We are constantly under its prosecution, so we got to keep on running til the well runs dry. It is an endless cycle of effort and failure, effort and failure. You know the conditional refrain, “If I can just do X, then everything will be fine.” If I can just lose more weight, then I’ll be fine. If I can just get through this next week, then everything will be fine. If I can just find that right person, if I can just get that promotion, if I can just get out of this relationship, if I can just get through this deadline. It goes on and on. We may actually succeed in some of these more trivial areas, but there is always another. It never ends. There is never a mission accomplished moment. We just keep on putting out more effort, but the goal of perfection is never accomplished. We focus on these more temporal concerns trying to move the goal line closer to us so that we can cross it, but we find that every time it appears we have crossed it, it instantly moves another hundred yards away. It is forever out of our reach. That’s the old covenant based on law. Again, it leaves us singing with the Cold War Kids, “All us boys on death row, we’re just waiting for a pardon.”
This new covenant is different. God tells us that it won’t be cold and lifeless, written on stone like the Mosaic covenant. Rather, it will be written on our hearts. It will be a part of our very being. We will be given new hearts, new life. We’ve said it before, and we’ll obviously say it again, but God is concerned with the heart, with who you are. The old covenant did nothing but expose the brokenness within us. It showed the inability for us to be good. It was all about focusing on the problem. The new covenant is all about giving us the answer. It does not expose the heart as broken; it replaces it with a new one. It heals all that has been broken. God actually brings about the change in us through the new covenant that the old always demanded, but could never do anything about.
The new is written on our hearts and this is very good news because it also means that this new covenant is not dependent on external law nor on human interpretation. Being written on our hearts means that we have intimate knowledge of and fellowship with God himself. There is something personal about it for all of us. He says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest…” (vv. 33-34). We know God because he gives us new hearts to know him, new hearts that love him. This does not mean that we do not need to ever be taught. It is not about rabid individualism where we need no one. Not at all. What this is about is the fact that this new covenant means each person will have their own heart experience of divine grace from God. Each one of us will know grace on a heart level, on a level that is far deeper than just some intellectual exercise. We won’t be able to simply respond like Will, “Yeah, I know.” Because God’s radical, unconditional grace will penetrate down into that place in us where we are so scared and hurting and tired, so damn tired of all of the effort and disappointment and the endless demand. God will reach into that place and say, “It’s not up to you. Let go. I love you. I love you. I love you.” He will take hold of us there and embrace us in our very place of pain and we will be undone forever. It puts us all on equal footing. There is no hierarchy of people who have more of God than others. It is a promise to give of himself to us, to all of us, “from the least to the greatest.”
Finally, we come to the end of the passage and we see exactly what this new covenant is based upon. How is all of this possible? How can it be truly different from the old covenant? As we said before truth is often very simple, but incredibly profound…this new covenant is based on forgiveness. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” It is NOT about works. It is NOT about merit. It is NOT about performance. Because it IS about forgiveness, the forgiveness of our sin. More than that, it is about the forgetting of our sin. It is not like any forgiveness we may have ever experienced on this earth because the One forgiving us literally forgets that the sin ever existed. “All us boys (and girls) on death row, we’re just waiting for a pardon?”...here it is. We are pardoned forever. This is why it is most often called the covenant of grace. God is telling us here that he is going to change everything in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the one who establishes this new covenant of grace by dying for our sin on the cross and rising again from the dead. We remember it every time we celebrate communion. We hear his words as he says, “This is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it do this for the remembrance of me.”
This is the message of radical grace: because of Jesus Christ we are forgiven of our sin and it is forgotten by God forever. We have been wiped clean, given new hearts, made new creations. It is the reason why the church exists, why we are here. We are children who need to hear it again from our Father that loves us without condition, and we want others to know that this love is real and it’s free. We want everyone to hear that “It is not up to you. It is up to God, and he has done it in Jesus for you.”
Amen.
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