Lent 5
There was a book a year or two making the talk show circuit called The Secret. It was supposed to contain the secret for getting everything you want out of life. We Christians have a secret to life, too, which happens to be the subject of our scripture today.
The secret isn’t Jesus—there’s no secret there—everyone mentions him all the time. But the reality he brings—that’s not quite as widely known. In our Old Testament reading today, the prophet Jeremiah speaks of this new reality, something that he claims we should all know. We don’t even need a teacher or a preacher according to Jeremiah. So what is this reality that will answer all our needs?
According to Jeremiah, it’s God’s forgiveness. Jeremiah describes a new covenant written not on stone tablets, but on the hearst of each of us, based on the gift of God’s forgetting our sins. What is strange is that Jeremiah is the prophet who describes this gift. Jeremiah’s words in the Bible are many, and they aren’t happy ones. Jeremiah looks into the future and sees gloom, doom, destruction, and not much else. Jeremiah predicts that everything that makes up the nation of Israel Israel
Why is Jeremiah so confident in his predictions of doom? The nation of Babylon Israel
Odd, then, that here, when all is lost and destruction is overdue, Jeremiah would start talking about something new. Is there really hope here at the edge of disaster?
Hold that thought. We’re going to leave Jeremiah here at the edge of disaster for just a moment, because we need to bring the Gospel story into our biblical picture.
At first it would seem that Jesus’ situation is far removed from Jeremiah’s. Jesus isn’t at the edge of disaster, in fact he is at the pinnacle of his success. That’s what is behind his strange response to Philip’s inquiry. Some Greeks want to hear Jesus. These people are Jews, in town just as Jesus is for the Passover. They talk to Philip, probably because they don’t speak the same language as Jesus (Aramaic), and Philip, who is from a Gentile area of the country, is probably bilingual. What their request tells Jesus is that he’s gone viral. Here are people who don’t speak his language, have never been anywhere he has been, don’t know anyone he knows, and they have heard of Jesus. His message has gone way beyond his personal presence and teaching now, so it is time for the next step in his ministry. What is that next step going to be?
Now Jesus and Jeremiah stand on common ground, at the edge of destruction. Jesus is clear about this: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit.” He is going to be that grain of wheat. He will be “lifted up,” a metaphor our author John points out describes his death, just in case we missed the reference. Jesus is at the edge, but he uses a strange word to describe that end:
Glory. His death, his being lifted up, will be a sign of glory.
Now here’s a good church word: glory. We use it all the time here—what does it mean? Bright and shiny? Or something more?
Probably the best definition we can use for glory is truth. To see God’s glory is to recognize the truth of who God is—holy, almighty, utterly beyond us. To give God glory is to acknowledge this same truth, knowing that God deserves our worship. If the cross gives God glory, that cross must reveal the truth, and so it does.
The first truth of the cross is judgment, the judgment of this world. “This world”—that’s the code we heard last week for all the parts of reality that are opposed to God’s plan–everything and everyone who does not hear Jesus’ message of the Kingdom as Good News. Certainly that means judgment falls on the religious establishment who oppose Jesus, and the political regime that kills him, seeing him as a threat to its power. But the “world” is more than that. It’s also all the parts of us who would rather not acknowledge this truth. The parts that would prefer to pretend that our place is at the center of creation, the parts that are content with prejudice and self-justification, the parts that just don’t want to care—all belong to this world. We live in this world coming under judgment, in our fears and excuses we are also part of this world.
This world, opposing his message, puts Jesus on the cross. In silencing Jesus, putting him to death, the victory would seem clear. That’s where the judgment comes in, God’s judgment, that is. The powers of this world are judged as weak—they cannot stand. They are judged as the losers, and the power that wins has another name, the one Jeremiah gave us so long ago: Forgiveness—another word for glory, for the truth.
The glory seen on the cross is the victory of forgiveness. Notice that while forgiveness is the truth revealed, we don’t hear one word about repentance. I mentioned that Jeremiah doesn’t suggest it. Jesus preached repentance earlier as a preparation for hearing the Good News, but as the glory is revealed, repentance drops out of the picture. Forgiveness is God’s gift alone.
Isn’t this irresponsible on the part of our Creator? Forgiveness without any remorse on our part—isn’t that just an excuse for us to run amok, doing whatever, and assuming we’ll be forgiven at the end?
Notice that the consequences of sin remain. Israel
So is this irresponsible or life-giving? What does it mean to us to know where we belong, to be at peace and unafraid, to let go of the past without regrets? In other words, what does it mean to be whole?
The scripture invites us to reflect this week on what it would mean if we based our lives on God’s forgiveness. If we knew that there was one, and only one, opinion that mattered, what would we do differently? Are there battles we wouldn’t have to fight? Or maybe battles we need to engage? If it were clear that we were freed from the past, what excuses would we put aside, what new tasks might we take up? Once it is clear that we can’t have it all and we can’t do it all, and that’s all ok—where do we want to be?
The Good News is that we are free. So what does that look like now?