The People who Survived the Sword, found Grace in the Wilderness

We have talked before about Adam and Eve and how they fell.  It is, I suppose literally, the oldest story in the world, and so I am not gonna go through the story in any detail, but it is where we will begin today, even though it isn't where I plan to wind up.  The question that I want to start with is why.  Why would two people who had all of the goodness of Earth heaped up in front of them, and who enjoyed fellowship with God face to face give it all up?  We think of temptation usually as a desire for something, I am tempted by a Reese cup or something of that sort, but I think that their temptation and probably the roots of ours aren't like that.  It says that Eve saw that the fruit was desirable to make one wise, to give one knowledge of Good and Evil, and that that was why she ate it. 

I think fundamentally though, it begins with her conviction that God had something Good that He didn't plan to give her.  He was holding out on them.  She imagined that there was something Good other than God and His will for her.  To put it plainly, she determined that God was either incapable of judging what was best for her or unwilling to give her what was best.  She doubted either His wisdom or His goodness.  And she judged Good and Evil for herself.  And everything that she did Adam did too, except that Paul says He wasn't deceived.  He knew he was going the wrong way and he did it anyway. 

And what did they get?  Well they certainly got knowledge of Evil.  They lost so much goodness and gained so much suffering.  Losing good and gaining suffering because we have done wrong is known as "The Law".  By the Law, that is by getting what we deserve, is the knowledge of sin, as Paul told the Roman Church.  The Law at its core is the mechanism by which wrong is punished, it is simply the way the world works, known to orientals as karma or the Tao.  All humans know the generalities of the Law although they may miss out on some details.  The Law is God's covenant with creation, fittingly called the Old Covenant because it dates back to Creation.  We can see a certain inherent rightness in all of this.  It is good for Good to be rewarded and Evil to be punished, it is good at least to an extent.  That is it is Good for the Good, but it is Bad for the Bad.  

By the Law is the knowledge of sin, of Evil, but what about Good?  Was the fruit really just the knowledge of Evil or was it the knowledge of Good and Evil?  I have to think that Moses gave us its true name, but where is the Good?  God wasn't taken by surprise by Adam and Eve's choice, it wasn't unplanned, but rather as ugly and as sick as our lives have become, it is all part of the Creative act, it is part of the world that is Very Good.  The Divine Artist seems to have a fondness for painting with black.  I am aware that most Christian theologians shy away from anything that seems to make God the author of sin, but my creed says "Creator of all things visible and invisible" and John's prologue says the same thing, so I am forced to abandon the too subtle distinctions of the theologians in favor of the belief that if it is, and sin is, then it is made by the Good God and despite being the black on the canvas contributes to the beauty of the whole.  But how? What good can there even be for a sinner?

The evil came quite quickly and obviously but the Good was hidden in mysteries, it came at a great distance in wild dreams and impossible imaginings, and was only dimly seen even by the Prophets.

The following excerpts are taken from the 31 chapter of Jeremiah.

Thus says the Lord:
“The people who survived the sword
Found grace in the wilderness—
Israel, when I went to give him rest.”

Good that begins with evil, grace found in the wild wanderings of refugees.

The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying:
“Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.
Again I will build you, and you shall be rebuilt,
O virgin of Israel!
You shall again be adorned with your tambourines,
And shall go forth in the dances of those who rejoice.
You shall yet plant vines on the mountains of Samaria;
The planters shall plant and eat them as ordinary food.
For there shall be a day
When the watchmen will cry on Mount Ephraim,
‘Arise, and let us go up to Zion,
To the Lord our God.’”
For thus says the Lord:
“Sing with gladness for Jacob,
And shout among the chief of the nations;
Proclaim, give praise, and say,
‘O Lord, save Your people,
The remnant of Israel!’
Behold, I will bring them from the north country,
And gather them from the ends of the earth,
Among them the blind and the lame,
The woman with child
And the one who labors with child, together;
A great throng shall return there.
They shall come with weeping,
And with supplications I will lead them.
I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters,
In a straight way in which they shall not stumble;
For I am a Father to Israel,
And Ephraim is My firstborn.
“Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
And declare it in the isles afar off, and say,
‘He who scattered Israel will gather him,
And keep him as a shepherd does his flock.’

Grace begins with Law, with sin being punished, with our being scattered and driven from our homes and our lives.

For the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
And ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he.
Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion,
Streaming to the goodness of the Lord—
For wheat and new wine and oil,
For the young of the flock and the herd;
Their souls shall be like a well-watered garden,
And they shall sorrow no more at all.
“Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance,
And the young men and the old, together;
For I will turn their mourning to joy,
Will comfort them,
And make them rejoice rather than sorrow.
I will satiate the soul of the priests with abundance,
And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the Lord.”

But why?  What is the root of this grace which is extended to us?  We know that knowledge of sin comes from the Law, but where does the knowledge of Good come from?

 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

The New Covenant is not like the Old Covenant, if there was ever something to shout from a mountaintop that is it.  The New Covenant is not that Good gets rewarded and Evil punished, because as we have seen that is the heart of the Old Covenant.  But listen, the New Covenant is not like the Covenant which Our Fathers broke.  Now, we are not Jews and our Fathers were not lead out of Egypt, but the same covenant was first broken by our first Father and Mother.  If the Old Covenant was broken and the New Covenant is not like that, then it must mean that the New Covenant will not be broken.  And how can God be sure that even such inveterate sinners as we will not break this covenant?  Even the rather gracious terms of Eden's covenant were violated, so there must be something fundamentally different about the New Covenant, it must be unbreakable.  It must be that the New Covenant does not depend on anything that we do or do not do.  There is nothing that we can do that will break the New Covenant.  The Old Covenant was as breakable as the tables of stone that it was written on, but whatever abuses we pour on the New and Living Way, He comes to us again the third day.

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

The heart of the New Covenant is that which the Old Covenant could never provide.  By the Old Covenant is the knowledge of sin, of Evil, but never anywhere does the Law provide the knowledge of God, of Good.  And that, I think, is where the church has gone so wrong with the Law.  They say that when the only tool that you have is a hammer the whole world looks like nails.  Every problem that you have you solve with the hammer, by beating it.  It is sad that I have to paint the church as having the Law as its only tool but I do.  The church solves all of her problems with the Law.  Here is the way that we have reasoned.  We have the Law, and so we know sin, we know evil.  And if that is all that we know, then we must define Good, Righteousness, and ultimately God Himself, as that which is sinless.  Now that is true but it is the most incomplete of definitions, a straw on which we have built the whole edifice of Christianity, by making God the ultimate Law-keeper, ultimately nothing more than the Great Accountant in the Sky.  But worse than that, when we begin with Law, with the reward of Good and the punishment of Evil, and define Good and God from sin then fundamentally our definition is that God, and all Good, are things that we do not know.

The New Covenant says that all of us will know God, and will know Good, the unfulfilled promise of Eden will finally be fulfilled.  Those that survive the sword will find grace in the wilderness, the Evil will ultimately be the soil from which a greater good will grow.  But why?  What is the seed of the New Covenant that makes everything different?  "For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more."  It is the dismantling of the whole of karma and the Tao, the whole system of rewards and punishments, of Good People getting Good Things and all of the people in this room getting the shaft.  It is the judge letting the crook go, and we try and come up with a lot of fancy reasons why it is ok, why it is just for God to forgive sinners, but justice is something that belongs to the Old Covenant, and the only reason we can truly give for God to forgive sins is because He loves the sinner, the crook goes free because she is the judge's wife.  That is unjust to anyone who defines righteousness by the Law, but the knowledge of righteousness does not come by the Law but only the knowledge of sin.  The Law, the knowledge of sin, came by Moses, but grace, the forgiveness of sins, and truth, the knowledge of God, comes only by Jesus Christ into whom we are baptised and the New Covenant of communion with Him.