Over and over again, humanity has fallen short, failing to live up to our covenants with God. So, God has made a new covenant in Jesus Christ, one that depends on God’s forgiveness, not our efforts. We depend on God for life – and that’s good news!
Here’s my sermon for the fifth Sunday of Lent, March 21, 2021. Today’s Scripture readings are Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51:1-12, and John 12:20-33. This week, I found helpful Henry T.C. Sun’s commentary at Working Preacher.
Grace to you and peace from the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Occasionally when I look at at the week’s Scripture readings to get started on a sermon, a word comes to mind to use as a theme.
Last week’s sermon focused on the word “love.” I talked about God’s motivation being love, how God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
This week, I’m thinking about the word “dependence.” Today’s readings are all about what it means to depend on God.
Let’s start with the Jeremiah reading. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant.” There are a lot of covenants in the Bible, agreements between God and people.
We’ve actually heard several of them in the last few weeks, although I don’t think I’ve preached on any of them. There’s the covenant between God and Noah on behalf of the whole creation, where God promises to never again flood the whole earth. The Creator will never get so upset with the Creation as to wipe it all out and start over.
God’s committed to loving this world, and as a reminder of that commitment, God puts the rainbow in the sky. When it rains and God sees the rainbow, God will remember this promise. That’s one covenant.
Another covenant is between God and Abraham. God calls a nomadic herdsman and says come and follow me, and I will make you the father of many nations. Trust me, and I will be your God, I will be God to you and your children and your children’s children and all the generations after you, and you will be my people. You’ll serve me, and I’ll watch over you.
Then there’s the covenant Jeremiah refers to, the covenant God made with the people of Israel when God took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. You know the story.
God’s people were slaves in Egypt, but they cried out to God and God sent Moses to rescue them and lead them out of slavery into freedom in the promised land. On the way, God made a covenant with them, promising to always be with them, to be their God forever, and in return, they promised to obey God’s laws, to follow the ten commandments, to live God’s way and be a light to the nations around them, to be God’s beacon in the world.
And over and over, the people broke the covenant. They kept returning to sin, abandoning God to worship false idols instead. God sends them prophet after prophet, calling them to return to the Lord, and they do, but it never lasts.
Eventually, God sends them into exile, and during the exile, God decides this isn’t working. God’s people have proven themselves incapable of keeping a covenant. But since God’s not willing to give up on them (remember, God is motivated by love), it’s time for something new.
So, God says through the prophet Jeremiah, I will make a new covenant. It won’t be like the covenant I made before that they broke. Instead, this will be the new covenant: 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. Everyone will know the Lord, and the Lord will forgive them and remember their sin no more.
This new covenant doesn’t depend on the people’s obedience; it depends on God’s willingness to forgive. The whole thing depends on God. From our perspective as Christians, looking back thousands of years later, we recognize Jesus is the fulfillment of the new covenant.
God has come in the flesh, offering us forgiveness on the cross, defeating the power of death in the resurrection. God has come to do what we were incapable of doing.
In fact, Jesus even refers to this at the last supper, in those familiar words we hear whenever we celebrate communion. Taking the wine, he says, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you and all people, for the forgiveness of sins.” It’s Jesus giving himself for us. It’s a promise—a covenant—that depends fully on God.
We can’t save ourselves. We depend on God for life, because on our own, we die and that’s the end of our story. When it’s up to us, death always wins.
Psalm 51 makes it clear. I love this Psalm, because it’s bluntly honest. This is one of the few Psalms where we know the backstory. This is written by King David after he has committed the biggest sin of his life, impregnating a woman named Bathsheba, and then having her husband killed to try to cover it up.
He’s broken God’s law in a big way, and he knows it, and he knows he can’t make up for it. He needs forgiveness. So he writes this Psalm crying out to God.
“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving kindness. Blot out my offenses. Wash me through and through from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin.”
David knows his condition. He’s stuck in sin, not just in this big, dramatic thing he did, but for his whole life. “Indeed, I have been wicked from my birth, a sinner from my mother’s womb.”
He throws himself on God’s mercy. There’s something beautiful and powerful in David’s honesty as he admits his dependence on God for life, begging God, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
Confession is powerful, not as a way of beating ourselves up, but as a moment of honesty between us and God. When we confess, we admit our dependence on God. We declare the truth: We are human, we are fallible, we are sinful, and we cannot save ourselves. You may not have done something as awful as David did, but as a human being, you need God’s help. We depend on God for life. And God forgives. God restores. God comes to us in our brokenness, in our despair, in our mortality, and God gives us life.
But to accept the life God gives, we need to recognize our need for it. Jesus calls us to die to ourselves, to let go of our love for the broken life we’re living now, to turn from the path we’re on which leads to death, and instead to turn to the One who gives true life, everlasting life.
The image Jesus uses is a grain of wheat. Before it can grow and flourish, it first goes through death. Wheat needs to be buried, to give up what it knows in order to be open to to something new. Jesus, of course, is talking about himself—he will be buried and rise again—but he’s also talking about us.
One of the images of baptism is drowning and being raised up from the dead. The old self dies, and God gives us new life. When we follow Jesus, when we confess, when we surrender our lives to God, we let go of our life of sin, and we receive God’s gift of new eternal life. We die in order to live.
It’s a strange message, this idea of dying to ourselves. Our world, our culture, our human nature tells us to hang on to what we have at all costs, yet following Jesus is about letting go. Letting go of your sin, letting go of your fears, your self-centeredness, your self-reliance, letting go of possessions and security and control, and allowing yourself to be buried with Christ so that you can be raised with Christ.
Following Jesus is about a new way of living, a way of living that depends on God, relying on God’s love and mercy, rather than on ourselves.
As we hear once again next week the story of the cross and see how far God is willing to go for us out of love, may you find both death and life, dying to yourself, and being raised with Jesus.
May you depend on God for life, because God loves you and God is faithful.
And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen