Reflection -- Written on The Heart

Jeremiah’s life and ministry came at a very troubled time for the little kingdom of Judah. He lived to see his country overrun by foreign invaders, Jerusalem fall, and her people exiled. Jeremiah foretold these tragedies and saw them as a consequence of the people’s disobedient abandonment of their faith in God, their rejection of covenant--a term most often used in the Old Testament to describe the framework of God’s relationship with the people.

While Jeremiah had many words of warning as his nation moved toward abandonment of God and destruction, he also had a word of consolation for the people in the middle of despair when that destruction came. Even in their unbelief, God had not abandoned them. The time would come when God would establish a new relationship with God’s people despite their failures, a new covenant relationship in which God would bring a true knowledge of God into the human heart and remember human failures no more.

Christian writers have seen this promise of renewed relationship between humanity and God fulfilled in the coming of Jesus. This is the Lenten message for us. It is Jesus who is the mediator of this new relationship with God. (See Hebrews 8-10.) God did the unexpected, entering into human form under humble circumstances to bring the good news of the depth of God’s love to all, even (especially?) to the most ordinary of people. It is a love that can not be stifled by evil’s efforts. Even persecution and death could not overcome it!

The only thing that can get in the way of such love is our refusing to let it in. When we say yes to God, God will write the reality of God on our hearts and restore fullness of life, remembering our past failures no more.

This writing on our hearts is an ongoing process and you could find yourself anywhere in that process.  The first faint traces are there even before we know what they are. Do you recall a hunger in your spirit for relationship with God, even without knowing what it was? Later, did things you heard in sermons, hymns, and the stories of other Christians strike a cord of truth in your heart even though you did not know why you recognized them as truth? Have you also experienced an unexplained hunger, as your faith grows, to study and learn more about what God is like and to search out the meaning of these internal experiences?

What is God writing, on your heart?

revclay

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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. [NRSV]