The Season of Lent is almost over: many of us are glad for it to end, others would like a few more weeks of personal pangs in not recognizing the Christ. The purpose of Lent is, in the terms of many theologians, an admission that God doesn’t shun going through Death to Life. The persons in the pews this weekend will hear challenges to recognize Christ in both days of old and within contemporary settings.
JEREMIAH 31:31-34 is atypical of the Gloomy Prophet–he announces a New Covenant within a New Age, one written upon the heart and not just the stone or papyrus of the Original Ten. Here is God staying the course faithfully, even though the Creatures of God’s Love have broken away like self-identifying children. The days are coming when the people will know God not as an academic teaching, but as an all-encompassing Person with corresponding intimacy. And this new covenant comes with a promise: “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
This leads us to the mysterious Letter to the HEBREWS 5:5-10. Who in the world is Melchizedek? We’re referred to Genesis 14, which all good Hebrew children should know. He’s the High Priest who goes before God with all our supplications–and returns with messages of forgiveness. Jesus has prayed for forgiveness, and also lives out the covenant established in Jeremiah’s vision of Newly Engraved Hearts. “The chief task of Israel’s high priest: that in the most terribly sacred space, all alone, he bears to God the most crucial human need. The text envisions Christ as being forever in this mode.” (Paul Simpson Duke, in FEASTING on the WORD, B 2:137)
JOHN’s Gospel is a storybook detailing Jesus’ confrontations with idols/the power of evil. Here in 12:20-33 is the account of how some gentile visitors to Jeusalem’s Passover feast want to see Jesus. Now, thinks Jesus, just before his crucifixion, is the time fulfilled: the entire world is looking for the Man of the Covenant. “Now is the judgment of this world, now the ruler of this world (cosmos) will be driven out.” And indeed it has been–we just don’t know it yet. A New Age foretold by Jeremiah is within us, despite the outbreaks of idolatry, injustice, selfishness and materialism that tend to overcome us! Jesus has now exposed the System, which totters on old beliefs and customs alone.
Many wish to see Jesus, and may be looking in all the wrong places. Suffice it to say that Jesus is more than an historical character, but lives in and through this New Covenant. Disciples today have an assurance that God is near–but we have to keep on course with the Savior in changing the wreckage of the cosmos that its former ruler has left behind.
In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King
Join in the challenge of being confronted by scriptural texts which will be read during worship this upcoming weekend–every Tuesday at horacebrownking.com
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