Variety: Jeremiah 31v33

Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).

Richard Rohr presents the journey of the prophets as one that ends in trusting God’s unconditional love and grace. He uses the prophet Jeremiah as an example: 

The first covenant between YHWH and Israel appeared to be bilateral: “If you obey my voice and hold fast to my covenant, you of all the nations shall be my very own” (Exodus 19:5). But the covenant that emerged in Jeremiah’s time was unilateral from YHWH’s side: “Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). This dramatic change replaces the earlier order by surpassing it, not destroying it. God forgives undeservedly, even after direct disobedience! This is a love that waits and hopes and desires, working toward surrender and trust. It gifts us a new covenant that we can actually fulfill, just not perfectly or by ourselves. Only God can fill in all the gaps. Henceforth, there is no such thing as deserving or earning anything. All is grace. 

Jeremiah 31 is frankly a total changing of the guard—and what is guarded is only the human capacity for intimate reciprocal love! As many scholars have agreed, the notion of a God-initiated, unilaterally fulfilled divine relationship is the highest peak of any spirituality, especially since most of us fear, deep down, that we’re unworthy of it.  

It is deeply unfortunate that our interpretation of the old covenant is so enmeshed in our dualistic logic of tit for tat that most Christians remain untouched by Jeremiah’s proclamation of a spiritual revolution. We remain content with retribution and vengeance passing for justice. We would rather stand outside of love than receive a love of which we believe we are not worthy—or have not earned or cannot figure out. We think the old covenant at least tells us where we stand, even if it is outside of paradise. We seem to find certitude more comforting than we do trust or love. Infinite love is literally too much for most of us to comprehend. We think we know how to love—alone. But how do we know and love together with a “divine another” living within us? The answer is by participation rather than performance—riding the divine coattails, as it were.  

In his aloneness and anguish, Jeremiah saw what a majority still cannot see twenty-five hundred years later. Our refusal to allow ourselves to be loved undeservedly and unconditionally will probably forever be the anguish of every prophet and the burden of every mystic or saint. Jeremiah’s scroll of writings was cut into pieces and burned by King Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36). This is how threatening any new covenant of grace, or any new anything, is to a world already set in full and determined motion.