Is It All Over?
For the people of Judah, the Temple was not only a site of worship. It was a symbol of God’s presence and protection. Seeing the smoke rise from its daily sacrifices and smelling their pleasing odors would have assured the people of God’s nearness. Many people assumed that the Temple would stand forever. After all, God had promised King David that his kingdom would have no end (2 Sam 7:12-13). According to Jeremiah, the leaders of Judah encouraged this perception. They would say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (7:4). Imagine a national parade in which flags are raised and glory is proclaimed and the nation’s demise is simply inconceivable. For many people, that feeling of triumph and eternity accompanied the Temple. As long as it was standing, they knew that God was on their side. And they believed it would always be standing.
But then one day, it wasn’t. When Babylon conquered Jerusalem in 587 BCE, it destroyed the Temple. Suddenly the people were thrown into doubt. The Temple’s destruction meant that maybe God was not on their side. It meant that maybe God had left them. They felt desolate and wondered if they had thrown it all away. They wondered if they had broken God’s covenant beyond repair.
Maybe you know what this feels like. We all have little Temples of our own—people, places, possessions, achievements that somehow become the meaning of life for us. When these little Temples suddenly collapse, we are left wondering if it is all over. Maybe it is divorce, or the loss of a job, or serious financial trouble, or a relapse. Whatever it is, we are suddenly left feeling very alone and wondering if we blew it.
Getting Past Our
Deeds to God’s Love
To a people who felt like they had blown it, Jeremiah announces a curious prophecy. On the one hand, the first thirty chapters or so of Jeremiah are precisely an announcement of having blown it. Jeremiah declares the unsavory truth that deeds have consequences. In the case of Judah, the people had violated God’s covenant so boldly and for so long, neglecting the poor and vulnerable and chasing after their own greed, that their society had become divided against itself and crumbled. God describes the consequences that Judah must endure in terms of a clearing out: God will “pluck up and break down,” “overthrow” and “destroy” (31:28). We might flinch to hear this terminology of judgment, particularly if we apply it to our own lives and those moments when our world has suddenly collapsed, but it may help to understand that God’s judgment here is not a matter of punishment or retribution. It is simply the consequence of our own deeds.
But if Jeremiah proclaims the difficult truth that deeds have consequences, he also proclaims an even deeper truth. Consequences do not define us. God’s love does. “As I have watched over them to pluck up and break down…so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord” (31:28). Earlier in the same chapter, God declares God’s motivation for restoration, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (31:3).
When our Temples collapse, the tendency is to think that we are done. We mistake our identity for what we have done—in particular what we have done wrong. We identify with our scars. We think they tell the whole story, a story of our failure and our not-enough-ness. (We might forget that when God first marked a human for his wrongdoing, it was not a mark of punishment, but a mark of protection. God marked Cain out of love, so that he would live.)
“I’m Gonna Tattoo
That on My Heart”
Father Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a gang intervention and rehabilitation program in Los Angeles. Today his ministry supports over 10,000 men and women who are escaping the vicious cycle of violence and incarceration. Greg explains that the gang members who enter into the program share one thing in common: they all have grown up in terribly deprived and hurtful settings. Early in their lives, they absorb the destructive message that they are not worth anything, which becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy as they embark on destructive gang careers. Degraded and abandoned as little children, they act out their perceived worthlessness on the streets.
One day, Greg was struggling with Sharkey, a “particularly exasperating homie.” (“Homie” is the affectionate name that the former gang members have for one another). Greg realized that he had been acting harshly toward Sharkey and expecting too much from him. So, he decided to switch his strategy and catch Sharkey in the act of doing something good. He praised him for his bravery. He pointed out that Sharkey’s old peers had a “hollow” bravery, acting violently but never trying to change their circumstances, whereas Sharkey had actually given up his old ways and was forging a new life for himself. He told Sharkey, “You are a giant among men. I mean it.” Suddenly, Sharkey grew silent and stared at him. Then he said, “[Dang], G…I’m gonna tattoo that on my heart.”[1]
Many of the homies whom Greg serves are covered in tattoos. In fact, one of the services his ministry provides is tattoo-removal. It can be a big help when a homie is looking for employment—as most employers steer away from people with hateful words and images etched prominently onto their faces or forearms. It strikes me that tattoo removal for these homies is more than simply erasing a piece of body art. It is liberating them from their old identity, promising them that they are not defined by their past deeds. They didn’t blow it. Their race is not run. What defines them is not the past tattooed on their skin, but the unconditional love that gives them new life—the unconditional love that Sharkey wanted to tattoo on his heart.
Covenant
Re-understood
When God declares God’s love to the people of Judah and promises restoration, God also declares a new covenant that will be different from the old covenant. To hear God describe it, the difference is not so much the content of the covenant, which was and always will be God’s unconditional love for the people (cf. Deut 30:1-5); the difference is how the people understand the covenant. Earlier, God says, the people broke the covenant. They did not trust in it. They did not trust that God’s love would give them life, but instead sought life in the competitive realms of wealth and power and reputation. But this time, God says, they will trust in God and know God “for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (31:34). In other words, the difference between their first understanding of the covenant and this second, renewed understanding of the covenant, is what has happened in between. They have done all the wrong things, and God still loves them. They blew it, but God loves them just as much as ever. God cannot magically erase all the consequences of their past deeds, but God’s love can draw them beyond the past into new life.
God describes this renewed understanding of covenant in the most intimate of terms. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it”—tattoo it?—“on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (31:33).
Greg Boyle tells another story about a homie named Miguel. As a little child, Miguel had been mistreated and abused by his family. Then one day they abandoned him. He grew up an orphan. Over a recent Thanksgiving holiday, he had no family to join, so he invited several other homies who were orphans like him over to his home. Later, he proudly told Greg that he had cooked a turkey. “How’d you do that?” Greg asked. “You know, ghetto-style,” he replied. When Greg shared that he wasn’t familiar with the recipe, Miguel explained, “Well, you just rub it with a gang a’ butter, throw a bunch a’ salt and pepper on it, squeeze a couple of limones over it and put it in the oven. It tasted proper.” Marveling over Miguel’s hospitality and kindness of heart, Greg asked him, “How do you do it? I mean, given all that you’ve been through—all the pain and stuff you’ve suffered—how are you like the way you are?” Miguel responded, “You know, I always suspected that there was something of goodness in me, but I just couldn’t find it. Until one day,”—he quieted a bit—“one day, I discovered it in here, in my heart. I found it…goodness. And ever since that day, I have always known who I was. And now, nothing can touch me.”[2]
Miguel had discovered the ancient, everlasting covenant of which Jeremiah spoke. Just like Sharkey before him, who gave us an updated translation of Jeremiah, “Dang, G…I’m gonna tattoo that on my heart.” This covenant written on our heart is not that our temples will stand forever and that we will be successful in all that we do. It’s deeper than that. It’s a covenant of God’s care, and it will be standing even when our temples collapse. (And for some of us, it may be only when our temples collapse that we become fully aware of it.) It’s a covenant that cannot be broken by the past or anything we’ve done or even death itself. When this covenant is written on our heart, when God’s love defines us, everything is transformed. It’s like we were in a prison of our own making, and suddenly we are free. Nothing can touch us because we know who we are. We are God’s beloved, and we are here to love.
Prayer
God of steadfast care—
Help us to accept
Our past,
Its difficult consequences,
And our responsibility
…
And help us to know
What defines us—
Not these things
But what is written on our heart:
Your love,
Which is making all things new.
In Christ, our brother: Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment