New Covenants – Then and Now

October 28, 1962
Rochester

Sermon Series: Our Judeo-Christian Heritage
7. New Covenants – Then and Now

About two hundred years after the birth of Jesus, the Christian Church separated sacred scripture into two parts, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. We know this two-part scripture as the Old Testament and the New Testament. Because common usage dilutes or clouds the original intent, words sometimes lose the power of sharp meaning. When one considers what has happened in nearly two thousand years of Christian history, the radical nature of the division is a vital proposition if one is to understand our heritage. Secondly, these dangerous hours of late October, 1962, are crawling with apprehensions of total desolation, but we are sustained by the promise of a new covenant chartered in our time. I would speak, then of New Covenants, Then and Now.

The Old Covenant was the main strand of the people of Israel. The Old Covenant was the bond that tied the Israelites to Yahveh, the one eternal God. Yahveh had chosen Israel as the vehicle of salvation. They had chosen Yahveh, promised to obey his laws and worship scripture of the people. Noah had accepted the Covenant and the rainbow was the sign. Yahveh instructed Abraham and his descendants throughout all generations; and the circumcision of every male baby at eight days was to be the sign. The book of Exodus (31/16) tells that “Israelites must keep the Sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant,” a sign between Yahveh and the Israelites forever. The covenant with Moses became not only the sign, but also the foundation, for the religion of the Hebrews in all the succeeding centuries.

In the four centuries before the Christian era, it became more and more apparent that the Chosen People could not prevail by strength of armies or national wealth. They were a tiny, subject nation with no hope of subduing the great empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Syria, Rome. The Jews, as one dismal century succeeded another, came to look for a Messiah who would be sent by Yahveh. Messiah, with Yahveh’s miraculous help, would bring in the Kingdom of God. As the years passed, expectancy grew. Many were the men who professed to be Messiah, or around whom the subject people built dreams of Messiahship. But still the occupying empires ruled.

Jesus lived, taught, died; and was believed to have broken the bonds of death and to have risen from the tomb. He was one of many of his time whose followers proclaimed the Messiah. After his death, his disciples re-assembled. Their meetings, teachings and service to others planted the seed of all the manifold varieties of Christianity.

Although all of Christian history is a record of contention and controversy, as well as more harmonious feelings, the most pivotal conflict occurred within a generation after Jesus’ death.

The basic belief cherished by all the early followers was that Jesus was the Messiah. But had he come as the Messiah of the Jews or of all people? Was the movement to be a reform effort within Judaism, keeping the law, observing the covenant requirements of circumcision and the Sabbath, or was it to be a fellowship not limited to the Jews, but including the Greek, the Roman, the African and all others of that cosmopolitan world?

James, the brother of Jesus, Peter and most of the disciples stood for maintaining the ways of Judaism. Incidentally, this was not, as sometimes believed, an exclusive group, barring everyone but Jews. The Petrine group believed that converts must be circumcised and obey the laws of Torah. But all were to be welcome, as all were welcome to all the synagogues, whether or not there was influence exerted by the followers of Jesus.

Paul, a Roman citizen, combined rabbinic training with attitudes influenced by Hellenistic culture. In Paul, the cultures met and mingled. He insisted that the followers of Jesus must be “neither Greek nor Jew, barbarian, bond, nor free.” Peter came around to Paul’s position after the notable Jerusalem council. “Christ” is the Greek word for the Hebrew word, “Messiah.” Paul prevailed over the Jerusalem disciples; “Christ” prevailed over “Messiah.” For that small group who were first called Christians at Antioch, the New Covenant replaced the Old Covenant.

The expression of the New Covenant is found in Paul’s letters and a more sophisticated version in the letter to the Hebrews (of unknown authorship). Paul’s case was this: Jesus was the Messiah and had been rejected by his own people, thus canceling the Old Covenant between God and his people, Israel. The Christians in their fellowship are the people now in covenant with God. They came to believe that at the Last Supper, Jesus said “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” When the Christians of early days participated in their weekly re-enactment of the Last Supper, they believed they were partaking in, and renewing, the New Covenant.

Most of the intricate theological interpretations came much later. These earliest Christians held as a common affirmation, “Jesus is Lord.” Doctrine for most of the followers of the “Way” in those days was not highly intellectualized.

Paul pushed great forced in motion in his prime advocacy of the New Covenant. It was a winsome and appealing faith to many who had become disillusioned with national gods and fertility rites. The New Covenant offered redemption to everyone and it was not necessary to abide by intricate Jewish law and ritual requirements. Then, too, who could match the appeal of a faith which testified that this New Covenant, instead of requiring men to sacrifice their lives, provided that Christ made the atoning sacrifice for all men? The New Covenant, with its promise of the Christ soon to come again and redeem his own, was a great spark to spirits dampened by despair over the overwhelming might of the Roman Empire.

There was an element of accommodation to the Roman Empire, too, in the New Covenant. By virtue of their persistent faithfulness to one God, the Jews had won a particular place in the Roman Empire which exempted them from sacrifice to the Roman gods. The New Covenant, in making Christ the “true Passover,” could claim that Christianity was not an innovation, but of great antiquity, a fulfillment of prophecy, and the Church was the true Israel. For awhile at least, the Christians were not averse to such coattail riding.

Theologically, Paul had compressed the whole nature of the salvation of men as being completely dependent on the death and resurrection of Christ. The nature of Paul’s involvement with death and resurrection only, is demonstrated by his utter disregard of the life of Jesus. Paul’s letters, earliest of Christian documents, might have made plain much that is confused about Jesus, if Paul had review the facts then known about the actual ways of Jesus’ life. But for Paul, everything hinged on the crucifixion and resurrection.

Adolf Harnack, greatest of all church historians, in one of his matchless expositions of the early Church, stated that the New Covenant witnessed by Paul and the others, was a great and sublime theme, but “that it is indissolubly connected with an antiquated view of the world and history.” (WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY, p. 149) Although most Christian churches still maintain elaborate or simplified theological varieties of the New Covenant, in our branches of liberal Protestantism, most of us would have to seek the timeless elements that are not antiquated or unbelievable, theologically. What endures for us in the New Covenant?

Apart from the elements of mysticism and the personal experience of Christ, early Christianity combined the features of a religion worth having. There was an inseparable obligation to, 1) understand that a person finds renewal, strength and hope inwardly, and, 2) that he was obligated to be a working member of a creative community. The Jerusalem group, at least, practiced a voluntary communism, so deeply did they feel their lives intertwined and their efforts shared.

Justin Martyr, living in the first half of the second century, a Greek philosopher, elaborated the reasons which caused him to become a Christian convert. What won him over was the distinctively better moral life exhibited by Christians and how this way of living was obvious even in the routines of day-to-day happenings.

Harnack also found an enduring element in the idea of Incarnation. God became a person and “it is persons who form the saving element in history.” (ibid, p. 142)

Timeless about the New Covenant are the strands of inner personal strength, cooperating community, high morality and a recognition that the saving power in history has to be the human element.

These qualities of the New Covenant then, are necessities for the New Covenant now. The United Nations carries our hopes for a working covenant which will be the effective agency for peace in the world. This week we have experienced as United Nations week, is also the most momentous of its brief history. These dangerous hours have brought us close to the full face of horror. Unless the timeless qualities of the Covenant idea are maintained by those trusted with power – inner personal strength, the achievement of a cooperating world community, faithfulness to high morality and a recognition that the human powers mus save us – then the abyss of terror by night and pestilence by day will enclose us all.

We have underestimated the need and capacity of the U.N. as a saving instrument to prevent international conflict. For many people, the U.N. has been justified only through the wonderful work of the agencies. UNICEF has saved millions of children from disease and starvation. If all the children of the world who are alive because of UNICEF were to march close-order file through this church, months would be needed to view the continuous column of millions now living who would be dead, but for UNICEF. So, if on Halloween, American children knock on your door, tricking and treating for UNICEF, you may be sure your generosity will save lives.

The World Health Organization has fed the hungry and carried through project after project which has had saving power. So also with UNESCO and the Emergency Fund. Now while all these represent a saving and serving covenant of good works of incalculable scope, until this week, we have not been sufficiently appreciative or recognized the need for the United Nations to be a New Covenant of political universalism. Political universalism requires that the Security Council, but more vitally, the General Assembly and the Secretariat, provide a modus operandi, a way of working together, by nations who maintain opposing political and economic systems; who hold strong levels of suspicion and hostility toward each other. In the case of the Soviets and ourselves, we now have the power to cremate the world and all that is therein. We and the Soviets are hostile, antagonistic, yet there is something sardonic about the news story in the New York Times that Khrushchev's letter to Bertrand Russell caused the New York stock market to rally, after Tuesday’s losses. We confront each other like ancient warriors, but the fact is that anything each does, inevitably influences the other.

An anecdote this week in Bill Beeney’s column in the Democrat & Chronicle stayed in my mind as a homely, but realistic illustration of our fearful days. Two fishermen, in one boat on the Ottawa River, each felt a strike on the line. Each played the tugs and runs skillfully for five minutes or so, until there was a sudden mutual awareness that each hook had caught on the other. This is our world. Unless the New Covenant of the United Nations can be made to work, the two great powers will hook each other.

The chance of such a fearful grapple now surrounds us with apprehension. We can deplore the circumstances that caused it. But the nature of power struggles seems to be that social growth and actual political achievement come much more slowly than enunciation of great principles. I doubt that history is granting much additional margin to make the New Covenant work.

I am just a man in the street as far as the intricacies of politics, diplomacy and defense are concerned. The scene is littered with ambiguities and too-easy generalizations. But we men in the street had better listen, read and make our convictions known.

There are wide differences of opinion about the nature of the present triangular duel between Cuba, the Soviets and ourselves. That any and all of these nations can be criticized from different perspectives is plain to any observer. But certainly it is unrealistic to consider the boiling issues in isolation from the thrust and counter-thrust of not only twenty years of Cold War, but also from the perspective of forty-five years in which there has been a persistent cloud of mutual threat and suspicion beginning as early as the Communist Revolution of 1917. Cuba, and all it involves, is not a sudden break in harmony, as a stone disturbs the waters of a placid pool. International turbulence, unnoticed at times, has been the companion of our days for fifty years, at least.

The mournful historical fact is that nations are not necessarily deterred from seeking power advantages, even when there can be no doubt now that war is a desolation beyond imagining.

The time must come soon when the New Covenant of the United Nations will be pledged by the nations without secret cynicism. Ways of living must be provided for open skies, open borders and free access to the end that no longer will fear of terrible attack be caused by spiraling tension and make easy the conditioning of people’s minds for war.

That this is a most hazardous moment in the Cold War cannot be denied, but that it has not turned to the white heat of nuclear war seems in large part to the United Nations – the opportunity it has given for confrontation and the pressure for peace it exerts. The current negotiations, even if war is prevented now, are essentially a holding action until the New Covenant of world peace through world law will be written on our hearts and enforced through the statutes of a United Nations, sovereign in affairs of world peace.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho told this story: “Sometimes when I think of the United Nations, I recall the story of Adam proposing to Eve. Eve hesitated for a moment, causing Adam to ask, ‘Is there anyone else?’”

Adam’s question is ours. Is there anything else than the political universalism of the New Covenant of the United Nations? It is interesting to observe that the people gathered in the earliest Christian movements, who were the creative strength from whom the great Christian religions grew, were not the rich, the powerful or the privileged, but the poor, unknown, underprivileged. Today, the U.N. numerically is largely comprised of the poor, weak, underprivileged countries. These new nations may be the genesis of tomorrow’s world order, particularly if the great and powerful nations fail to measure up.

The time has come to trust the process of the New Covenant. This trust must come to include soon, not only negotiated step-by-step disarmament, the end of nuclear testing, but also authentic police powers to enforce the statutes of international law. If our community had the codes of criminal law and civil law, but only organized a police force and appointed a district attorney after an alleged violation, one could expect not order, but confusion and delayed justice at best. If we coded traffic rules and installed traffic lights only after traffic was fantastically snarled, with a raucous chorus of thousands of horns and a terrible accumulation of collisions, then we would find ourselves well-nigh helpless to deal with congested chaos. This applies at the level of the international covenant and indicates how we might best strengthen the U.N. for the formidable tasks it must accept.

It is interesting to note that after the followers of the New Covenant of the New Testament were gathered, rules of order soon were necessary, moral behavior regulated, elders appointed, and processes of church government developed to meet the conflicts and problems of that day.

We are under similar compulsion today, it seems obvious to me. In the earliest days, sometimes a letter from Paul straightened out a problem, but that method soon changed to church government. Our world is vast, complex and has problems of great urgency and complex character to solve, even after peace comes as a way of behavior between nations.

It was about thirteen years ago that Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the U.N. was killed as he was on a mission for peace. It was said of the early Christians that they were ready to die and this is the reason their cause did not fail. Harnack, reviewing the rise of Christianity and the moral power he saw in Christianity, remarked “the sufferings of the just are the saving force in human history.”

U Thant, a Buddhist, Secretary-General, feels that suffering as he plays the role of mediator in the sharpest crisis yet faced by this organization, still in its teens. If he succeeds, people in a large part of the world have another chance for life and peace. If he fails -----

Let us pray:

O Lord of Justice and Mercy, we the people on the face of this world are a blundering lot, but we pray for strength to search for the truth as we know it; we pray for the initiative to inform our leaders of our deep-held convictions; we pray for the patience to talk with warmth, but not heat, with our friends to refine our opinions and deepen our faith; we pray that there will be a world where people can sleep in the night, work in the day and will make love and good-will the strands that bind the affairs of man. Amen.