When God Re-Negotiates

When God Re-Negotiates--October 30, 2017

"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." [Jeremiah 31:31-34]

You and I are living in the future.

No, still no jetpacks.  Still no flying cars.  But we are living in the future that ancient dreamers envisioned, prophets like Jeremiah, people who dared to listen to the Spirit's voice saying, "I will make a new covenant..."

You and I are living in the vision that Jeremiah could only hope for, long for, and look forward to.  You and I are living in the future that the Spirit held out to the prophets, because you and I are people who live in the midst of the "new covenant" inaugurated in Jesus.  It is strange in a way how we can take for granted what those ancient prophets dreamed of.  We have a way of forgetting how surprising this passage must have sounded in the ears of Jeremiah's first hearers. Because the way God speaks here of a new covenant... well, it flies in the face of the way the world usually does business.

At the brink of exile, Jeremiah and other prophets of his generation were navigating the people of Judah through a crisis of their faith and identity. Exile was the end of the line.  It represented an end to the relationship with their covenant God, Yahweh, so they thought.  For centuries, the basic theology of the day said, "We do certain things to live as Yahweh's people, and in return, Yahweh gives us divine protection and blessing."  And hanging over their heads in the background was always the fear, "If we mess things up so royally, so completely, by turning away from God and turning toward violence, greed, and the ways of other nations around us, then the worst that could happen would be for God to let those foreign powers overwhelm us and carry us away into exile."  As the Babylonians came knocking at the door, armed with siege-works and soldiers, folks in Jeremiah's day could see exile coming.  And that meant, they assumed, that their relationship with God--their covenant partnership--was at worst obliterated, and at best, thoroughly broken.

This would be the moment for a contract renegotiation.  This would be the moment where self-proclaimed business experts would push to get more concessions from the people of Judah.  This could have been God's moment to exert some leverage and tell the people, "Well, if you want to continue in relationship with me, I'm gonna need to see a big increase in what I get out of the deal."  This could have been the moment for the Almighty to push for more offerings, or increased sacrifices, or to regulate a certain code of additional moral purity, with the threat of exile cajoling the fearful Israelites into re-negotiating on the Deity's harsher terms.  That's at least how plenty of powerful folks would insist on doing things today, at any rate.

Except--and this is important here--the God of whom Jeremiah spoke is not a colossal cosmic Jerk.  The God who speaks new covenant isn't looking to push for better terms that benefit God.  Rather, the God of Jeremiah 31 speaks of a new covenant that will NOT depend on what the human actors bring to the picture.  It will depend, in a word, entirely on grace, and not on what humans "do" for God. 

This is the wonderfully counter-intuitive way the God of the Bible works: instead of leveraging to get something "better" on God's side of the deal, the God of new covenant says, "It is all grace. I will remember your sin no more.  You are forgiven."

That is the new covenant Jeremiah envisions, and for the followers of Jesus, that is the reality we are invited to step into right now.  Already.  Today.  The rest of the world may think that it's a good idea to push for getting more for yourself when you are re-negotiating a deal, but that's not the way Christians are called to see the world.  Rather, we are called to see things through the lens of the New Covenant--the relationship between us and God that has everything to do with God's grace and nothing to do with God "getting" more out of the deal.  Jeremiah dreamed it.  He envisioned it would happen.  He hoped for its coming.  And we get to live in it.

We are included, we are given hope, we are welcomed... because when the God of the Scriptures revises a covenant to make it "new," God has a way of giving away the farm for free.  If God were a selfish jerk, sure, God could insist on "getting more" out of the deal, the covenant, between the divine and the human, but blessedly God is not a  selfish jerk.  

And instead, the God who spoke to Jeremiah offers us a future that depends entirely on God's goodness, and not upon what we bring to the table. That is an amazing reality to consider--and we have received it by grace.   

In all of our discussion this past month about how Mercy moves us into God's future, we can sometimes get so focused on the heavenly talk of pearly gates and golden streets that we can forget how we are living in part of God's promised future right now.  The assurance of grace that holds us together is a gift that countless prophets like Jeremiah dreamed of and waited for... and you and I get to live in it and lean on it now.  Today, then, as much as we keep envisioning and picturing what else is in store, this is a moment to consider that we already live in the gracious future God had promised to voices like Jeremiah's.  

We get to live in light of the new covenant.

Lord God, write your word on us and make your new covenant in our hearts and lives and deepest selves.