Reflection The Rev'd Dr Deborah Broome

A new covenant – written on the heart

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”  But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of the one who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.  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 31:27-34

Jeremiah speaks to a people in exile, offering them – at last! – a message of hope.  The time is coming when destruction will be a thing of the past and restoration will happen.  Israel will be sown with the new life of God to get a new generation of people and animals.  The old despairing proverb suggesting that their ancestors had done wrong and they were bearing the consequences will be cancelled out.  God will forgive them. 

For Jeremiah, being God’s people was about relationship – a relationship in which “I will be your God and you will be my people.”    That’s the basic statement of the covenant.  Jeremiah and the people he was writing to had known God for a long time.  God was the one who had brought them out of the land of Egypt and given them the law at Mount Sinai.  Sometimes, though, the relationship (like any relationship) had gone through rocky patches – and the time Jeremiah was active as a prophet was one of those times.  The people had turned their backs on God, broken the covenant, and Jerusalem had been destroyed.  The people had been carted off into exile, cut off from all their familiar places, all the time-honoured ways of worshipping.  But Jeremiah delivers God’s message to them: God has not forgotten us.  God still wants to be in relationship with us.  God still loves us.  And a sign of this is that God will write the law not on tablets of stone but within the people’s hearts. 

Let’s be clear: we read this wrong if we see this as the new covenant of Christianity versus the old covenant of the Jews.  It’s not a different covenant (it’s still the Sinai covenant): it’s the same relationship, but now written on the heart, not just on stone.   It’s a new way of staying faithful to it, putting the covenant inside them so that wherever they were they could know how to keep this most special of relationships working as it should.   Because the thing about the law was that it was always about relationship much more than it was about rules.

What does it mean for us to have God’s law written on our hearts?  Do we know how to nurture our relationship with God, how to live a life that delights God?  Do we listen to that voice within our hearts that speaks of love and belonging?  This is about learning to live as people shaped by compassion, justice, and love – learning to live out of a relationship with the God who loves us.