The Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

JEREMIAH 31:31-34: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Drink this, remembering me." With these words Jesus of Nazareth on the last night of his life brought into the New Testament one of the most profound moments of the Old. Jeremiah had proclaimed, "The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . . 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."

William Holladay (Jeremiah, A Fresh Reading, 128-132) provides a context for this prophecy. He said that every seven years, from 620 to 586, the Book of Deuteronomy was publicly read to all the people. The first reading took place when the book was discovered during a rebuilding of the temple. The last reading took place in 586, the year the temple was destroyed by Babylonian armies.

Deuteronomy was the book of the Second Covenant. Building on the work of Moses six centuries before, when God had declared that the Hebrews in the desert were his people and he was their God, Deuteronomy renewed that covenant between God and people. The book had appeared at a time of crisis in Judah. Assyrian armies were marching up and down the land. Egyptian armies were marching through the land to meet them. Jerusalem was sequestered on its high hill, but no one knew whether it was safe from the marauders. King Josiah, a young boy new to the throne of Judah, took a bold step. He ordered his workers to remove the statues of Assyrian gods that had been erected in the temple of the Lord. (They had been put there by the Assyrians to show that the Assyrian gods were stronger than Judah's God.) He ordered that the temple be rebuilt so that its only God once more would be Yahweh. This was an act of treason against Assyria but of independence for Judah.

While the work was being carried out, a book was found in the temple. The book contained words of Moses. It said that God had given his law to Israel and Judah, and it set out in great detail the laws that God had given. It said that if Israel or Judah failed to keep this law, God would bring up enemies to destroy them. King Josiah heard the law read (apparently he himself could not read), and he was struck to the heart. He ordered the law read to all the people, so that all Judah could organize its life to conform with the law. The first reading of the law was in the year 621.

Every seven years thereafter, in autumn of the seventh year, the people assembled to hear the law read. It was read in 614 and in 607 and in 600 and in 593. Now it was 586. In August of that year, Babylonian armies burned the Temple, the palace, and all the main houses of the city. They destroyed its walls. The Babylonians took the king of Judah and most of its leading citizens into exile in Babylon. It was a moment of desolation that Jewish people would remember forever. Would the book be read again this year to the bereaved and grieving people of Judah?

Holladay insisted that it was. In October, two months after the destruction, the priests gathered the remaining people together at the site of the destroyed temple. They began to read the book to the people as they had done for 35 years. In that dramatic moment, the prophet Jeremiah stepped forward, suggests Holladay, to bring a new message to the people.

Jeremiah had believed for some time that Deuteronomy did not represent what God wanted of the people. The covenant with God that Deuteronomy represented called for the people to keep God's law perfectly, to hold fast to every jot and tittle that was written there. Jeremiah recalled that the relationship of Yahweh and people in the desert was much more dynamic than that. Yahweh had given the people not a set of laws to bind them to him. Yahweh had given them his own living word. The people were to hear the word and build their lives around it. The relationship of Yahweh and people had not been that of memorizing a set of rules. It was more like a conversation between two parties, both of whom had moral responsibility for what occurred. Jeremiah wanted the people to resume their conversation with God, not just commit to memory rules and regulations purporting to come from God. It was a revolutionary step. So, as the priests stepped forward to read the law to the people once more, Jeremiah stepped forward also to deliver his message. This is what he said.

"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."

The revolutionary nature of Jeremiah's prophecy can be seen in its first line. This new covenant will be with both Israel and Judah. But, the people must have protested, Israel had been gone this last century and a half, destroyed by Assyrian armies one hundred fifty years ago. Make a covenant with Israel? Indeed God will, said Jeremiah. God is doing a new thing. God will restore Israel. God will resurrect this people. The new covenant is with both Israel and Judah.

"I will make this new covenant because I am their husband," said the Lord. This too must have struck the ears of the people as a strange saying. The word for "husband" was the very word that the followers of the baals had used to describe the relationship between baal and people. It carried all the connotations of Canaanite worship. Yet Hosea had used the idea. Israel is my bride, and I am her husband, the God of Hosea had said. I will love her and care for her and ask of her that she be faithful to me. Husbands and wives talk with each other, have affection for each other, are loyal to each other, make plans together, respond to each other. If only Judah would do this with me, said the Lord. She is my wife. I am her husband.

"I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts." The word "heart" as Jeremiah used it meant not a center of affection but a center of decision. People would make their decisions on the basis of "the inward law of God," the inward conversation with the living God which the new covenant made possible. Jeremiah went so far as to say "they shall no longer teach each other." The "teaching" being done was "rote memory." Someone would read the law, and the people would woodenly recite it until they knew each word. Then in a wooden manner they would apply the words to the situations of their lives. That is wrong, said Jeremiah! God is not a wooden memory which Judah recites. God is a lively conversationalist to whom Judah must respond. We shall not teach one another in this manner, for we shall each know the living Lord.

The most important word was reserved for the last pronouncement. "I will forgive their iniquity, says the Lord. I will remember their sin no more." Israel and Judah, with their rebellions against God, had destroyed the former covenant. God had remembered their acts, and God had punished them for their treasons. That day is over, said Jeremiah. Israel is gone, Judah is gone, Jerusalem is destroyed - that is punishment enough. Now I will forgive their sins, and I will not remember their iniquities, says the Lord. "I will be their God, and they shall be my people."

Strangely enough, this pronouncement of Jeremiah was largely forgotten. Nowhere else in the Old Testament is it referred to. As far as that book is concerned, it is as if Jeremiah had never said it. Two groups of people, however, remembered what Jeremiah had said, and his words became important to them. One group was the little community of people who had gathered on the shores of the Dead Sea to rebuild their lives and the life of all Judah. This was the group at Qumran, new covenanters who believed that Jeremiah's words about a new covenant were spoken for them. The other group was the Christian Church.

Jesus gathered his disciples for one last meal. They had come to Jerusalem for the feast of passover. Jesus had entered the city to great acclaim, he had cleansed the temple of its impurities, he had taught the people. Now he knew that Jewish priests and Roman officials were conspiring to kill him. One of his disciples, Judas, had contributed to the plot. As that spring evening died across the Mount of Olives and its darkness shrouded all Jerusalem, Jesus had carefully led his disciples through the twisted streets of the city. They came to a house where they were to eat the passover meal. They were admitted to the house and went to a large upper room furnished and ready. Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." They all ate and drank. Jeremiah's new covenant had been fulfilled at last.

PSALM 119:97-104: This psalm is the longest psalm in the psalter, 176 verses in all, and in some ways it is the most interesting. It consists of twenty-two stanzas of eight lines each. It is organized as an acrostic, that is, each of the stanza begins with the next equivalent letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the first word in each line of the stanza begins with the same letter. (The third chapter of Lamentations follows a similar scheme, except that each stanza is only three verses long.) The poem praises Torah, the Hebrew Law which had been put into an integrated form during the time of Judah's exile in Babylon. Clinton McCann, (Presbyterian Worship Planner) points out that its size and repetition are important to its message: "The repetition and formal structure," he says, "create and reiterate the message of the psalm. God's 'law' -- that is, God's 'instruction' or 'word' or 'revelation' -- is all-encompassing and all-important for humankind."