Read the Small Print

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Lent 5
March 21, 2021

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. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.


As we have traveled through the season of Lent, many of the weekly scripture texts have spoken of God’s covenant. Today Jeremiah announced a new covenant, and our ears perk up.

It captures our American hunger for what’s latest and up to the minute. Laundry detergent gets repackaged, and the manufacturer calls it “new,” as if new signifies the clothes will sparkle even brighter.

Or the auto dealer brings out the latest edition of a favorite car. It has the same name, smells the same. Perhaps the designer lengthened the front hood by an inch, moved the dome light two inches, or improved the fuel efficiency by three inches per gallon. This qualifies it as a new car. The last one drove very well. The new car should drive even better.

We like to hear something is new. It’s a lot more exciting than what is old. Or what is durable.

I wore my new blue blazer to worship today. Maybe the last one lingered for a dozen years or more. Made by Land’s End, you could toss it in a heap, hang it up next week, and all the wrinkles would just fall out. It was a great jacket despite the worn elbows, a couple of impossible stains, and the threadbare lining. So it was time to retire it and ask Santa for something new.

Our landfills are stuffed full of good things that are no longer new. Some of them function perfectly well, but they lost their shine, and somebody lost interest in them. So, out they go.

All this bears on Jeremiah’s announcement about a new covenant. Some Christian people hear Jeremiah and think he’s talking to them. After all, that old Jewish covenant has lost its charm. All those animal sacrifices, that hierarchy of priests, temple worship in a building that no longer exists: those things are old, and therefore expendable.

We had a Sunday School teacher who said as much. He said, “The old covenant was with Israel. The new covenant is with Jesus. The old is over, the new is here. And the new covenant is better.” Then he had us open our Bibles to the page right before the Gospel of Matthew. It reads, “The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Years later, I discovered he was well-intentioned, but confused, and probably wrong. He is correct. There is a new covenant in Jesus. We will get into that next week when Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem to begin Holy Week. And Jeremiah’s not talking about that.

He is not saying that someday Christianity will replace Judaism, as if it is new and improved. No, Christian faith is born out of Judaism and comes alongside of it. As the Jewish apostle Paul would declare, “God keeps the covenant made with Israel. The Christians are grafted onto that as wild shoots on an olive tree.” (Romans 11). Without Jewish parents, the Christian faith is an orphan. It would have no past, and therefore have no hope. If we don’t remember where we come from, we forget where we are going. I realize we prefer what is new and reject what is old, but when faith is concerned, this is a mistake.

So what is Jeremiah is talking about? He’s talking the old covenant, and how it appears to have come apart.

Jeremiah is one of many preachers trying to make sense out of a long-term national crisis. About 600 years before Jesus began to preach, the Jerusalem Temple was pulled down by the Babylonian army. It signaled the destruction of the nation, its faith, and its economy. Some of the smartest and most capable people were pulled off to serve the Babylonian army. The country splintered and a lot of Jerusalem never came home.

Jeremiah is one of the prophets who wants to know why. Was God punishing the people? Did God lose interest in Israel? Was Jerusalem too corrupt? The leaders too cynical? The people too self-centered to care about their neighbors? Some of the prophets had warned about all of this, and it all still happened.

In the reading we have today, Jeremiah pulls no punches. God established a covenant, and the people broke it. In an intriguing metaphor, God took a marriage vow to Israel and Israel didn’t remain faithful. God had taken them by the hand, led them out of slavery, and said, “Here is how I want you to live: no other God, don’t steal or kill, honor your mom and pop,” and all the rest. The people thought they could do better, and God’s experiment came unraveled.

Yet in the middle of the crisis, Jeremiah hears God speak afresh. “I’m going to write a new covenant,” says the Lord. “This time, I’m not going to carve it on stone tablets. I’m going to engrave it on their hearts. Everybody will know they belong to me. Everybody will know the covenant – better yet, they will know me. They will not have to learn it. They will not have to teach it to others. Everybody will know it.” Thus says the Lord.

If we hear this announcement in its context, we wake up to affirm Christianity isn’t any better than Judaism. We have the same issue! We have heard what God has to say – but it doesn’t seem to stick. We know how God wants us to live – but we move on to our own pursuits. We have recorded the Words and Deeds in an enormous Book – but those words and deeds don’t often sink into our souls. Rather they defect off some pretty tough armor.

So God reminds us of his intent to get under the skin and into the heart.

In the Hebrew language, “heart” has little to do with emotions. Emotions are like whims that come and go. They blow like the wind. They react to something or somebody outside of us. By contrast, the heart is the ruling center of someone’s being. It is the integrating center of the will, the mind, and the passions. The heart expresses who we are and directs what we do.

God is saying to his Jewish people what God-in-Christ says to the rest of us, “I know you. You belong to me, and I want you to know me.” All the external promises are to be inscribed within. The aim is for obedience to move from responding to what we’ve been told to something we want to do.

We can take a cue from Jeremiah’s metaphor, where God says, “I was their husband, I was their spouse.” Those of us who have been married know that if the relationship is reduced to one person telling the other what to do, the clock is ticking. Didn’t I tell you to take out the garbage? Aren’t you going to put the laundry? I told you to pay those credit care bills! Tick, tock, tick, tock.

By contrast: Honey, I picked up those cookies that you liked. Now that the snow is melted, I cleaned up the backyard after the dogs. Or to score a small point, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed getting you a brand-new blue blazer. I know you asked Santa for it, but I didn’t want to wait for him. Can we hear the difference? The intention has been written so deeply upon the heart that the heart directs what we shall do. There are no empty promises nor antagonistic reprisals. In their place, there is integrity. The words are written on the heart.

Rabbi Jacob Neusner knew about words. When he died five years ago, his obituary in the New York Times reported he had published over nine hundred books. I don’t know what you have been doing with your time, but I know what he did with his. In his book, The Enchantments of Judaism, he points out that God runs the universe through words. “Let there be light, and there was light…” and that was only the beginning. When God speaks, God creates life and directs how life should be.

Rabbi Neusner compares these commandments. which constitute God’s covenant, to the printed notes on a page of music. God’s teachings are like the little black dots on a musical page, and then he says:

The musical notes are not the music and do not make the music. The musician makes the music, guided by – responding to – the notes. The two violinists, the violist, and the cellist of the quartet form the silences, define the rhythm, therefore also create the logic and power of the sound. The notes do not make the music; the musician-artists make the music. …The musical notes on paper are necessary but never suffice. So, too, in religion, God made the world with words. But the notes are not the world: they are necessary but not sufficient.

The words of religion do not make religion… God or the composer – creators above or below – send out the words, the notes, to those who will receive them and makes something of them. And while not all of us can make music, all of us are, or can be, artists in religion.[1]

It's a wonderful quote. To see it come alive, watch the bell choir when they play in a few minutes. They have rehearsed the piece. They have “worked it up.” They know when to ring the F# and when to pause because they have done this and done this. If they are nervous because they are still learning the piece, we can be patient and gracious. The music will soar, not when they are afraid of making a mistake, but when the notes have become part of them.

That’s just how it is when the promises of God are written upon the heart. What is new is not the song, but the singer. What is brought alive is not the material on the page, but the one who lifts it off the page.

Let me say a good word for every artist in religion. They are so many of you! You worship with us. You pray with us. You hum along with hymns that you know. You read the Bible. You stretch your imagination and your intellect. You keep in touch with one another. You give generous gifts to make good things happen. You are living out the promise of new covenant – and it is obvious. Thank you. Truly, thank you.

This pandemic has been a hard 53 weeks for all of us. Some of us have gotten sick. Some of us are passed on. Some have lost jobs or made major decisions about life and work. All of us have felt the stress. All of us have had our lives disrupted. If there is any single lesson from all of this, it is simply to keep going. To keep trusting. To keep living lives of grace and graciousness. Don’t stop. Stay at it.

I have a good friend who is a Biblical storyteller. He can stand up and recite large chunks of scripture. Once I heard him recite the entire Sermon on the Mount. It was the greatest sermon in the world. With passion and clarity, he recited 108 verses of scripture, letter-perfect. Afterward I said, “How did you do that?” You can guess his reply: “If you repeat something enough times, it becomes part of you.”

So let us offer a good word on behalf of repetition. We can repeat the promises of God until they are written upon our hearts. We can bend our knees in prayer until we know where to turn for help. We can share what we have with others until we develop a habit of generosity. We can speak words of affirmation until we see the good within them. We can thank God for everything until we actually become grateful.

This is my suggestion for those whose faith has lost its flavor. The way to deepen faith is by keeping at it, until God’s promises are written in a place where they cannot be erased. And when the day comes when we need it most, we discover that our ancient faith is fresh and new.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

[1] Jacob Neusner, The Enchantments of Judaism (New York: Basic Books, 1987) 13-14.