Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen
The Fifth Sunday in Lent B, March 17, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
In my prayer and preaching this Lent, I’ve been following the throughline of covenant. Our readings have told the story of God’s continual refinement of her covenant, which begins with Noah as the representative of the whole creation (very important that we recover that ecological understanding) and follows through God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, and then in the giving of the law through Moses on Mt. Sinai. At each point along the way, the people violate this sacred covenantal relationship with God. But rather than abandon them (us), God rejigs the covenant.
Infected as we are with a radical protestant reading of Paul, we have often come to view the law, and therefore the covenant, as a dead thing in opposition to the living spirit. But, of course, our Jewish ancestors in the faith knew, just as our Jewish siblings still know, that the law and the covenant that it represents was and is a means of grace, a beautiful and life-giving doorway into the full flowering of the life of God. If they and we know the law more in its violation than in its keeping, that has everything to do with human frailty—and yet even our failure to keep the law opens us more and more to God’s abundant mercy.
This morning we hear God’s promise, given through Jeremiah, to refine the covenant yet once more: “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. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me.” Where once God made her covenant with one person on behalf of the whole creation, now God promises to write that covenant on every single heart. Where once God mediated the covenant through law written on stone tablets, now God promises to write that law on the tablets of our hearts. Where once the elders conveyed knowledge of God to their people, now God promises to be so close to her people that everyone will know God in the innermost part of their being. God will be closer to us than our own breath, and every heartbeat will whisper her name.
Of course, we know how well that worked out. We have only to look around us at the world we have created to see that even God’s indwelling presence cannot guarantee our virtue. Even written on the tablet of our heart, the law cannot corral this restless human nature of ours. But God’s mercy is such that God chooses to leave us free to choose whether and how to respond to God’s love. So that, whether we conform to God’s way or violate it, we are steeped in mercy.
In her new book Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson writes “The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is in effect another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only what God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic […] relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps.”
Our total freedom to choose either good or evil, life or death, is perhaps God’s greatest mercy to us. Our lives and our choices are not predetermined. Yes, we know that we are all driven by instinctual forces, manipulated by past traumas and the unmet needs of our child selves, shaped by beliefs so deeply held as to be shadows on the wall of our consciousness. And yet, we are not now, nor have we ever been, predetermined or predestined. We are radically, frighteningly, and miraculously free.
I can say with certainty that it is a miracle some of us are here today worshipping and loving and laughing and singing and not dead or in prison or drugged into oblivion. Because yes, we may be assaulted daily by the shadows of the past and the urges of our unmet longings and the compulsions the advertisers stir up in us, and yet still there remains that quiet tapping on the inner chamber of our hearts, that whisper of a voice that calls our name if get quiet enough to hear it.
Jesus himself offers us this example in this morning’s complex and rich passage from John. It’s one of the few times we hear something of Jesus’ inner thoughts. He knows that he is nearing his death and, in that death, the fulfilling of God’s purpose for him. Human as he is, he shows some reticence to accept death. But then he chooses actively to surrender himself to God’s will. That choice is not incidental. It is everything! Jesus has a choice. Like us, he has total freedom to walk away. Without that freedom, his obedience to God would be a puppet show, and his death and resurrection would mean nothing at all. His radical freedom—and ours—are the fountain from which the living waters of God’s love flow into our hearts.
We might wonder how Jesus comes to be able to surrender himself to God’s purpose. The clue is in the voice from heaven. Each time that voice has echoes in the scriptures, it proclaims God’s love for Jesus, calling him the beloved child—first at his baptism and then at his transfiguration. By now it would see the mere echo of God’s voice in the thunder above him reminds Jesus of who and whose he is. And like the voice of a loving parent, God’s voice settles Jesus enough to choose once more the path of self-giving love.
This is the kind of obedience to which God calls us—not slavish or begrudging or tepid—but born from the sure knowledge that God loves us and wills for us our salvation and our healing. God desires nothing less than to drive the ruler of this world from our hearts and our lives, so that, like Jesus, we can lay down our lives for the world in radical and miraculous freedom. We can think of obedience as a chore, some kind of boring or difficult task that we know we need to do but would rather not. But the very fact that we can obey is itself God’s grace to us, the freedom of the children of God written on the flesh of our hearts.
I know that our lives are challenging. Often they’re boring, too. Sometimes they’re painful. And sometimes, hopefully more and more as we grow in Christ, our lives shine out with the radiance of God’s love and we hear in the thunder above us the reassurance that yes, we, too, are God’s beloved children. Our lives, in all their complexity, are God’s grace to us, and we can choose to see and celebrate and cultivate that grace, a freedom that is itself grace and opens the way to more grace. Because the more we learn to recognize God’s mercy to us, the more we come to see that everything, absolutely everything is grace. It is a miracle to be alive, my brothers and sisters. You are God’s miracle and God’s promise.
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