Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 17 March 2024.
• First Reading: Jeremiah 31: 31-34 (A new covenant, written in peoples’ hearts. All will know Him)
• Epistle: Hebrews 5: 5-10 (Jesus did not take on Himself the glory of becoming a high priest)
• Gospel: John 12: 20-33 (The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified)
Most revolutions start with the overthrow of the old regime, and then there is a bout of searching out possible traitors or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ supported by a reign of terror and the usual spree of blood-letting.
The French did in in public, like a form of entertainment, supported by the guillotine.
The Nazis and Communists preferred concentration camps, where their bile could be discharged in private, and protected by a veneer of respectability. In this case, the general public just did not need to know. It might be harmful to them – or to the new regime.
But when God initiates a revolution, the process is quite different.
First of all, it applies to the whole society – the whole tribe of Israel, before the coming of Jesus – and then afterwards, to the whole of humanity.
Next, God knows exactly where His enemies are hidden: they are there in the depths of every human heart. It does not matter how they speak or were educated, what is the colour of their skin, or the occupation or status of their parents.
The evil that God confronts is there within the memories, motives, ambitions, attitudes and priorities of every soul who breathes and walks upon the earth. He does not have to seek them out – only to know that this is where the heart of evil lies, and unless this is addressed directly then no amount of publicity, campaigning, entertainment, or plain posturing is going to make the least difference.
But then – and this is the clincher – God has already resolved to be the remedy Himself. He will take the blame and He will carry the burden and the penalty that no one else in the whole of creation can.
So when He speaks through Jeremiah, the vision is not a new society or a new kind of politics. It is not a new culture or economic system.
It is all about new hearts, new minds, new motives and loyalties. Laws would be known by all and would be followed by all, instinctively and with little or no instruction.
God would commit Himself to His people – by His own initiative.
He would be looking for those people also to follow in His steps and walk in His laws until an even more radical covenant was revealed to them. It would be their way of showing that the Lord was indeed their God, and only Him.
But then Jesus spelt it out to the Greek inquirers who came calling. They might be looking for wisdom, but Jesus was showing them a wisdom that their most learned and careful teachers could never have imagined.
In His death many would find life. In His humiliation and abuse, they would see their salvation and their hope. He was never going to be too proud or important not to go, willingly, to the cross for this was the nature and the extremity of the love of God.
The desiccated wisdom of the philosophers and the academics would be confounded and turned inside out by the self-giving of Jesus and in His vindication by God His Father, in the resurrection.
Jesus was about far more than the good life or the worthy death. He was about the total commitment of God to each human life upon the earth in a personal life and relationship. Nothing less would do, and no amount of entertainment or posturing was ever going to make the slightest difference.
Jesus would carry the load than none could carry for themselves. He would be the atonement that none even dare imagine, and which no amount of self-appointed good works would ever satisfy.
To be one with Jesus would mean being one with His agenda – the whole of it.
It would mean letting go of all in this life in order to receive the whole of eternity, in the presence of the glory and majesty of God.
Nothing less was ever in the plans and counsels of God and none on earth was ever going to be able to even imitate it. Like the prophets they might point to it and like John the Baptist they might announce its coming.
But only Jesus could proclaim it in His actions and teaching, and then fulfil it on the cross.
Take away that cross and we are left with trivia and irrelevance. The pronouncements by the doers of good would be shallow and superficial. They would not last the year and might not last the day.
But the blood of Jesus would be God’s cleansing agent. There is none better – and there is definitely none other.
This is the signature on the letter proclaiming our release into His realm.
And He seeks to write it in all human hearts.
