Grapes and Grace
- Rev. Aaron Houghton
- Oct 16, 2016
- 6 min read
Jeremiah’s prophecy, from today’s text, includes an interesting proverb about “sour grapes.” He’s using it to reference a widespread attitude of despair among the people exiled in Babylon, and those left behind in Judah. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Have you ever eaten a sour grape? It makes your mouth pucker, makes your teeth feel sore. This proverb suggests that if your parents ate the grapes, your mouth would pucker…in other words, the proverb reveals a prevailing attitude of the exiled community: “What is the use of trying—our ancestors have done wrong and we are paying the price!” (1)
The purpose of prophecy is to set God’s words of hope against the prevalent mood of despair among the people of Judah. Recalling earlier prophecies foretelling doom and judgment has caused a “widespread mood of fatalistic resignation” to their current situation. (2)
Jeremiah’s prophecy that “everyone shall die for their own sins” isn’t joining the fatalistic chorus…it’s a reminder that the consequences of your life aren’t yet set. If you resign to the fact that you’re doomed, such an attitude can certainly make things worse for you. But what if you root your belief in the hope that lies at the heart of the God’s will for you? You can always do better.
Renewal and restoration are always possible, but they require repentance: recognition of the wrongs and their consequences, not resignation to them.
Repentance can’t really occur if you’re in a “sour grape” mindset: fatalistic, all doom and gloom, and 'it’s someone else’s fault and there’s nothing we can do about it'. A lot of the troubles in our world this day are the consequences of others’ action, that’s true. But there is something we can do about it…and no, not by going back into the past to change things, but by building our outlook on the future on a firmer foundation than fate.
God wants our outlook to be built on faith, which is more powerful than we give it credit for. It is quite possible for us to believe the future into being. Scripture fuels our hope again and again through different iterations of God’s hope for us: “You can do better.” When enough faith is invested in a vision of a better future, action towards that future becomes inevitable.
This isn’t simply a scriptural truth, it’s the way of the world. Whether you claim it or not, you’ve got to have faith to live. Every choice we make, every action we make, every word we speak starts in our minds as potential. Our brains our incredible, so the time it takes for me to decide to lift my hands and the actual action of me lifting my hands is undetectable. But it starts in the mind.
***The time it takes for the renewal and restoration of Jerusalem is undetectable, too…but it starts in the mind of God.
That said, there are many differences between our minds and the mind of God, but the one that we’re constantly being reminded of is the goodness of God’s vision for all people and all creation, and our tendency to focus our vision on simply getting good enough for ourselves, with no regard for the consequences it will have on others. That’s one of the prime effects of sin: it blinds us, in a way, of seeing God’s bigger picture. If we don’t have to face the negative consequences of our actions, then why should we care who does? To such thinking, God reminds us: “People, you can do better.”
“You can do better” is at the heart of our faith, and at the heart of our religion. If the mantra of “sour grapes” is “Well, we’re doomed!” then “You can do better!” is the mantra of grace. And for this reason, understanding exactly how human hope works, Jeremiah follows his denouncement of the “sour grapes” mantra with the pronouncement of a new covenant, founded in grace, culminating in the forgiveness of all iniquity and banishing all sin into oblivion.
Why would God bother forgiving us if God didn’t truly trust, truly believe, truly know, in all of God’s divine wisdom, that we can absolutely, unequivocally do better? But that’s a part of forgiveness and grace that I don’t think we focus on enough. Paul, the apostle, had clearly struggled with this when he wrote to the Roman church [my paraphrase], “So God has given us grace in Jesus Christ! That’s awesome! So should we keep on sinning so that grace has ample opportunity to shine?” His response, “Absolutely not!”
Paul then goes on…and on…to expound upon the mind of God revealed to us in grace: the way God sees us—both as we are, but also as we could be; the potential of new life in grace; the foundation on which he wants us to build our faith; the bedrock of better. The crux of Paul’s argument is built on this bedrock, in fact he quite literally hits rock bottom in the third chapter when he writes that “ALL have sinned and fallen short of the vision of God’s mind,” more commonly referred to as the “glory of God.”
This is not a new concept, that was Jeremiah’s reason for bringing up the “sour grapes” attitude prevalent among his people. Jeremiah’s vocabulary is quite different from Paul’s, but he’s talking about the same thing: we’ve hit rock bottom and sin has a stronghold on our hope.
The question that plagues the new covenant proposed by Jeremiah is this: “But if things are restored, what’s to say they won’t be destroyed again? God already rescued us from Egypt and made a new covenant with us…and we broke that one." The people know that the actions of their ancestors brought on the Babylonian siege, the destruction of the temple, the forceful dispersion of people from their homeland. If Israel’s sins in the past brought such fearful judgment upon the nation so that it came close to total annihilation, what assurance can there be that the same fate will not befall Israel again? (3)
We’ve talked about this before, the way that sin works at us in the present through anxiety. It's an attack on our perception of our potential. Sin sharpens our focus on the failures and flaws of our past, and in so so doing, holds our future hostage. Jeremiah’s response to this anxiety attempts to pay the ransom and set people free from sin. He says that God will, by the very creative power of his love, write the law of the covenant upon the hearts of the men and women who make up Israel. This is exactly the covenant of grace upon which Paul expounds, and the covenant that is radically incarnated in the flesh in Jesus Christ--and in his life and death and resurrection.
In Jesus Christ the mind of God is revealed to us in human form, the vision of God is told to us in stories and parables, restoration and renewal are manifest in healing. And if you can remember Jesus’ seeming disappointment in last week’s lesson from Luke when only one of ten men who were healed of their skin disease returned to praise God, then we can also see in Jesus a revelation of God’s hope: “We can do better.” When he tells this man, “Your faith has made you well,” he is referring to a wellness beyond being cured of a skin disease, he is talking about a wellness founded on a vision of welfare, God’s vision of wellbeing for all.
This man who returned came to believe that he could, indeed, do better. The other nine, not surprisingly, were thrilled to be healed, but were not made well in the sense of shalom…they did not use the physical healing as a window to see into the grace of God, as an opportunity to build their lives anew on that foundation…a function of faith, which would truly make them whole.
Scripture isn't whole without the Holy Spirit. The story of God is a story written in the Bible, but also written in our hearts—it’s an ongoing story in which we are called to participate. There is a major theme that is repeated throughout the written word, made incarnate in the living Word (capital ‘W’, referring to the Christ), and which God wants to be written into our lives. The vocabulary used to tell it is different, but the theme is essentially this: “God wants to exchange our sour grapes for grace.”
God forgives us because God wants to wipe away the story of sin that tethers our potential to selfish inclinations, that tethers our sense of worth to wealth, that tethers our future to fate. God forgives us to wipe the slate clean and write a new story in our hearts. God wants us to trust that we can do better, that our nation can do better, that our world can do better. God wants us to place our faith in the vision of hope found in the mind of God, commonly referred to as the Kingdom of God. God forgives us because we can do better.
Trust this, believe this, let it be written on your heart, and live into hope. May it be so. Amen.
Citations:
(1) R.E. Clements, "Jeremiah" from Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 1988, John Knox Press. Louisville, KY. p 189.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid. p 190.
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