Within
Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33

March 29, 2009


Jeremiah is one of the most difficult books in the Bible to read. For one thing, it is as if the pages were stuffed in a folder and then all they all fell out and were thrown back together in a fairly random order. There are some prose sections that relate incidents in Jeremiah’s turbulent life, but the majority of the book consists of those long poetic oracles of this prophet who seldom had a nice thing to say. Almost certainly, as a human being you wouldn’t like Jeremiah. He was always in someone’s face in a troubled age.

In fact, the English language has a word for how he behaved - a “jeremiad” - a doleful complaint or lamentation. Jeremiah had his reasons, for he was living in a time when Judah was falling apart, spiritually, economically and politically. He warned the king and the nation who didn’t want to hear bad news, even once they had been occupied by a foreign power. For his words of uncomfortable truth, Jeremiah was thrown into jail, beaten up badly on several occasions. Then in 587 B.C. something really did happen and the Babylonians completely destroyed Jerusalem, burned the Temple, and sent off the Jewish elite on a long death march to live in exile in faraway Babylon, modern Iraq. Jeremiah was, after all, God’s prophet and he was right.

Yet, ironically, when things were at their worst, when Israel was no more and the Jews were on the tragic road to exile as strangers in a strange land, Jeremiah heard a remarkable “Word of the Lord.” In its timing, it made absolutely no sense, for when there is no chance of hope, how can you have hope? It was one of Jeremiah’s last words, although it is found in the 31st of 52 chapters, a sure sign of that dropped folder of pages.

“Sir, Ma’am, we wish to see Jesus,” 600 or so years later a group of Greek god-fearers approached Philip, a man with a Greek name, and asked for an introduction to the prophet from Nazareth, for they did not know what Jesus looked like. Philip talked to his brother Andrew and together they found Jesus, “Do you have a few minutes?”

Jesus started talking and teaching, but to no one in particular. After he was finished, he escaped, hiding from the crowd. The Greeks never really had a chance to talk to Jesus.

This was an unprecedented moment of hope for the people of Israel. Here was this new prophet from Galilee, fresh from raising Lazarus from the dead, and people could palpably feel the Roman strangle hold on their nation coming undone with every new word Jesus said. So what did he say in this heady time of hope unbound? “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Has there been any generation in any age that has said “Amen!” to that message? We are universally competitive, straining to achieve more and reach beyond our competitors. We do not intend to lose our life in order to gain it. If people were really listening, and there is consistent evidence that they really were not listening, Jesus’ direction would have quashed all hope just when they thought there was hope.

Maybe that’s why Jeremiah and Jesus are paired together this Sunday - they are talking about the same thing, just different ways of approaching hope. Jeremiah is declaring hope when everyone else is in despair; Jesus brushes away the false hopes of grandeur with the only real hope that comes from giving oneself away in love.

Most of the world still doesn’t believe this in the slightest. Overheard in a conversation not too long ago, a young woman was defending her decision to bring up her children without the church, declaring in a calm, straight tone of voice, “What intelligent person would possibly look to the church as a moral compass these days?” You have heard that said too, I am certain, in so many words in so many places. It is utterly amazing how so many people can be so confident in a world they believe is so hopeless.

That is some of what is going on south of the border. Barack Obama is working hard to rebuild hope during this economic recession, a hope that for the moment cannot be backed up by hard numbers. I sense that a lot of Americans and Canadians no longer know how to hope or what hoping authentically means. Of course, Obama is preaching out of the context of his black church background, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and I am sure the same is the case for his family’s new church, 19th Street Baptist Church in Washington, DC. Many people catch the drift from Obama’s inflections; many others have no idea what he is talking about.

What was Jeremiah talking about? Strictly speaking, Jeremiah wasn’t speaking, it was the Lord God speaking through him and the grammar - all the “I’s” reflect that.

The very first time I preached on this passage was in my second year in the ministry. I was the associate minister at the downtown cathedral United Methodist and the senior minister, Jim Cain, was on holidays for three Sundays. So this was my first opportunity to preach - on the radio too - and no one then had heard of the Lectionary. I chose three of the classic texts of the Bible as an easier way to get into the task, but the only one I remember choosing was Jeremiah 31:31-34. It was the first Sunday in August, 1974, and when I preached about the new covenant, unlike the old covenant, everybody knew what I meant. A few days earlier a certain Richard Nixon had resigned from his Watergated Presidency, and Gerald Ford was president without having been elected. A new covenant, all right: nothing guaranteed and plenty of mess and backlash left behind to deal with. Nevertheless, there have been extremely few times when I have felt the congregation so abuzz with hope afterwards.

Jeremiah’s word was not just wistful hopefulness for a better day, but the anticipation of a new way of living. God will write the new covenant within you, on your heart - no need for schools anymore because we will all know naturally and intuitively what is important to know. That day has not yet arrived, but its anticipation has an indescribable way of changing our behaviour now.

In the novel and movie The Shawshank Redemption, a lifelong convict nicknamed Red, keeps telling his fellow prisoner, Andy, to stop talking about hope since in prison, hope is a dangerous thing. It’s better to live without hope than to have a hope that will torment you by virtue of it’s not being fulfilled. One day Andy barricades himself in the warden’s office, flips on the Shawshank prison P.A. system, and plays a portion of a Mozart opera, bringing the entire prison to a standstill as each prisoner listens to the aria. Even Red, the one who resisted all talk of hopes or dreams, could not resist this spot of beauty.

And so Red muses, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singin’ about. I like to think they were singin’ about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. For the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank was free.”

Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, we can be free at last!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan