No Law Without Gospel
Lent 5B (Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-12; John 12:20-33)
No longer will they teach one another, or tell one another “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive them and remember their sin no more.
During this pandemic year, we’ve had a couple of Sundays where the first reading came from the prophet Jeremiah, and they were quite a bit different from the text we read today. Jeremiah lived about 600 years before Jesus. But, by his time, the people had been living in the Promised Land for centuries.
And things had not gone according to plan – the plan being spelled out in our Old Testament readings throughout Lent. God had promised to Abraham and Sarah a people that would be God’s own – and yet the people often turned away from the Lord towards the gods of their own making. The people had by and large given up trying to live the vision of the beloved community that God had given them in the Ten Commandments; they had even stopped repenting and returning to the covenant, as they did in the incident of the poisonous snakes in the wilderness.
In short, as the Lord says through Jeremiah in today’s reading: I made a covenant with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, even though I was their husband, says the Lord. Even though I committed myself to them, to love them and to honor them and to protect them and to be faithful to them – they have not loved or been faithful to me.
As you know, Jeremiah’s calling, for most of his life, was to tell the people that their unfaithfulness had created an unsustainable situation – that if they did not change their ways and return to God, it would all end badly. Which did not make Jeremiah very popular, as you can imagine, and – as we’ve seen a couple of times over the last year – Jeremiah often found his vocation as a prophet of doom to be quite unfulfilling. Jeremiah was rejected for his faithfulness, and he didn’t enjoy it very much.
And then, one day, the bad ending that Jeremiah saw coming actually happened. The Babylonians had invaded, sent the king and many of the leading citizens into exile. A few years later, the puppet king rebelled, and this time the Babylonian army came back and meant business. The city of Jerusalem had been surrounded, the food had run out, hungry people hunkered down in their homes to avoid disease. The walls were about to come down, the Temple would be destroyed, the whole people would be uprooted and forced out of the land God had given them.
And in the middle of the disaster that Jeremiah had spent a lifetime warning about, what did Jeremiah do? “I told you so” would be the natural reaction. “Now do you want to listen to me?” “Now do you want to admit that I was right and you were wrong?” You could forgive Jeremiah if that had been his reaction.
But in fact, as the catastrophe reached its peak, Jeremiah pivots. Don’t despair, Jeremiah says, don’t give up on God, because this is not the end. It feels like the end, it feels like everything has changed, it feels like we can never get back the life we thought we had – but this is not the end. We may have been unfaithful, but God remains faithful and God will not forget or abandon us. God will use even this disaster to accomplish God’s purposes.
The last two Sundays, we’ve read the Ten Commandments – God’s vision for how wonderfully a free and holy people can live with trust in God and at peace with one another. And we’ve read how, in the wilderness, the people who had been physically delivered from captivity in Egypt discovered that Egypt still had a powerful hold on their minds and their spirits.
Martin Luther called this the two uses of the Law. The Law of God is like the Ten Commandments: it’s a vision of what could be, of what God wants for us, of how we were made to live, of what living in God’s truth looks like, and it’s beautiful and would be deeply fulfilling and joyful if we ever could actually be free enough to put it into practice. But the very beauty of this vision also works as a mirror, to show us how unfree we actually still are, how captive we remain to the forces opposed to God’s good kingdom, how far we are from actually living the life that we know God wants for us. The Law both lifts up how wonderful life could be in covenant with God, if only we loved God and loved our neighbor as ourselves and confronts us with just how much we fail to love, just how much our fear and our pain and our lack of trust keep us from that covenant with God.
So what can we do? We who can see the goodness of the Law but who can also see that we haven’t kept it very well? What can we do? Well, one common response is to double down on trying to keep the Law. To try really, really hard to follow all of the commandments as precisely and exactly as possible. That was what Martin Luther did in his younger days, and eventually, he concluded that trying harder just doesn’t work. It never works, but that doesn’t stop people from trying and thinking that they’re doing God’s will.
Although being fanatical about trying harder to follow the Law usually makes people miserable for themselves, and dangerous to others. If you don’t believe me, read some of the newspaper articles about the young man who confessed to killing eight people in Atlanta last week. A man who grew up in the church was considered an exemplary member of his church’s youth group, who by all accounts was obsessed with what he considered to be his own sinfulness. The laws that he thought he was violating, if the Biblical passages in question are read properly and in context, are always – always! – about protecting socially powerless people from predators who would take advantage of them. And he was so obsessed with not transgressing laws meant to stop him from harming socially vulnerable people that he wound up killing eight of them. How messed up is that? How unspeakably tragic for these eight beloved children of God, and for their families and all who knew and loved them. How frightening and disturbing these events have been for all people who are socially vulnerable, in different ways.
Fortunately, most people who obsess over their sins and failings – of whatever sort – get off the double-down train before things get to this point. But if the only thing we know about God is the Law, that’s where fanatical devotion to the Law eventually leads. And this is why the pivot that Jeremiah makes in today’s first reading is so essential, so vital, to any understanding of how faith and a relationship with God works.
For in the moment when the people are confronted as never before with the consequences of their failure to keep God’s Law, with the inevitable results of their breaking of God’s covenant with them, Jeremiah does not give them more Law but instead, Jeremiah gives them Gospel. Jeremiah tells them that God will accomplish God’s good and life-giving purposes, no matter what. That God can work with anything, even failure and sin, and that even if we are unfaithful, God will remain faithful. That God’s love and goodness and God’s care for us is not conditioned on whether or how we respond to God, because that is who God is. And – most importantly – God’s love and care for you – you! – is not conditioned on how well you keep the law.
I think this is what Jesus was getting at in today’s gospel reading when he says: When I am lifted up on the cross, I will draw all people to myself. Jesus came announcing the coming of the kingdom of God, showing us the beauty of the life of faith and love that God has always intended for us and that is always present here and now if only we have the eyes to see it – the first use of the law. And in a world that has turned away from God Jesus provokes intense opposition, the willful blindness of those who are so invested in their power and their belief in themselves that they refuse to see God’s kingdom, no matter the cost to themselves or to their neighbors – the second use of the law. To the point that Jesus will be crucified – and in so doing, Jesus will incarnate the faithfulness and the love of God who works even with failure and sin. This is the gospel, this is the good news about God that will draw all people to God through Jesus – if we have wrestled with the Law enough to begin to hear just how good this good news is.
This is why Luther insisted that the Word of God must always be read and understood as both Law and Gospel. God reveals to us first a vision of what God’s goodness could mean for our life. And then God reveals to us how far we are from that vision, how unfaithful we have been, how captive we still are – and it is in that despair that we begin to actually hear the Gospel that God’s love and presence and salvation are still there, even for me, even for me in my own failures and lack of love. If we only hear it as Law, we’ll be unhappy and we’ll harm our neighbors. If we only hear it as Gospel, God loves us but has no expectations and makes no demands on us, we won’t actually perceive how good this good news is, and our faith will be the weaker for it.
All of God’s Word – in the text of the Bible, made flesh in sacraments, in the living presence of God in Christian community – all of God’s Word is both Law and Gospel. As we move now over these coming days to Palm Sunday and Holy Week and the Three Days leading to Easter, see how the Scripture and the liturgy work to show us both Law and Gospel. You can even see it in our hymn of the day today – it’s one of those classic 17th-century German Lutheran dirges. Written by a Lutheran pastor whose ministry spanned the Thirty Year’s War, a time of great violence – much of it allegedly in the name of religion – and suffering and loss.
Yes, it strikes notes of the Law – both our aspirations to love and our shame and despair over our failures to love, and how we are responsible for the suffering of Christ who takes on the suffering we inflict on ourselves and our neighbors. But it does so in service of the Gospel – of the good news of the faithfulness of God, of the faithfulness of God to me despite my failures, of the promise of God to continue to work in me, bringing good out of evil and life out of death. This good news – not obsessive and destructive zeal for the Law, but life-giving faith in the God whose goodness gave the Law and promises to remain faithful even when we are not – this good news is what will draw all people to God, and thereby together to one another.