Gordon McPhee
John 12: 20-33
EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Introduction:
“Let’s make a deal!” I can’t believe it’s still airing after 60 years. I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched it for more than a few minutes and that only a very few times. But as little as I know about it, I’m very certain that God does not play “Let’s Make a Deal!” with His creation, us. As we will read in our Old Testament passage from Jeremiah, this morning, God has his own deal: “Let’s make a covenant!”
Like any agreement, there are at least two parties, but God’s covenant isn’t so much a deal as it is a promise. He tells you what He’s going to do, the good when you follow His will and the bad that will happen when you don’t. Think of it as if I made a covenant with you in which I promise if you keep away from the fire you won’t get burned, but if you ignore me, and put your hand in the fire, you’re going to get burned and it’s really going to hurt.
God has made many covenants since He created the world. Like his covenant to Noah and all of creation, never to destroy the earth with a flood. And to Moses and to Abraham and the people of Israel and King David. And finally, his covenant with us we signify in baptism and celebrate in the Eucharist, that he made with us on the cross and in His resurrection and that we’ll soon testify to at Easter. We call this the new covenant, from which we get the name of our unique Christian Scriptures, the New Testament.
However, our reading this morning from the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s new covenant. Which is significant for two things, both of which are the same thing. First, this is the only place where God’s new covenant is mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, and second, it is here, in Jeremiah, 500 years before Jesus’ birth, that God’s new covenant is first revealed.
Now that’s something worth talking about this morning.
Sermon:
There is a famous quote by the 18th century author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, that goes, “Everything old is new again”. I’m not sure which made it more famous, the Peter Allen song of the same name or its repeated use in political essays, but it has certainly received a lot of playtime. Another familiar old expression originates with the quaint Scottish story of one Lee Douglas IV who, being upset with his mother for being a prostitute, kicked her out of the house and replaced her oversight of his home with a new, young mistress and hence was coined, “out with the old and in with the new”.
Although conveying a similar theme of old and new, they treat the relationship between them very differently. On the one hand, the old is preserved and rejuvenated, and on the other, it is discarded and replaced. These two expressions underscore a distinct difference in the way we look at the new covenant.
Modern Christianity seems to want to divest itself of the old as quickly as it can. Old hymns, old liturgy, old beliefs and practices, old buildings and sometimes it feels like, old parishioners. And that goes hand in hand with everything in our culture today, forcing us to ask, are our church leaders leading or following?
We think of ourselves as part of a modern Anglican church with up-to-date answers and programs that address today’s concerns and today’s challenges. We’re part of the protestant reformation. We’ve put behind us the dark ages of church history, colonialism and even the more recent errors with our own indigenous communities. We don’t speak of God as “him” so as not to offend. All of that old stuff is being swept away for the new.
So often when we read the Bible, have a Bible study, preach a sermon, we turn always to the New Testament. And although we acknowledge that Jesus said of the law and the prophets, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them,” we think of it as “out with the old, in with the new.” We don’t think of ourselves as Jews, and rightly so. As Paul pointed out often, if you’re going to be a Jew, the whole law still applies. What we forget as gentile Christians is the many times Jesus upheld and even reinforced many of the laws.
In particular, is the Sermon on the Mount. All of what is in Jesus’ teaching can be found in the Torah. Jesus wasn’t making up anything new, but he was expanding on the laws to show how they applied to everyone, Jews and Gentiles. There are many laws that apply only to Jews that God imposed simply to make them distinct from other nations, just as there are laws only for the Priests because they must be holy and different from the common people. These laws Jesus doesn’t teach, but laws that apply to everyone, about your relationship to God and to your neighbour and the oppressed and needy. These Jesus taught and expanded their understanding to apply to all nations.
The wonderful new and enlightened teachings of Jesus are word for word the Torah teachings given to Moses and expanded and explained in the Psalms and Prophets. Jesus didn’t throw out the old to bring in the new, but he breathed new life, his own life on the cross, into the law and the prophets.
Listen to Jeremiah, “The time is coming when I will make a brand-new covenant with Israel and Judah.” And why? What happened to the original covenant? “They broke that covenant even though I did my part as their Master.” Do you see the irony in this? They broke the covenant God had made with Israel to make them his people, distinct in the world and blessed with the purpose of showing to the world who God is and leading the world to God. And what does He do? Wipe them out, destroy them from off the face of the earth? No. He makes a brand-new covenant with them.
And what is that covenant? A whole new set of laws, ones easier to follow and understand? No. He says, “I will put my law within them—write it on their hearts!—and be their God. And they will be my people.” God doesn’t change one iota of the commandments, they were perfect divine law, both in nature and in spirit right from the beginning. But this time, rather than understanding and obeying them with their intellect, God will make the law a part of their hearts. “They will no longer go around setting up schools to teach each other about God. They’ll know me firsthand.” That’s what God, through Jeremiah, says. What is a real encouragement to me is that He also stipulates, “the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow.” As I struggle with my courses at McGill, I find that really encouraging.
In our 21st-century Christianity, we like to dwell on the ‘brand-newness’ of the covenant. It’s like a license to overlay what shines as the brightest and best of North American woke culture onto the morality and practice of our daily lives as God’s children, his chosen people. When we hear God’s declaration in Jeremiah, “I’ll wipe the slate clean for each of them. I’ll forget they ever sinned!” Well, that sounds a lot like, “out with the old and in with the new.” But what, in fact, is “the brand-new covenant that” God is making? “I will put my law within them.”
Not some new-fangled morality, an enlightened woke cultural revolution that promises to set up individual freedom and rights as the ultimate god and goal of humankind while encouraging an antithetical homogenous community in which we all get along because we all hold the same values. All of it enforced for God and humankind by civil law that cries democracy and smells of fascism.
No, what God writes on our hearts in the brand-new covenant is the first, original, unchanging eternal law he established in all of creation at the very beginning when He declared in Genesis 1:31, “God looked over everything he had made; it was so good, so very good!”
The natural law has always been with us, as it says in Romans 1, “Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.” God clarified and specified this in the expressed Divine Law given through Moses at Sinai, not just through the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, but also through some 613 direct commands. These commands guided the choices of morality and justice for all people, as well as distinguishing His holy people and His holy priests from other nations. The purpose was for them to be identified as chosen and different, and as the holders of God’s covenant for the world. Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels clarifies that the new covenant does not set aside or rewrite any of these.
What is clear is that this is the same new covenant spoken of 500 years later by Jesus. Once, and only once, in each Synoptic Gospel, and then in 1st Corinthians only as part of the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. In Matthew and Mark Jesus says. “This is my blood, God’s new covenant, Poured out for many people,” and Luke portrays Jesus saying, “This cup is the new covenant written in my blood, blood poured out for you” which is similar to Paul in 1 Corinthians, “This cup is my blood, my new covenant with you.” The book of Hebrews, appropriately, as it reviews the covenantal history of creation, mentions the new covenant seven times, always in relation to Jesus’ work on the cross as High Priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
You see, this is not a once and forever deal. The establishment of this new covenant, this writing of the laws on our hearts began in the exile to Babylon when Daniel, Ezekiel, Ezra and so many other Jews learned to maintain their faith without a Temple, or Jerusalem or even a copy of the law. All they had was what their community could remember, what was written on their hearts. And it continues in the church and will continue until that day we read of in Revelation 21, “‘They’re His people, He’s their God. He’ll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone.’ The Enthroned continued, ‘Look! I’m making everything new.’”
And just so there is no confusion, the word translated ‘new’ is the Greek ‘Kainos’, which is distinguished from its sister word ‘Neos’, meaning a newly created thing. Kainos connotes renewed. Something “new in substance” and quality, consistent with what came before but radically transformed into something even more fresh and beautiful. Not out with the old in with the new, but everything new again.
Although I said the only Old Testament book that referred to a new covenant is our reading from Jeremiah, that actually depends on how you’re translating the Hebrew and Greek texts. Ezekiel 16, still a contemporary of Jeremiah and so still 500 years before Jesus, also speaks of a new covenant in this way, “‘God, the Master, says, I’ll do to you just as you have already done, you who have treated my oath with contempt and broken the covenant. All the same, I’ll remember the covenant I made with you when you were young and I’ll make a new covenant with you that will last forever.” Like Jeremiah, they broke the first covenant, but God’s new covenant is a remembering of the first covenant that will last forever until that wonderful day in Revelation 21, when all is made new again.
This is the covenant under which we live. It began 500 years before Jesus was born and will continue till the marvellous, glorious day when He comes again. We should and I dare say need to care about all the scriptures, all the law and the prophets, from day one in Genesis until Revelation, because Jesus does, and upholds, all of it.
We are not in some new dispensation of New Testament freedom, where everything is permitted if only, we can justify it as loving our neighbour. Our sovereign God defines from the beginning in natural and Divinely inspired law what it means to love our neighbour. And if we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength (Mark 12:30), then we must also love our neighbour as ourselves exactly as He has prescribed us to in His law which, He writes on our hearts because Jesus has opened the way, wiped away our sin, that in baptism and the Eucharist we may be in-dwelt by His Holy Spirit and know Him face to face, as Moses did.
These aren’t new things for our new age, they are the same old things, made new again under a new covenant, His laws written on our hearts that by the power of His Holy Spirit we won’t again break that covenant, but He will preserve us for that glorious day when he comes again and all, including you and me, is made new again. Thank you, Jesus.
Amen
