"For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one." [Hebrews 8:7]
When things aren't working in a relationship in your life--anything from colleagues at work to family to friendships to romances--you really only have three choices. You can leave it broken and just keep hurting and being hurt, for one. You can bail out and walk away from the relationship to find new ones with new people, but at the cost of giving up the old one. Or, you can change the relationship to make it work again. Every option is really some variation on those three: leave it broken, leave the relationship for new people, or keep the people and change how the relationship works.
What do you think--how does God choose among those options? When it comes to the relationship (and that's really all the fancy word "covenant" means) between us and God, and things get broken, what does God do? The three options in front of God are basically the same as ours. God could leave the relationship between us broken and just keep going through the motions, perpetuating the dysfunction. Or, God could bail out on us--leaving the covenant--perhaps to go looking for better covenant partners than we humans. Or, ultimately, God can choose to keep us and to change how the relationship works.
Well, I'll venture a guess that you know already: the God we meet in Jesus doesn't just pretend things are fine when the room is on fire. In other words, God doesn't just leave things broken forever between us. So Option Number One is right out. The choice, then, is over which God would rather keep: the terms of an old deal... or us. If God has to choose, will God insist on keeping the old contract for our relationship with the divine and get rid of us in the event that we can't hold up our end of the bargain... or will God keep us and adapt the terms of the covenant to stay in relationship with us?
Or, to put it a little more directly, would God rather keep the set of rules and change the people if they can't live by them... or keep the people even if it means changing the structures of how we relate to God? Which is more important to God to hold on to--the terms and conditions, or the people?
In case you couldn't tell, the writer of Hebrews says God chooses us, even if it means a change in the terms of the relationship. Or, in the language of his readers, a change of covenant. God will change the covenant in order to keep in relationship with us, rather than kicking us to the curb in search of perfect people who can keep the covenant perfectly. God would rather have us.
That's what makes the coming of Jesus so important. In Jesus, God decides to be done with the old terms of relationship--sacrifices and priests, temples and altars, and so on--in order to bring about a new way of relating, one that comes through Jesus' cross and resurrection. The writer of Hebrews points out that you don't need a new covenant--a new set of terms for the relationship, so to speak--if the current one is working as it's supposed to. You know the saying: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But where the relationship between us and God is broken, God's chosen solution isn't to throw us away in pursuit of better rule followers or perfectly-behaved little boys and girls to let into the heaven club. God would rather remake the covenant and keep us. God would rather have you than the dusty set of regulations we could never live by anyway. God chooses you, and then lets the chips fall where they may.
I wonder how often any of us lets that sink in: God is so committed to you that God is willing to create a new kind of relationship for us, rather than throw us out when we fail at the old way. You are just that important, just that beloved, just that valued. And so is everybody else whom God has drawn together in love through Jesus. You are loved enough that when God has to choose between keeping perfect rules and losing you or coming up with a new way of relating in order to keep us, that's what God chooses.
Every time.
That's enough to give a person hope on the day you need it. You are just that beloved
Lord Jesus, thank you for choosing us. Help us to do our best to live inside the space that your grace makes for us.
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