On the Heart, Not Stone (March 17, 2024) Jer. 31.31-34

The people are gathered around the square. A new letter just arrived from the homeland, and they are excited. That is until they hear who the writer is. Jeremiah. The one who told them all the bad things that would happen to them. The one who, in his last letter, told them to set down roots because they would be in exile for a long time, 70 years, a lifetime for many. “Bummer man” is the name that they gave him because all he brought was bad news. They also called him “The weeping prophet” because of his demeanor when bringing the bad news that he gave to the people.

And he was a weeping prophet now. Now he sits in the ruins of Jerusalem. The walls are gone, the houses are burned out shells and the Temple looted and destroyed. Why would he not weep? Just because he is shown to be a true prophet does not give any consolation. The words that he gave were ones that he had to give. They were inside him and were like a burning in his bones. He could do nothing but say the words.

So, one can understand why the people are…reluctant to listen to what he has to say. They were burned out hearing how bad things were going to be. They were in exile for crying out loud! Could they not get some good news for once?

Then the letter is read to the people, and they are stunned into silence. What they hear is good news. They are told that the days are coming when things will be better, when God will bring them back to the land, when Jerusalem will be rebuilt and that they will see all of this. They hear that a new covenant will be made with them, one that would not be like the one that they continually broke. And their sins would be forgiven and forgotten. What a message! What hope!

Chapters 30 and 31 of Jeremiah are known as the Book of Consolation. It is here that the prophet tells the people of a time that is coming when things will get better, when they will return and when they will realize who God is and what God can do.

There are three promises in chapter 31 from verses 27 to 40 where Jeremiah says that “The days are surely coming.” The days when God will bring good thing to the people instead of bad. The days when all will be right with the nations.

The first promise is that the land of Judah will be restored. The people will return, God will raise them up and they will raise crops that they raised before. They will once again be the people of the land of Judah and the people of God.

The third promise is that Jerusalem will be restored as well. The city will be rebuilt. Not only that, but it will also be enlarged to include areas that had not been a part of the city before. God also promises that the city will never again be overthrown, or the people uprooted from their homes.

Which leaves the second promise. This is the heart of all three of the promises, the promise of a new covenant.

Covenants in ancient times were made between two parties that were not equal. It was not like today where there would be negotiation with give and take between two equal parties. No, in these covenants there is a relationship that is built between two parties where the stronger cares for the weaker. The weaker party really has nothing to offer to the covenant. And when the covenant was made there would be an animal slaughtered and cut in two. The parties would walk between the two halves of the animal as if to say, “May the same be done to me if I break this covenant.” This is what happened between God and the Hebrews. A covenant was made between God and the Hebrews which was broken not by God, but by the people. So, God is now making a new (or in reality, renewing) covenant with both Israel and Judah.

To understand why this is significant for God to include both, one has to remember that Israel and Judah were two rival kingdoms of the same people, the Hebrews, or the children of Israel. They had split a united kingdom and been antagonistic toward one another until Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE. Now God is telling Jeremiah that there is to be a renewing of the covenant that God had made with all the people. It was not to be just with Judah that this covenant was to be made but it was to be made with all the children of Israel.

And it is not to be like the one made on Sinai. Again, God did not break that covenant. It was broken by the people. They worshipped other gods besides God, they swore falsely by the name of God, and they broke all the other stipulations of the covenant that were established when God led them out of slavery in Egypt. And God gave them second chances. God continually told them “One more chance” like a parent tells a naughty child. God even sent prophets to tell them of God’s anger and heartbreak to bring them back. Finally, God had had enough. The people fell away into apostasy though God had been as a husband to them, taking care to provide them with all that they needed and all that they could want. And because of this apostasy they were defeated by the Babylonians and taken into exile far from home.

But the new (renewed) covenant will be different than the one given to the people’s ancestors. This covenant will not be written on tablets of stone that were in the temple (or in today’s language a courthouse rotunda) to be seen, given its due and then forgotten. No, this covenant, this law, this teaching, will be written on the inside of the people. It will be inside where the people will know it. They will have it inscribed, or written, on their hearts.

John Kaltner says this about the heart: “Today the heart is typically seen merely as the center of emotions, but in the Hebrew Bible the heart was also viewed as the place of intellectual, ethical, and moral activity.”[1]This was where God would be putting the new covenant, in the place where the life of the persons who were part of that covenant lay.

They will also no longer have need for teachers. God will inscribe the teaching on their hearts and there will be no need for anyone to interpret what the teaching says or what the people should do. They will already know it. With this there will be no need of a hierarchy where those who teach will lord it over those who are learning. Again, this is because God will be the teacher. There will no longer be any need to exhort the people to know about God because the people will “know God” personally. There is a great difference between knowing about God and knowing God. The first is head knowledge and what one learns from another person or from books. The second is heart knowledge.

Knowing is a word that has a very powerful meaning. This verb is a word that carries the connotation of profound, personal, and intimate knowledge that comes from only being in a very intimate relationship. Those in the relationship will be committed whole heartedly to one another in mind, emotion, and will. It is in such a relationship that the past is forgotten, sins forgiven. In other words, there will be the relationship like that of a parent to a child or that of a husband and wife. They will know each other’s thoughts and feelings. They will be as one.

And know this: this covenant is not made with individuals. It is made with the houses of Israel and Judah. God makes this covenant with a community in which individuals have access to it only as members. We would do well to remember this in our society where the individual is king. We stand as a community that has been granted a new covenant in Jesus, but we do not come as individuals to God, but as members of a community of faith. No one can say that they found God outside of the community of faith, that God came to them in a sunset or while walking in the woods. The covenant was made with a community and that covenant remains with the community.

So, what about this new covenant? Were the glories that were promised fulfilled? Yes and no. The people returned from exile and did renew the covenant with God. Jerusalem was rebuilt and the city boundaries were expanded. But there was still the need for teaching. There were still those who conquered the city and the people were under oppression. But the covenant remained. The people were still faithful to God. And they still are today.

But does this all mean that Jeremiah was wrong, and the prophecy was not fulfilled? No. The people lived, and live today, in a “now/not yet” time. A time when the fulfillment has been partially completed and where the complete fulfillment will occur at the end of the age.

So, what does a covenant with Israel mean to us as Christians today? As stated before, we see the fulfillment of this covenant in Jesus. But we too are in the moment of “now/not yet.” We are in the now of salvation, but we still require teaching and we still sin, the not yet. John Goldingay has this to say about the covenant and its fulfillment: “…the new covenant promise was fulfilled soon after Jeremiah’s day and fulfilled again in Jesus, but it still awaits fulfillment. In Romans 11, indeed, Paul sees this promise about forgiveness as due to be fulfilled in the future after “the full number of the Gentiles has been gathered in”—in other words, it still lies in the future[2].” We still are waiting with the Israelites of Jeremiah’s day. Goldingay continues by saying, “fulfillment didn’t mean everything was simply hunky dory. People continued to need to teach and exhort one another to acknowledge God. Similarly when in Jesus’ dying and rising God gave an even more spectacular expression of his willingness to pardon waywardness, that act hasn’t meant that people stopped needing to teach and exhort (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this book, and you wouldn’t be reading it). So the new covenant promise was fulfilled soon after Jeremiah’s day and fulfilled again in Jesus, but it still awaits fulfillment.”[3]We are sometimes discouraged because of this but Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” We still need to have God inscribe the law on our hearts so that we will know God.

This is not to say that we have superseded the covenant with the “new” covenant and that the “old” is irrelevant. No. If God could give up the covenant that God made with the Israelites, then God could surely give up the covenant that was made with us. Goldingay says about what is known as supersessionism, “If God could totally abandon Ephraim, then maybe God could totally abandon Judah. But if God cannot do the first, it would imply that God cannot do the second. It points Christians to a selfish reason for recognizing that God hasn’t abandoned the Jewish people. If God could do so, he could also abandon us.”[4]Instead of Jews and Christians wondering who is in or who is out of the covenant, of whether one covenant is obsolete or that one is better than the other, let us stand together in awe and grateful thanks that God extended and still extends forgiveness and grace to us, that the teachings of God are written upon our hearts, and that because of God and God alone we are in the new covenant. May we ever remember that grace will reign in the end and that God will always make good on a covenant that God makes with God’s children. Amen.

[1]Joel B Green. Connections: Year B, Volume 2 (Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship) (Kindle Locations 3009-3010). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition. [2] Goldingay, John. Jeremiah for Everyone. Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015. Print. Old Testament for Everyone. [3] Goldingay, John. Jeremiah for Everyone. Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015. Print. Old Testament for Everyone. [4] Goldingay, John. Jeremiah for Everyone. Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press; Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015. Print. Old Testament for Everyone.