The prophet is one who has an eye on the horizon of God’s future: The days are surely coming. Something new is going to happen, changing everything. Jeremiah calls it a “new covenant,” invoking the ancient self-understanding of the Jews that they were God’s partners in the drama of salvation (“I was their husband,” is the way “the Lord” puts it here). The primary image of the original covenant was that of the divine law being engraved in stone on the summit of Mt. Sinai. Moses carried this written Law or “Torah” (better understood as a way of living in tune with the universe than as an arbitrary set of rules), down the mountain to the people so that they might know their own obligations in this partnership agreement. But it’s one thing to read words engraved on stone, and quite another to make those words, and the sense behind them, into an integrated, faithful way of being. And in fact, as Jeremiah’s voicing of the divine reminds us, God’s people (then and now) find it hard keep the law, to honor the covenant relationship by living lives that are merciful, just and loving.
But God knows that it is not enough to tell people how to live. The Torah - what the New Testament calls the Way, the Truth, and the Life - must become something they desire from the deepest center of their being. They must want it more than anything else in the world. And so, says the Lord, I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. The heart, in biblical understanding, is not only the physical organ that sustains the flow of life in our bodies, but is also a name for the integrative center of our humanness where each person’s distinctive interplay of will, intellect, memory and desire is grounded.
Gerald May says there is “a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves, that we call a heart.” And this longing at the heart of our being is what Gregory of Nyssa called “the homing instinct for God.” If you want to find God, look in the place of your deepest longing. You will find that God is already there before you, writing on your heart. When will this take place? When will God inscribe the Way upon the center of our being, and make the energies of divine love as natural and fundamental to our existence as the beating of our hearts?
The promised day is already “at hand,” Jesus tells us. It is a temporal process, sometimes painfully gradual, but it has already begun. God’s hand is writing within us even now. We need only to pay attention, consent, give up, surrender, let go of all the obstacles that hinder and obscure that deep and sacred craving. Just as a writer sits down each day to write but a few pages, and after a time completes an entire book, so may the cumulative “heart-writing” of Lent’s forty days produce in us a most holy text of Christian living.
—The Rev Jim Friedrich
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