What to do with the new covenant?

 

Sermon. 19/10/2025. St Peter’s Merton, St George’s, Saham Toney

Trinity 8, Year C

Jer 31.27-34

Luke 18.1-8

 

Today I am going to push us a little. I don’t mean push, so as to make you fall down (God forbid); I mean push in the sense of giving you a gentle but clear nudge. I am going to offer some teaching which may be challenging. I am – I will say it right away – going to be bringing some insights from the Jewish tradition. You can take it!

 

The first reading today, from the prophecy of Jeremiah, contains a passage Christians tend to find extremely moving. Words on the “new covenant”. A covenant where the Law or Teaching or Guidance of God (the Torah) is written on people’s very hearts. A covenant it is so very natural for Christians to see fulfilled in Jesus. The Law, the Very Teaching of Very God was written on Jesus’ heart (Christians believe), and so, among other things, Christians are freed from the need to practise all the commandments there are in the Written Law (the Torah, as the first five books of the Bible).

 

Now, every word I have just said may be true, and I am not disagreeing with the import of what I have just claimed. But! But Jewish friends are likely to say: Believe what is right for you to believe, but please just not that that is not the plain meaning of the text in Jeremiah. Christians are indeed very comfortable thinking that Jeremiah’s New Covenant is revolutionary, but we miss just how revolutionary it is.

 

We think it means that we (Christians, everybody) can happily leave behind sacrifices, and temples, and rules about “clean” and “unclean”, and indeed almost every rule. For now it is what we feel or contemplate on the inside that counts. But Jeremiah is imagining something that may make all of that seem like so much tinkering

 

Listen again: “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me…”

 

So this goes way beyond getting rid of finicky rituals. It means there are no laws at all any more.

 

Think about it. If the ways of God are written on people’s hearts, what would the police, or the courts, or the prisons have to do? They would grow mouldy. And, yes, we might need a government to (you know) make sure the streetlamps were lit, but not to deal with crime (there isn’t any), and not to deal with bitter conflicts (there aren’t any). It is a certain kind of anarchy. Jeremiah is picturing a certain kind of anarchy.

 

But that’s the easy bit. Harder is facing up to how in Jeremiah’s vision there is a lot less for synagogues and for churches to do. For surely one whole strand of what churches and synagogues do is… teach. But – we have just heard it - teaching falls away. Another whole strand is encouragement. We come together to encourage each other (to say words which amount to “Know God… know Jesus…”). But – we’ve just heard it - encouragement falls away. We could still meet for worship, but that would be about it.

 

No laws; no teaching. No teaching; no laws. This is actually what Jeremiah describes as the new covenant. One question is: Is this our reality? And of course it is not. But here’s a different question:

Is it even attractive?

 

I’m serious. And I will seriously push/nudge us a little bit further. You see there is one Jewish reading of this new covenant of Jeremiah which sees it as deeply un-attractive.

 

Indeed, some say that what we have here is Jeremiah at his most negative. Jeremiah already is the most gloomy prophet (he curses the day of this birth [Jer 20.14]). Here (so the argument goes) Jeremiah slips further down, into despair. He thinks that God will give up with all the older covenants. In the older covenants (think Noah, Abraham, Moses and Sinai), God wanted to cooperate with human beings. Work with. To persuade, cajole, exhort, train, and bring in. Always alongside human beings, never forcing their hand. Never forcing them. But here Jeremiah imagines that God will just kick the whole game-board over, with all the pieces, and start again. Start again with people not as we understand them, people who obey God automatically, like automata, like robots. They will obey God, because they simply have no choice. They are God’s AI-people. That’s sad, we may feel, and the argument is: It is meant to be sad.

 

I have pushed us. Sometimes it is good to come to a familiar – a beloved – text, and, yes, be nudged to see it in a different way, a challenging way. It isn’t Bible Sunday today (that is next week), but there is no harm in us spending a moment or two rediscovering the Bible as strange. Not estranging. We are not estranged from God. But God is still so different from our expectations that God’s word comes to us as strange.

 

Here endeth the lesson!

 

And now a story. I was a student in Dublin many years ago. I spent a happy afternoon wandering around its main park, Phoenix Park. I knew that Pope (now Saint Pope) John Paul II had celebrated mass there in front of well over a million faithful. (That was before I was there [it was in 1979])! There was, you won’t be surprised to hear, a cross, to mark the very spot where he stood. And a text. A simple text. It said simply:

Be converted every day.

 

Be converted every day. I come back to this, time and time again. Day by day, you might say!

 

So I want to say that whatever the meaning of Jeremiah’s new covenant (and remember that Jeremiah himself might not have known quite what he was saying), one thing we can do is… make it our own, here and now. In this case, we can ask:

 

What would it mean,

if the very law of very God were written on my heart,

today?

What, then, would I do?

How then would I live?  

 

It is something you may have to sit with. It is something worth sitting with. You may not get an instant answer. You may well not, you probably won’t, you almost certainly won’t get an instant answer. But you can be like the persistent widow of today’s gospel, and keep coming back to the point.

 

What would it mean,

if the very law of very God were written on my heart,

today?

What, then, would I do?

How then would I live?  

Amen.