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The New Covenant
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 23, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Jeremiah 31:31-34 Luke 22:14-29
Once upon a time when I was an associate minister, I would spend a month each summer in a cottage belonging to my colleague’s family on an island along the coast of Maine. There I would curl up with a book by the fire—it was summer in Maine after all—or stretch out on the dock, reading as long as the sunlight allowed. My reading, however, was seldom idle. One summer was spent in Patristic theology, tracing the genesis of the doctrine of the Trinity. Another summer was given to the first volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. But the most valuable summers were spent entirely with my nose in the Bible, first the Old Testament and then the New. “What are you reading?” an islander would ask me at the Saturday night cocktail party held in the so-called one room yacht club. “Halfway through II Kings and itching to do business with Jeremiah,” I could have said. Instead, like a rabbi, I countered a question with a question. “Have you read the latest Ann Rivers Siddon, falling silent, nodding knowingly. But to tell the truth, what I remember most about the summer spent between Genesis and Malachi was finally getting the sweep of the biblical narrative into my bones. Never having been one who set out to read the Bible cover to cover, now I happily spent weeks slogging through the reports of kings who “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” such that their kingdoms came to naught. I endured days fogged in with prophets railing against the apostasy of God’s chosen tribes. Slowly I felt the weight of living at a distance from God’s presence, knew the woes that come to people who walk in darkness as though the darkness were light. And like the longing of the deer I spied on paths leading me to astonishing ocean vistas, I longed to return to God’s temple as one exiled. Even more than getting the plot that summer, at the end I remember longing for word of God’s Messiah on the way to redeem our sorry human condition. So we begin this morning with the repeating story of the God who will not give up on God’s people, with the story of a people who keep quitting the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in favor of foreign gods. Idolatry and disobedience fill these pages from David to David’s greater Son. The glory days of David, selectively remembered, give way to the opulent years of Solomon’s reign wherein the temple denied David is built with God’s blessing, at least according to the royal narrative. On first reading it would seem that Solomon was the promised son whose kingdom would never end. But alas, with the exception of a few reformers like Josiah who unearthed, in the rubble of the temple, a long lost copy of the law of Moses we know as the Book of Deuteronomy and returned God’s people briefly to faithfulness…or Hezekiah who, with Isaiah’s help, seemed almost able to pull off the kingdom on earth…the people that wanted to be a nation just like other nations got (as the saying goes) just what they asked for in their kings. By the time we encounter the respective prophets of Judah and Israel, we find ourselves standing on the stage of a Shakespearian tragedy populated by characters that cannot help but bring it all to ruin. Exile, in other words, looms inexorably ahead. To put a present point on it, Jeremiah first hears the word of the Lord in the midst of a nation rife with idolatry and ideology. “The ideology he had to counter in Jerusalem,” reports the now familiar voice of Walter Brueggemann, “was a royal-political-economic system which said ‘peace, peace’ when there was not peace. The idolatry he had to meet was the self-deceiving worship of an indifferent god who provided cover, security, and rationalization for covenant breakers….In the face of such numbed deception…Jeremiah speaks…the hurt of God.” But the people were more taken with issues of homeland security than moved by the pathos of God: no one cared to listen. In 2500 years, not much has changed! Perhaps I have also grown deaf since my salad days, but I no longer hear the prophetic voices that once called this nation to account, demanded of our common order a care for the least of these, required much from those who have acquired most, refused comfort in the face of injustice. These voices not only are silent in the land but also in the church. Like the Israelites before us, we are a people who have “arrived at a manufactured religion, worshipping a god from whom we dare expect no transformation. Indeed,” says Brueggemann, “we prefer a god who has become a guarantor of the way things are. We absolutize the present and imagine it has always been the way it is. Because we have no memory, we articulate a god who has no history [spirituality, it is called]….The outcome, surely, is an idol, an immobilizing transcendence, a god so secure, so established, so allied with the American dream that there is no space left for anguish, ambiguity, uncertainty, hurt beyond guilt.” In such a situation, God’s deliverance of the Israelites into the hands of their enemies was paradoxically their only hope of a return to the temple and to the worship of the God who is God. Still Jeremiah, who loved the people he was called to condemn, could not help but speak God’s promise in prospect, the promise of a new covenant God would establish with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. No longer would the covenant be conditional as it had been since the wilderness; nor would it be something from which they would turn as they had turned away from God to human kings. This would be a covenant written upon their hearts, written in flesh of their flesh. “They shall know me,” God says through Jeremiah with the biblical connotation of two becoming one flesh, “from the least of them to the greatest…for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” But by the time the Israelites are returned physically from exile, Jeremiah’s prophetic words concerning a new covenant had all but been forgotten. To be sure, the conditional covenant God made through Moses was renewed at the Watergate. However the real promise of the moment was the promise made to David’s line: that the son of David would return to Zion and his throne would be established forever. In a land continually under occupation by foreign powers, messianic expectations were fueled by the retelling of this story whose focal point, according to New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, was the king who would “restore national liberty to God’s people…would fight Israel’s battles…[and]…defeat Israel’s enemies.” Or in Brueggemann’s words “Israel expected the good, effective king to come, even though all present and known incumbents had failed. Out of concrete political practice arose an expectation of the coming of messiah: a historical agent to be anointed, commissioned and empowered out of the Davidic house to do the Davidic thing in time to come, to establish Yahweh’s justice and righteousness in the earth.” Instead, some say, they got Jesus. I remember my colleague asking our Israeli guide on my first trip to the Holy Land, “Why don’t you believe Jesus is the messiah. He fulfilled all the Hebrew Scriptures, didn’t he? What more are you looking for?” “Look at the world” the guide said to us as many Jews have said to me since. “What is different now that your messiah has come? The land God promised is still not securely ours; our enemies are at our gate; we do not dwell in peace; there is no justice and no righteousness. When Messiah comes, the promise of land and the future and a king to rule in righteousness will be made sure.” “Are you he who is to come” John asked in a question that still echoes down the corridors of history, “or shall we look for another?” What we cannot hear with our New Testament ears is the striking character of Jesus’ reply: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them.” We hurry to the prophet’s words and connect the dots. But for ears tuned to the prophetic and political expectations of one who would establish justice and righteousness on earth—a human king anointed to rule as David ruled—the words evoke as much doubt as belief. As for one who would rebuild the temple, would fight Israel’s battles, would reestablish the land with secure borders and rule as a king rules other nations, Jesus could not have been farther from their understanding of what God had promised. Time does not permit the counter litany of how, according to the gospels, Jesus rang the changes on Israel’s messianic expectations such that those with ears to hear would know in him they were having to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the same God made known in the law and the prophets, the God who once promised never to take his steadfast love from David and David’s line forever. Suffice it to say that the new covenant in Christ, the promise vouchsafed to humankind by God in the life, death and resurrection of a Jew from Nazareth, is a promise of a different order. On the one hand and far from fulfilling our expectations in human history, the birth of David’s Son deepens our longing, his life literally increases our dis-ease with present arrangements, his death and resurrection intensifies our hope for a kingdom where neither kings nor their deathly ways rule, but where the Lord God Almighty liveth and reigneth forever in God’s kingdom that hath no end. That is to say, in Christ the promise is fulfilled not in the sense that what has been promised has or shortly will come to pass. Rather, said Karl Barth at the beginning of Hitler’s reign, “it means that the promise is now complete, unambiguous and thus potent.” I cannot say this too many times because it is so counter to minds made up by present day religion and politics. In Jesus Christ we behold the content of our hope, though still it remains hope. But on the other hand, we behold in David’s Son the true king in whose death and resurrection the only enemy that finally matters has been defeated. In him (his body being God’s temple) God had come to dwell, had returned to Zion as the King of Love and the Prince of Peace: he had come to do battle with the last enemy that is death. O Death where is thy sting? Thanks be to God, wrote Paul, who giveth us the victory in Jesus Christ. “The resurrection,” concludes Wright, “was the only reason [Jesus’ disciples] came up with for supposing that Jesus stood for anything other than a dream that might have come true but didn’t. It was the only reason why his life and words possessed any relevance two weeks, let alone two millennia, after his death.” Now children of a new covenant sealed in Christ’ blood, these first Christians lived in the light of God’s victory over death and as though God’s kingdom had been inaugurated. They dwelt in the world of present arrangements as strangers and sojourners who administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched raging fires, escaped the edge of the sword, won strength out of weakness. They lived as witnesses to the covenant written on their hearts in the sure and certain hope that we, no longer fearing death, might dare to live the life given us by God to live for Christ sake. Thanks be to God! |