Today's readings were Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 51, Hebrews 5:5-10, John 12:20-33

We’re back to covenants again this week. You’ll recall that over the course of Lent we’ve been looking at the various covenants between God and humankind, agreements about the way in which we can be God’s people and God can be our God. That started with Noah and the ark, and God’s promise not to destroy the earth again. Then we had the covenant between God and Abraham, where Abraham’s faith in God, and his obedience, was enough to secure the promise of blessing. And finally, a couple of weeks ago we looked at the role of the Ten Commandments, where God’s expectations of humankind were written down in much greater detail, literally set in tablets of stone. We also looked forward to the ultimate re-stating of the covenant that came about through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Rewinding now to the Old Testament, we’re reminded that the covenant put in place by the Ten Commandments didn’t actually last much longer than a couple of hours, since the Israelites immediately broke it by making an idol, a statue of a god they preferred, melting down their jewellery and valuables to create a golden calf.  Through the ups and downs of Jewish history, they continued to oscillate between obedience and disregard, sometimes running riot, and occasionally rediscovering the beauty and importance of God’s law.

This morning’s reading from Jeremiah comes from a period just before the definitive defeat of the Jewish people and the exile to Babylon, the time when the Temple was destroyed and the hopes of the people shattered. Jeremiah, like so many of the prophets, doesn’t flinch from telling his contemporaries just how badly they’ve behaved, how completely they’ve failed to be faithful to God and compassionate towards their neighbours. Yet there is a glimmer of hope in this beautiful reading. ‘I will put my law within them’, says God, ‘and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’

This is going to be a different kind of law: not a series of ‘Thou shalts’ and ‘Thou shalt nots’, not something to be read out loud and disputed over in a court of law, but a law written on our hearts, in the inmost part of us. In Jewish understanding, the heart isn’t something that stands in opposition to the head, it’s not a question of God’s word moving from the head to the heart, of people acting on feelings rather than responding to ideas; rather, the ‘heart’ is the place of understanding. So it’s more a question of people knowing God’s law from the inside out, rather than the outside in.

And a different kind of law will lead to a different kind of covenant, one where God’s people will understand the spirit of the law, and not try to wriggle out of right behaviour by arguments over the letter of the law. It’s an idea that’s echoed in the words of Psalm 51: ‘Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.’

That idea of renewal takes us forward into today’s New Testament readings. Looking back after the resurrection, the Letter to the Hebrews focuses on the idea of Jesus as a great High Priest ‘according to the order of Melchizedek’. It’s a complicated idea and there’s not really time to go into it in too much detail today, but basically it establishes a distinction between the tribe of Aaron, who were traditionally the priestly families, and Jesus, whose right to be a priest, to mediate between the people and God, is bestowed by God alone. Like the Jewish law, the traditions of the priesthood have degenerated into a series of squabbles over detail, an intricate adherence to conventions which turn out to be hollow. The Aaronic priesthood fails because people are all too human, and not up to the task.

By contrast, Jesus is prepared to take this most difficult of tasks upon himself. In John’s gospel, Jesus is presented as heroic, possessed of a deep consciousness of his relationship with God and an unwavering understanding of what his role is to be. The other three gospels show Jesus succumbing to mortal fear before his crucifixion, terrified and alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying to be spared the ordeal to come. But here we see Jesus considering this possibility and then dismissing it: ‘Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour”? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.’

This passage is the turning point in John’s gospel. Up until now, whenever people have tried to force a moment of crisis, Jesus’s response has been the same: ‘The hour has not yet come’. But now, curiously, the situation has changed. The hour has come. And what has brought this about? A handful of Greeks, apparently, asking to be introduced to Jesus. An intimation that salvation is no longer just for the Jews; that this is a message that can be taken out throughout the Greek-speaking territories, throughout the Roman Empire, to the very edges of the known world. So that all the families of the world can be blessed. Salvation will no longer depend on obedience to a set of complicated laws, but will be known in the heart and the mind and the gut, a conviction that loving God and loving your neighbour is the only right way to be.

But it is, as T.S. Eliot so brilliantly puts it in the Four Quartets, ‘a condition of complete simplicity /(Costing not less than everything)’. Jesus appears to change the subject almost immediately, introducing the famous metaphor of the grain of wheat, the seed that will only bring forth new life by allowing itself to be destroyed, split open as the seedling shoots. It’s a clear prefiguring of Jesus’s death and the resurrection that is to follow  - hence the kind of drumroll from heaven. By allowing himself to be ‘lifted up from the earth’ on the cross, Jesus will ‘draw all people to himself’.

And what is the message for us, apart from the obvious one, of striving to love God and love our neighbour? Well, earlier this week I saw a piece on the Channel 4 news about ‘Lockdown Secrets’ – a series of postcards created by a small stationery shop in London. They send out special blank postcards, and the idea is that people return them, anonymously, decorated in their own way, with a "lockdown secret". The one that particularly struck me was the one that said ‘I really love lockdown. I don’t want it to end.’

Now even though at one level we’re all gradually climbing the walls, I suspect there are quite a lot of people who feel the same way. There is something very comfortable about hiding away, taking the path of least resistance, not making the effort. Lounging around in your pyjamas except for the bit of you that’s actually visible on Zoom. But the hour has almost come when we’re all going to have to make the effort again; and the question is really, whether we will step up to the mark. Will we allow our cosy comfort to be broken apart for the sake of new life, new growth? Has the law of God been written on our hearts? Will we join the throngs booking cheap flights that literally cost the earth, determined to get our money’s worth after the boredom, the enforced saving, the lack of luxuries we’ve endured? Or shall we stand still long enough to consider all the situations crying out for our effort, for our compassion, for the expenditure of our time and our resources? The catastrophic inequalities lockdown has laid bare? The dreadful contrasts between the over- and the under-developed worlds? The unique opportunity we have been offered to do things differently, to re-think our priorities? ‘Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.’ Amen.