Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on October 16, 2022. Based on Jeremiah 31:27-34.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” This is the Shema, the centerpiece of Jewish morning and evening prayer services, something taught to Jewish children as their bedtime prayers, and the traditional last words of a Jew. It encapsulates the monotheistic beliefs of Judaism and reminds observant Jews of the true focus of their religion. We find it in Deuteronomy chapter 6, which reports Moses’s farewell discourse.
Deuteronomy is the closing book of the Torah or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Collectively, the Torah describes a covenant relationship between Yahweh and Israel. We see an evolution in understanding from first Yahweh being the God of Abraham—special to him, but not necessarily the only god—to eventually El Elyon, God Most High, the one true God. This is a part of God’s progressive revelation to humanity as humans grow in their ability to understand who God is.
In particular, the Torah is concerned with establishing the Sinai covenant. Recall that the Israelites were a group of tribes who were living as slaves in Egypt. God freed them from slavery and they escaped into the wilderness, but then what? They were still just a ragtag group of nomads. The covenant at Sinai turned them into a nation.
The technical terms under this covenant were suzerain and vassal. In antiquity, we see a number of covenants of this sort between a powerful nation, like Assyria, and a lesser nation, like Moab. The powerful nation is the suzerain and agrees to protect the lesser nation, called their vassal. In return, the vassal is supposed to “love” their suzerain. Here, “love” is not an emotion, but an action. The vassal is supposed to support their suzerain, give them money or supplies or people in times of need or war. A covenant is like a treaty, but more relational. In the modern world, perhaps the relationship between Russia and Belarus is like suzerain and vassal.
In the Sinai covenant, God is the suzerain and Israel is the vassal. In this way, God turns Israel into a nation, because only a nation can be in this sort of relationship. What we call the Ten Commandments are actually the headline terms of the covenant. Think about the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” God is saying, I’m your suzerain because I rescued you when you were in trouble, so you will be my vassal and acknowledge only my authority over you. God goes on to list other conditions, which are basically ways to support God or to take care of your neighbor—ways to love God and love neighbor. Deuteronomy expands upon these themes and spells out just what it is to love God and neighbor, how that plays out in real life, and what the consequences will be if Israel, as a nation, fails to uphold their end of the bargain.
Jeremiah speaks out against Judah in the days shortly before their conquest. The Old Testament basically narrates the history of Judah and Israel through their rise, fall, and rebirth. They start as one man—Abraham—who has a grandson, Jacob, who gets nicknamed Israel. Jacob’s twelve sons go on to found twelve tribes, one of which is Judah. After God rescues them from Egypt, they become a nation comprising these twelve tribes. Eventually they settle in Canaan and establish a monarchy under Saul, David, and Solomon. That’s the peak, after which they begin their slow decline. Ten of the tribes split off, so that there are two kingdoms, Israel and Judah. The northern kingdom is conquered, and then the southern kingdom is conquered and taken into exile. Seventy years later, Judah is freed from their exile and they return to rebuild. So there is this grand story arc from greatness to sin to exile to partial restoration.
In a sense, this is a “type” of all Creation. In Biblical studies, a “type” is a real person or nation or event that can be interpreted as representing something else, something greater. Israel’s story arc can be interpreted in two ways, going down or up in scale. Going down in scale, we can maybe see ourselves, our own lives, in this story. We grow up and are formed into adults by our parents or other adults. We’re on our own, and usually, we screw up. Maybe in big ways, maybe in small ways, but regardless, most of us go through some heartbreaks that we cause ourselves. Then, like the prodigal son, we come to ourselves, return to God’s guiding ways, and become better people.
Going up in scale, Israel’s story is in a sense a story about all of Creation. We began as simple people, completely dependent on God. Then gradually, societies grew and changed. Every society suffers from systemic abuse or neglect of the poor and marginalized. Every human institution falls short of God’s glory. Here and there, we can see bright spots in human history, times when societies did the right thing and were oriented towards improving people’s lives. In America, I can point to the Progressive Era, from the 1890s to the 1920s. This was a time when “robber barons” had their power reigned in. When protections were put in place for workers and consumers. When women were given the right to vote. When educational access radically expanded. When most modern service organizations were founded, from the Optimists to the Lions Club to the Boy Scouts and beyond. Now, these efforts had their problems, but at least there was a general ethos of helping build a better society.
But just as Israel’s restoration after the exile was only partial, these bright spots in history are only partial and have not completely transformed the world. The trend is in the right direction, though. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The world poverty rate, based on the percentage living on less than $5.50 per day, was 42.9% in 2018, which sounds bad, but is better than the peak of 68.1% in 1993. By nearly every metric, the world is better today than it was 500 years ago.
Yet as far as we have come, we have a long way to go. Let me turn back to Jeremiah. This section of his prophecies came near the end of Judah’s existence as an independent nation, but before they were actually conquered. I’ve said before that the apostle Paul had a hard life—well, so did Jeremiah. A few chapters later, he is imprisoned in a cistern and almost dies before being rescued. His life was so hard because he was an outspoken critic of Judah’s society. In fact, his recorded pronouncements were such extreme criticism that they gave rise to a term, jeremiad, which is “a long literary work … in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society’s imminent downfall.” Basically, he spent his whole life telling Judah’s leaders how terrible they were. They mistreated the poor and ignored their commitments to God.
Here in the middle of his ranting and raving, though, he takes a few chapters to give Judah hope. Back in chapter 29 we get the famous verse, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” He encouraged those who were captured by the Babylonians to live as well as they could in that captivity because one day, they would be free to return to Judah and rebuild Jerusalem.
Jeremiah spoke of a time when the material world of Israel and Judah would be reconciled. He said, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” He basically said that they were being punished, but the punishment would not last forever. He was speaking specifically about the restoration of Judah as a nation in what once was Canaan.
Yet Jeremiah’s words also point forward to the new covenant that Jesus Christ instituted. The original covenant was a suzerain/vassal relationship. Israel would be a nation that was a vassal to their God. But that was only temporary, as all things in this world are. That was just a way to teach them to follow God’s will and God’s ways. Moses said, “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.” He told the Israelites to remember God’s Laws, to write them on their door posts, to bind them on their hands and on their heads. He knew that people are forgetful and need constant reminders.
But God had a better plan. God said, “I will write it on their hearts.” We had been given book knowledge in the form of a set of laws, but now we will be given heart knowledge. God knows love must come from our hearts, not our heads. It must be both the absence of causing pain to our neighbors, and the action of helping them. It must be incarnational.
We have been made in the image of God. That image goes beyond our physical features and includes our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. We must become image-bearers by having God’s heart. Since Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension, we have become the body of Christ. We need to see our neighbors as God sees them and love our neighbors as God loves them.
Now, that’s impossible to do on our own, but with God, all things are possible. By that I mean, if we trust our normal human instincts, we are almost certain to do the wrong thing. I preach inclusion, but truthfully, when I encounter someone who looks and acts different from me, I still have those normal human biases against them. My conscious mind embraces diversity, but my subconscious mind reacts just like someone in a primitive tribe protecting himself from outsiders. But with God’s help, I get a little better all the time, and maybe someday my subconscious mind will get reprogrammed. In the same way, God is transforming each person to be a little more Christ-like. And collectively, our world is becoming a little closer to God’s original divine plan.
The days are surely coming when all shall know God, for he will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. That day has already come, and yet is still in our future. We live in an already-but-not-yet state. We have already been forgiven, through Jesus’s life of sacrifice. Yet we still sin against God and neighbor, and so we still need to be forgiven. We get glimpses of the kingdom of God, those times when God reveals her love to us and we can feel her presence in and among us. But we know we are not yet living in that kingdom, because we still see people suffering and dying, due to drugs or violence or poverty.
But the days are surely coming, and we can live into God’s kingdom now if we allow God to write their laws upon our hearts. Jesus did not abolish the law, but instead showed how it could lead to a better life. He showed that if we make God our top priority, and our neighbor’s welfare as important as our own, we can be part of the kingdom of God now. In the Gospel lesson we heard that it takes only a little bit of faith to be a part of that kingdom. If we trust in God’s plan, we can turn our focus from protecting ourselves from harm to helping others thrive. Just as Jeremiah told the ancient Judahites who were in exile, if we work for the good of others, God’s grace will flow over and through us, partially restoring us in preparation for our future full restoration and reconciliation.
One thing you will notice if you read the Old Testament prophets is that by and large, they were failures. Jeremiah preached that Judah needed to turn their hearts to God and follow God’s laws, and they basically ignored him or imprisoned him. The king even made a great show of burning the scroll that Jeremiah dictated to his scribe. I think Judah had to hit rock bottom before they would get the message. You sometimes see the same thing with people who find Jesus while they’re in prison—they have to hit rock bottom to realize that they need to rely on God instead of themselves. I think the same applies to churches, and the Church more broadly: we have to realize that relying on our own ideas and our own efforts is never going to be enough. If instead we rely on God, place all our faith in God, and put God’s love into action, we can be a part of remaking Creation according to the original divine plan and start to live in the kingdom of God now. Amen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download