postID: 7042; title: The Fifth Sunday In Lent
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Fifth Sunday In Lent
O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Array
(
[date] => 2015-03-22 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1204
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2015-03-22 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2015-03-22postID: 7042 (The Fifth Sunday In Lent)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7042; date_type: variable; year: 2015
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7042
displayDates for postID: 7042/year: 2015
Array
(
[0] => 2015-03-22
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2015-03-22 with ID: 7042 (The Fifth Sunday In Lent)
The Fifth Sunday In Lent
Array
(
[date] => 2015-03-22 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1204
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2015-03-22 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2015-03-22postID: 7042 (The Fifth Sunday In Lent)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 7042; date_type: variable; year: 2015
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 7042
displayDates for postID: 7042/year: 2015
Array
(
[0] => 2015-03-22
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2015-03-22 with ID: 7042 (The Fifth Sunday In Lent)
The reading_id [73396] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Jeremiah 31:31-34
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Jeremiah 31:31-34
✛
The Heart of the Problem
Array
(
[0] => 60726
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60726
)
] (reading_id: 73396)bbook_id: 60726
The bbook_id [60726] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
A short reading from the Old Testament today, a mere four verses, yet verses widely regarded as about the most sublime of the entire Bible. The Lord speaks through the prophet to say that in the coming days he, the Lord, will make a new covenant—not like the old covenant, the one the people broke. The new covenant will, in a sense, be unbreakable, because it will be written in the hearts of the people. I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. As a result, there will no longer need to be religious education. No one will need to have anyone else tell him to know the Lord, for the reason that everyone will already know the Lord, everyone from the least of them unto the greatest, from poor to rich, from intellectually endowed to intellectually simple, everyone without exception will know the Lord.
I say, this passage is widely considered one of the sublimest parts of the Bible, not only an extraordinary, uplifting moment in the book of the prophet Jeremiah (a prophet not known for his uplifting moments; he is, after all, the man who gave his name to “jeremiad”)—not extraordinary only in Jeremiah, but extraordinarily sublime amongst the entire Old Testament, sublime in the Bible as a whole.
If in the coming days the Lord is going to write his law on the human heart, where in earlier days is the law written? It is written on tables of stone, chiseled by God’s hand and delivered over to Moses whose descendants have handed it on, eventually, to us. It is written on public monuments; it underlies many written statutes of the present and past centuries; it is, in pious Jewish tradition, evoked and remembered in physical ways, tied onto one’s body during prayer, written upon the doorposts. And all this for what purpose? So that one would be reminded, going out and coming in, rising up and lying down, throughout the days of one’s life: reminded, that the Lord led you out of slavery into freedom, and has given you a very precious thing, his own law.
But laws, even when handed down in love, are handed down from the outside. That would not be a problem, theological education would not be a problem, Sunday school and Bible study and walking before the Lord all one’s days would not be a problem, if our hearts were right. But the human heart is not right. Jesus put his incarnate finger upon the—the one and only—human problem. “Can a man divorce his wife?” Jesus was asked. “Moses allowed divorce,” Jesus replied, meaning that the law allowed divorce, “because of your hardness of heart” [cf. Mt. 19:8]. While of course this is a teaching about divorce, to focus on that is to put the emphasis upon the wrong syllable, and to let slide past the sublime profundity of Jesus. Why is divorce permitted in the law, the written and passed-down law, the law that we teach one another and try to remember all the days of our life? Because, Jesus said, the human heart is hard. This is a general point: not only is divorce permitted, but a prohibition is put upon adultery, and murder is outlawed, and bearing false witness is verboten, and the sabbath is to be kept holy, and everything else that’s in the law—it’s all there, it’s all written, it was necessary that it be written down, because of the hardness of the human heart.
Of course, written laws are good things for us. Let us give thanks that we are here in this country, a land that aspires to be governed by law; it is no blessing to live in a lawless land. Yet both the blessing of this land, on the one hand, and the curse of lawlessness, on the other, are circumscribed by the irreducible fact: that the human heart is hard.
When the Lord says through the prophet that the days are coming when he will write his law directly upon our hearts, he holds before us the possibility of living with a softened heart.
It is a mystery, how the human heart turned hard, but it is said to have happened primordially. And then the law came. It was better to have the law than not to have it; yet it did not prove possible to live by the written law. Even the chosen people broke it, the people for whom, the Lord says, he was an husband. This rebellion, this hardening, seems to be built into us. Someone tells us to do something; our first instinct is to resist. God wants us to love him; with fear we turn aside. Our actions don’t make sense—there is nothing better in the universe than to be God’s beloved—but the human heart is wounded, fearful, and by turns angry and vicious.
Yet written law falls short on account of a second reason. For written law needs always to be applied to cases, and sometimes it will fit pretty well, but other times it will not fit. A man alone is not a man, Aristotle rightly said: but as soon as we have a group, the law, which is necessary, cannot treat every individual with perfect justice. A teacher running a classroom knows this, a manager leading her team, a general commanding his army, a conductor with his choir, a bishop with his diocese, a mayor with her city, and on and on. The law, which we need for our human flourishing, never fits perfectly.
So this promise spoken by Jeremiah—that the law might come from inside, that it might be internal—is profoundly good news. We know our human hearts must be softened; the promise that God will write his law upon them is a promise that they will be softened. This is, Jeremiah says, the new covenant; and although Jeremiah did not live to see it, we have seen it, and although we do not yet fully experience it, we know what it is. It is the Holy Ghost, God’s Spirit, promised to us by Jesus; when the Spirit takes up his dwelling within us, we will partake of the very life of God.
But those are (for now) words, ideas, images, propositions; and our problem, as Jesus identified squarely, is a problem of the heart. Words and propositions will not change the heart; if they could, then the law handed down from on high would have been enough.
That, I think, is why Jesus told stories: he wanted not to give us more information, but to change our hearts. And indeed that may be the deep reason why Jesus came: God knew that we did not need another message, but rather to encounter the messenger. And why Jesus had to die: By suffering, by submitting to misunderstanding, and mockery, and cruelty, and torture, and death, by climbing up onto the cross before our eyes, God makes his ultimate appeal to us. “Do you really want to have such a hard heart?” he says to us. “Look upon me,” he says, “and let your hearts be softened.”
The grain of wheat has to die in order to bear fruit. Our hearts need to lose their stubborn resistance to God’s law. In the holy week to come, that might happen even to me and you.
