I will put my laws in their minds
and write them on their hearts.I will be their God,
and they will be my people.No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.For I will forgive their wickedness
Hebrews 8
and will remember their sins no more.
Years ago I remember trying to paraphrase this line: “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
I think I wanted to make it personal, more individual, something I could remind myself in my own quiet prayer time.
But it just sounds wrong, it doesn’t really work: “I will be his God, and he will be my person”?
I’m sure if I tried long enough you could come up with a line that echoes the original and doesn’t sound completely broken… but at some point I gave up because I realised that the plural is intentional.
This covenant isn’t describing a billion small person-and-God relationships. It’s describing a single community-and-God relationship.
The style of Christianity I’ve grown up with has a heavy emphasis on a personal relationship with God, and this has been important to me!
But the covenants, both the one made with Moses to ancient Israel, and the one promised in Jeremiah’s writings that the early church claimed, are not about the personal relationship to God. They’re about the community’s relationship to God.
I’ve never had much sense that the wider community had any sense of unity around matters of faith. After all I grew up in pluralistic Australia. We’re lots of individuals with individual views making individual choices, and we often don’t agree with each other. So when I read something like Daniel’s prayer for his people (in Daniel 9), the use of us and we instead of I and me feels foreign and strange, even though it’s been translated into simple English language. I’m much more used to prayers and confessions being personal.
Daniel prays this heartfelt confession for the whole people: “we have sinned and done wrong”, “we have refused to listen”, “we have not followed the instructions he gave us through his servants, the prophets”, “all Israel has disobeyed… refusing to listen to your voice”.
From the written accounts we have, Daniel was an outstanding citizen and an outstanding person of faith. It’d be hard to look at the things he’s confessing and match them to things we know from his own life choices. Yet he’s confessing and praying not about his own behaviour and actions but the actions of his entire people.
What comes to mind for me as I try bring this to my own life, is the racism that runs deep in this country. I’m tempted to give myself a pass because I try to be accepting of those who look or sound different, I try respect the First Nations that have been here since before the first words of the bible were even written, and I voted “yes” in that referendum. But if the community has done wrong, and I am in the community… If I follow the example of Daniel I should confess our sins as if they were my own.
“God we started with outright massacres, we went on to steal children from their families and try force assimilation away into our culture, destroying their culture, and to this day we continue to hold racist prejudices and support biased systems that keep oppressing the lives of First Nations Australians, who are your children…”
Daniel doesn’t just confess the failings of his community though. He launched into this prayer after reading the prophecies of Jeremiah, which had been written a few decades earlier. And no doubt he’d read this bit with the promise of the new covenant – which celebrates God’s faithfulness to the people, even when the people are not faithful to God.
So he prayed “O Lord, you are a great and awesome God! You always fulfill your covenant and keep your promises of unfailing love to those who love you and obey your commands.” And “the Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him.”
If framing our covenant relationship with God requires considering the whole community and its actions… that is confronting. But when you remember the mercy and faithfulness of God that are central to this covenant… that is hopeful.