Focus: Jesus renews God’s covenant with Israel.
One of my favorite movies is They Shall Not Grow Old, a 2018 documentary released for the World War I centennial. The documentary relied entirely on decades-old interviews with veterans of the war, as well as original footage. Now if you’ve ever seen video footage from one hundred years ago, you know the problems. For starters, some of it has been damaged or exposed to sun or just the passage of time and is hard to see. Second, the camera speed isn’t quite right, so the people appear to be walking in comical, herky-jerky motion. Third, movies at the time did not have any sound. Finally, and most importantly, it’s all in black-and-white, so the people you are watching seem like ancient history, not like the rest of us. In They Shall Not Grow Old, director and producer Peter Jackson changes all of that. He and his team spent thousands of hours meticulously compiling the video, correcting the speed of the film, finding just the right audio to insert at just the right moment, and colorizing the film down to the smallest detail on every last uniform. The result? The movie is true to its title: They Shall Not Grow Old. Suddenly, you are right there with these men and boys on a battleship or in the trenches. They are the same people and stories as they ever were before, but suddenly we see them. They are alive, they are real, they are renewed.
Renewal is the topic in our reading from the book of Jeremiah today: God promises a “new covenant.” A “new deal,” if you will. So often we Christians think of the Old Testament as being the bad, old covenant that needed to be thrown away and the New Testament as the “new and improved” sequel. But, as Dr. Amy-Jill Levine has pointed out so many times in our Lenten Bible study, for Jews at the time and for Jesus, the problem was not the covenant or the relationship between God and the people itself. No, it’s that it needed to be renewed. It needed to come alive in a new way. It needed to become real to the people again.
That’s why Jeremiah’s “new covenant” never throws away the old. Notice that it’s the same promise as always before: “I will be your God and you will be my people.” It’s even the same laws. “I will write my law on their hearts.” The difference? It’s knowing the Lord. It’s an intimacy. It’s taking the laws and ways and covenant and relationship with God off the pages of the old, dusty scrolls and planting it directly in their hearts.
In Jesus Christ, that is what happens. Today he promises, “I, when I am lifted up on the cross, will draw all people to myself.” Jesus is the best of the old covenant: born a Jew, faithfully kept all the laws, lived fully in relationship with God and with his neighbors. But as the living, breathing word of God, he himself embodies the very promises, the very laws, the very relationship that God promises. Best of all, on the cross he renews this covenant for Jews and Gentiles such as all of us alike. Every week, when we hear the words “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” we get to take into our hearts, into our very bodies and souls, the God who has been faithful to his covenant people of all times and places. When we eat this bread and drink this cup: he makes us alive, he makes us our most real, truest selves, he forms us as his holy people renewed for the sake of the world.
In these words of promise, in this bread and wine, on the cross, we see the covenant “I will be your God” renewed and fulfilled in Jesus. Perhaps as things slowly return to normal, we his people can shoot for something better than normal: renewal. How can we live as people of the renewed covenant? How can we take what is best about the Christianity we have learned, taught, and known, the best about the Christ we meet here every week and make it alive, real, and renewed for others? How is Jesus renewing his covenant in our time and place?
Amen.