Written on our hearts
/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. -Jeremiah 31:33
We read a lot of Jeremiah during Lent, and frankly it’s no picnic. Jeremiah does not mince words about how displeased God is with the people, and spells out bluntly just how they will suffer for it and be driven away from their homeland because of their trespasses. The prophet Jeremiah lived through the terrible ransacking of Jerusalem by the Assyrians and then the Babylonians. Jeremiah stayed in Jerusalem after the exile to Babylon, but eventually was exiled himself to Egypt. So, in short, he lived through a very tumultuous and painful time, and you can hear it in his writing.
Nonetheless, later in the book, there are many chapters devoted to God’s promise of the eventual return of the exiles and God’s desire to have them back. It’s important to remember that this was written while the exile was still painful and ongoing, and not after a resolution and return had already happened. These hopeful chapters, therefore, are a declaration of faith in God’s goodness, despite the worldly destruction all around.
This makes Jeremiah’s vision all the more compelling. Not only will God bring us back, he writes, but we will know God more deeply after all this. God’s law will not be something in some book, but the spirit of that law will be within us, he writes, written on our hearts. We will finally be God’s own people. He assures his readers that God is saying: “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 testifies to God’s love despite the people’s suffering, and expresses faithful trust that a new, renewed and more life-filled time will come again.
Last year and now this year, our Holy Week and Easter season have been strongly affected by the pandemic. Once again our services for the highest holy days will be online instead of in person. We are still in exile, in isolation, physically distanced, wandering the wilderness of the pandemic, wondering when we will reach the promised land.
But our own time in exile has helped us hear the cry of Jeremiah and the lament of Jerusalem in a new way. Through our suffering, we’ve been opened to the suffering of others, and to the suffering of Christ. We’ve also been challenged to follow Jeremiah, and Moses, and Paul and John the Baptist and all our forbears in faith in proclaiming God’s love and goodness despite the outward signs otherwise. We’ve been challenged to trust, in the midst of a world pandemic, that God will bring new life out of all of this
We, like Jeremiah, hope that this pandemic time is writing God’s love on our hearts more deeply every day. We pray that this experience will have helped us to know Christ better. With God’s help, this year long time of trial will renew us as God’s own people.
As Palm Sunday and Holy Week approach, I pray you take even more time to prepare for the deep lament of this particular Holy Week, opening your ears, eyes and hearts to the depth of Christ’s suffering in this hurting world. And in the midst of the challenges of this Lent and Holy Week, we’ll nevertheless offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, as living sacrifices to God, humbly beseeching that we may be filled with God’s grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with Christ, that he may dwell in us, and we in him.
