I will Remember their Sin no more
Sermon by Jamie Howison on Jeremiah 31:31-34 and John 12:20-33
We’ve now landed on the fifth Sunday in Lent, and the lectionary has us reading a portion from the Gospel according to John that is a clear anticipation of the stories we will tell from Palm Sunday through Good Friday and on to Easter Day. Here Jesus does speak very clearly about his approaching death, but in John’s telling there is a very particular emphasis, which is quite distinct from what you see in the other three gospel accounts. To be sure, in the other three Jesus does speak about his death and of being raised up, but as John tells it the emphasis is on the victory and even glory of it all:
The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
‘Father, glorify your name.’ Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.
This is changing everything; that’s the consistent message of the Gospel according to John. In the present there is newness and life, even though there is still struggle and death, and this will all be reconciled in the fullness of time on account of the glorification of the Son of Man. This is a Lenten gospel reading that has Easter very much in clear, clear view.
It is important, though, to remember that the Hebrew scriptures also proclaim newness, which is why it is so good to have before us this text from the prophet Jeremiah. We began, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” and it is not uncommon for Christians to read the words “new covenant” and think in terms of Jesus. That’s not entirely unfair, but it also isn’t what Jeremiah had in view as he proclaimed his message to the Jewish exiles in Babylon.
For chapter after chapter after chapter, this oftentimes cranky prophet had been in Jerusalem, warning of the impending collapse of that city and nation. And why? Because, he said, they were not being the covenant people God had intended them to be. They had their covenant obligations—written on stone tablets and on scrolls—and they had their founding stories connecting them to their forebears Abraham and Sarah in the ancient past, to their enslaved ancestors who had been led from bondage into freedom, and to the establishment of the kingdom under the much-loved David, but yet had they strayed far from the path. One of Jeremiah’s key concerns is the degree to which they had replaced the true worship of God with devotion to idols and other gods, which to him is a clear indication that the life-giving commandments of God had ossified in their hands. Sure, temple rituals and sacrifices were still being observed, but to what end? Is the land being cared for? Are debts being forgiven? Are the poor and the widows being displaced for the sake of the gain of the wealthy? In short, is there wholeness to the nation? No?
And so in the opening verses of this book, Jeremiah had been given his commission:
Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth;
and the Lord said to me,
‘Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.’ (1:9-10)
And so for years he had been pronouncing his word of warning, that this was all going to come crashing down; that it would be plucked up and pulled down, destroyed and overthrown. And it was, when the armies of Babylon came crashing through, capturing the leading citizens of Jerusalem and shipping them off to prison ghettoes in Babylon, and then eventually returning to destroy the city and its temple.
Yet it is in those prison ghettoes that the captives began to read a new word from the prophet, and it is some of that new word that we read tonight. Interesting to note that in the verses just prior to tonight’s reading, Jeremiah had returned to the words from the opening of the book that bears his name: “And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.” And this is what it will look like, writes the prophet to those captives:
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… 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. 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…
And here Walter Brueggemann comments, “[T]he commandments will not be an external rule which invites hostility, but now will be an embraced, internal identity-giving mark, so that obeying will be as normal and as readily accepted as breathing and eating.” In other words, if there is going to be a future for this people—and for Jeremiah there is no question that there will be!—it will be because God will remake them from the inside out. The law—the Torah—will be written in the hearts of the people, and not merely stored away on scrolls kept in what was left of the synagogues back home.
And to be sure, this is what began to happen right there in exile. Not only did the people begin to find their feet in their displacement, but they began to flourish there. Some of the most extraordinary writings in the bible come from that period, among others not only Jeremiah but also a large part of Isaiah as well as Ezekiel; a prophet who wrote movingly about God transforming peoples’ hearts:
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
“All the newness is possible because Yahweh has forgiven,” comments Brueggemann, and here he is pointing to the stunning statement with which our reading today closed:
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.
“I will remember their sin no more”; that is an extraordinary proclamation. If someone wrongs me, I’m called by Jesus to forgive that person, which itself isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to do. But forgiving as we are ourselves forgiven remains the mandate, which we rehearse every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer. Yet we’re not expected to forget, and in fact there are clear instances when we shouldn’t forget. If someone has done you real damage and you manage to let go and forgive, you can’t then put yourself in a position of letting yourself get in a place where that person could well hurt you in the same way again. Or maybe forgiveness has led to a deep reconciliation, in which case remembering the whole incident might actually become a source of real peace and hope. So no, we don’t forget.
Yet here the prophet is clear that God is forgiving the iniquity of this people, and then forgetting it had ever happened in the first place. This holy forgetfulness, Jeremiah would say, marks a radically new beginning; an utterly clean slate for a people badly dislocated and now being relocated and reoriented into a startling and new future. And from within a Christian framework, this holy forgetfulness is at the heart of Jesus’ statement that, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself,” and in his dying exhalation of those powerful words, “It is finished” or “It is accomplished.” Jesus will not forget us, but in this Jeremiah-like sense, he will remember our sin no more.
That’s grace.
