All the Way Down

Propers: The Fifth Sunday in Lent, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel … They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest … I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

If you’ve ever wondered why we refer to the Christian Scriptures of the Bible as the new covenant, the New Testament, such terminology derives from this passage in the Prophet Jeremiah. His was no easy calling, as Jeremiah oversaw the destruction of his nation. The Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered the Kingdom of Judah, burned down the Jerusalem Temple, slit the throats of the king’s sons before putting out his royal eyes, and dragged off all but the poorest Judeans to Exile in a foreign land. The meek inherited the earth.

It appeared that the ancient sacred covenant at long last had been broken, indeed annihilated. “I will be your God, and you will be My people,” Yahweh had promised unto Abraham: promised that Abraham would have a family, that family would become a people, that people a nation, and that nation a blessing to every family on the earth. And so it came to pass, in the stories of our Scriptures.

Abraham’s family grew and prospered, eventually becoming a great people in the land of Egypt. By the hand of Moses, God led them out from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of their ancestors, and gave to them a Law so that they could then become a nation. God united their 12 disparate Tribes under the kingship of David, and centralized worship at the Temple of Solomon. This is how the people knew their God: through the land, through the monarchy, and through the holy Temple.

How historical all this is we leave for scholars to debate. What matters is that this is how the Israelites understood their identity. They were defined by their covenant with God, the promise that He would be their God and they would be His people, come what may. A covenant is not so much a contract, with specifications of duties, as it is the promise of steadfast relationship, a bedrock pledge of fidelity and love.

Traditionally one “cuts” a covenant, meaning that sacrificial beasts would be split in half, so that the parties of the promise could walk between the twain, as though to say, “Should what happened to these animals happen unto me, should I ever forsake my covenant with you.” A literally visceral pact, sanctified in blood.

But then the Babylonians take away the land, take away the king, take away the Temple. No more priests, no more royals, no more rituals. No more ancestral locations, where the bones of generations sacralize the soil. Is God gone? Is the covenant undone? It’s true we broke the covenant, Jeremiah says. We brought this on ourselves by abandoning our God, not just religiously but morally, forsaking justice, abrogating mercy. Yet God has not abandoned us. He has followed us into our Exile, followed us into our mourning. He was with us in Egypt, as He is with us in Babylon, and then as now He calls us home.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel … not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors … that they broke, though I was their husband … I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and … they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.

People are unfaithful, Jeremiah says. Any fool could tell you that. But God is always faithful. God never goes away. We lost everything we knew, but we have never lost our God. They stripped from us every touchstone of our faith, and yet behold! Our God is here! In modern Judaism, the new covenant of Jeremiah is understood to be a reaffirmation of the old, a return to the roots of the relationship, to the promise of the covenant and the keeping of the Law. Christians historically have taken it somewhat differently.

We must tread carefully here. So often we have fallen into supersessionism, the idea that God’s old covenant is done, that the Jews have been abandoned, and that the Church is the new and true replacement of God’s defective people, a New Israel with our New Covenant. But to say so is to rankly contradict the Scriptures here. God does not abandon His people, no matter how we sin. And Jesus Himself preaches the Gospel, preaches the Good News, not as a rejection of the Law, a rejection of the covenant, but as its fulfillment in glory.

There is a real sense in which the Gospel is the Law in its truest purest form. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind,” said Jesus, and “love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” It’s not about replacing or breaking the promises of God. It’s about breaking them open, universalizing them, fulfilling the promise to Abraham to be a blessing to all of the earth.

That’s why, in our reading from the Gospel this morning, when Greeks come seeking Jesus, He then knows His time is short. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Judgment of the world is here at hand, for the promise is fulfilled, the covenant brought to fruition. And it is done so, we believe, through our Lord Jesus Christ. His is the new covenant, the fulfillment of the old, not replacing, not superseding—for Christ is thoroughly Jewish and never ceases to be so—but expanding it to all of the world, grafting wild branches onto cultivated stock.

We shall no longer say to ourselves, “Know the Lord,” for we all know Him now. We know Him face to face. Jesus is our God made flesh, the face of God the Father. And He forgives us our sins, utterly, ridiculously, superabundantly, forgives us even as we murder Him. Such radical mercy, such scandalous love, shall when He is lifted up draw all men unto Him. There, on the Cross, is the judgment of our world. There, on the Cross, is the devil driven out. There we know the depths to which our God descends to save us.

This is why He’s come, He knows. Christ has come to die. Not because the Father demands some awful human sacrifice; Jesus was running about willy-nilly forgiving us our sins long before the Cross. No, He knew that He would have to die because of who we are. Because we could only respond to infinite love by torturing Him to death. This surely would break the covenant. If it couldn’t, then what on earth would? What Father wouldn’t burn the world that crucified His Son?

But we were wrong about everything. About Christ. About God. About judgment and death. We thought that if we threw Him into hell, that would be the end of it. No more Messiah, no more Kingdom, no more Heaven barging in wherever it doesn’t belong. Yet all we really did was put Him right where He intended: down in the pit, in the depths of hell, with all of the dead and the damned. That was His intention all along.

Christ has come to conquer all, the whole of our reality, the wellsprings of Creation. And to do that He must first descend: descending from Heaven to earth, from the womb unto the tomb; descending then from the Cross, down into nothingness, down into hell. And then He came back up! —rising all the way from the bottom, from the roots of the deepest pit, pulling up with Him Adam and Eve and all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train: thus to conquer death and hell, and bring holiness back unto Heaven.

He doesn’t conquer all the world with violence and hate. He conquers it with love, humility, self-sacrifice and growth, conquers us all by forgiving our sins, by raising us up from the dead, by gathering every wayward soul to God again in Him. Jesus went all the way down, in order to bring everyone and everything all the way back up.

This is the covenant unbreakable: that everyone, from least to greatest, knows God face to face; that our sins are forgiven, our iniquities forgotten; that everything old is new again, for life has outlived death. God is with us, He is for us, and He cannot be taken away. Such is the Judgment. Such is the Kingdom. Such is the Christ. Go, proclaim our ecstasy, to all this weary world. Go proclaim the Gospel that Jesus is alive.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.