14*

Saturday 14 December

A new Covenant

By Sandy Goldbeck-Wood

Jeremiah 31:31–34

I listened to a lot of Radio 4 recently. First there was the first Reith Lecture, on evil. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead, a doctor whose life´s calling has been to work closely with murderers and other violent offenders, spoke about evil as something of which we are all capable. Later, in The Best Medicine,  someone whose name I didn´t catch spoke of how his life had been saved – from the inside out - by stem cells gifted by someone he didn´t know.

In a sense, these are Jeremiah´s themes, too, in today´s reading. On the one hand, Jeremiah shows us the destructiveness and evil of which God´s people, are not only capable, but in which they – we - are actively engaged; and on the other, he bears witness to the implausible, miraculous possibility of transformation from the inside.

To err, as Dr Adshead reminds us, is human, and punishment is the least those we have harmed have a right to expect. Punishment is just what Israel, hard-wired for unfaithfulness and iniquity - never mind God´s faithfulness to them - also rightly had coming.

But like a laser through the impacted, scarred tissues of sin which Jeremiah describes so elaborately, come the words of God: 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.

Heart-writing. What an extraordinary procedure – not an admonishment, or a temporary fix – but “divine, interventional cardiography” – “DIC,” sharp and salvific, the best medicine, the only medicine, for the sin of the world.

“DIC” will change how things work, because with God´s law right on the inside, like good stem cells to replace the bad, the need for all the correctives  - the talking and the teaching – falls away. There will be less need for God-talk, and more God-practice in action.

We´re not there yet. But this is what we are waiting for, now that Advent has started - our undeserved but promised forgiveness; our transformation, all over again, one more year, by the laser of God´s love in Christ Jesus.

And while we wait, in the sure knowledge of our imminent healing, we can practice penitence. Now, in the anticipatory hope of Christmas, we can afford to emerge, naked, from our denial. We can leave behind our excuses for offences and omissions, whether as individuals too wrapped up in ourselves; as a church too protective of our own, which has harboured and hidden violence; or as a society which is engaged in destroying creation;  because now, the God whose covenant we broke is sending forgiveness.

We are approaching the top of the waiting list for a life changing procedure. The inconceivable has been conceived, and is growing apace. The days are surely coming. Amen, come, Lord Jesus.

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Jeremiah 31:31–34

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.