October 17, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

The God Who Refuses to Remember

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:97–34
Jeremiah 31:27–34

Love is the power of the new in every [person] and in all history. It cannot age; it removes guilt and curse. It is working even today toward new creation. It is hidden in the darkness of our souls and of our history. But it is not completely hidden to those who are grasped by its reality.

Paul Tillich

Every now and then, a well-known sports figure talks about God. Usually it is an athlete in an interview who talks about Jesus Christ being the center of his life. But this past week, it was Bobby Knight, former Indiana and Texas Tech basketball coach. Knight was a speaker at a luncheon at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. But he didn’t wait until it was his turn to speak. He grabbed the microphone unexpectedly after the opening prayer, in which the Rangers’ series win over the Rays was mentioned. He said, “I think Cliff Lee had a (bleep) of a lot more to do with it than the Almighty. If in fact the Almighty was involved in the game, what he ended up doing was screwing the other team. And I don’t think he works that way. You’ve got to get up there and throw the ball over the plate and swing at good pitches. You know, [God] doesn’t give a (bleep) about that. Let him help the Republicans” (Chicago Tribune, 14 October 2010).

Bobby Knight got it right in elevating God’s involvement from the arena of athletics to the public domain. I’m glad he challenged the notion that God is somehow involved when one team beats another. But it seems contradictory that he hopes God will help one political party more than another.

This raises an interesting question: does God ever take sides?

The prophets warned people that God desired and demanded that they worship God and follow God’s guidance. Jeremiah spent forty years appealing to Judah to be faithful to God and stop their disobedience. For generations, they failed to follow God’s ways. Despite Jeremiah’s pleas, they refused to return to God. Jeremiah proclaimed that their long refusal to turn back to God led to their judgment, which came in the form of exile, when the Babylonians took over their homeland and oppressed the people. Many were deported, and Jerusalem was destroyed. Israel suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Assyrians over a century earlier. Jeremiah proclaimed that God was punishing the people by allowing others to conquer them. It sure looks like God takes sides.

How do we know whose side God will take? There is a complex description of God found in Exodus 34:6–7. The first lines say, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin . . .”

But the next lines bring an abrupt about-face. The verse continues about God, “yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.”

These verses describe the God of love, who is in solidarity with people of faith and is prepared to stay with them in every circumstance. They also describe the God of stern moral retribution who will act abrasively to maintain sovereignty against any who challenge to or disregard of God’s rule. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says, “Yahweh may act in any circumstance in gracious fidelity, and often does. And Yahweh may act in any circumstance in ferocious sovereignty, and sometimes does, sometimes on behalf of Israel and sometimes against Israel” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p.270).

In our day we have a strong tendency to insist that Yahweh’s gracious fidelity has surely, decisively overridden Yahweh’s harsh propensity to sovereignty, so that we hope for a God of love. And yet we also hope that God will overpower evil and not leave the brutality in our world unanswered. Aren’t we glad that there are moral consequences for wrongdoing? Don’t we want certain actions to be punished? Unless, of course, they are our own.

We are left, like the people of Israel, with an unsettled awareness that the God who stands in solidarity with generosity is the same God who takes with savage seriousness Yahweh’s right to be worshiped, honored, and obeyed. We should not take for granted how God will act in any particular circumstance.

Those who heard Jeremiah’s preaching and took it to heart may easily have fallen into despair. He had been proclaiming the destruction of the nation because of the “sins of the fathers,” the refusal of the people over a period of several generations to repent and return to God. He had even concluded that the people were so accustomed to sin that they not only would not change but could not change ( Jeremiah 13:23; Dennis Bratcher, The Voice: Biblical and Theological Resources for Growing Christians).

If they believed him—and they would believe him after their city was destroyed—they would despair as they realized that, since Jeremiah was right in his assessment of them, they had little hope of ever becoming God’s people. If the consequences of the sins of the fathers and mothers and their own sins worked out into the future, what hope could they have of ever being faithful to God? And what difference would it make anyway if they would be burdened with the cycle of consequences created by the parents and grandparents?

Yet now, surprisingly, in chapter 31, Jeremiah announces that God is breaking that cycle of sin and punishment. God is doing a new thing. As the Israelites face their darkest hour since they were slaves in Egypt, God promises to restore them, to give them a hopeful future.

We hear God say to the people of Judah and Israel, “I will remember your sin no more.”

Choosing not to remember is different from memory loss. It’s not that memories will fade with the passing of time. God is announcing a decision to intentionally forget about the past, fully cognizant of all that happened.

This shift in God’s attitude, Walter Brueggemann says, does not mean anything has changed about the propensity of Israel. “Israel is still guilty, still sick, still under threat. Everything, however, has changed about God. . . . There is a radical alteration in God’s attitude, perspective, and inclination. The indignant One has become the compassionate One” (Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, p. 277).

There are many examples in the Bible of unexpected reversals by God. Again and again God hears and responds to the cry of those who suffer. The compassion of God so controls the divine will, so shapes our Lord’s intent, that it overcomes the will to punish. When God recognizes that the people of Israel are being taunted, that they have been utterly abandoned, that no one on earth cares for them, no one upholds their cause (Jeremiah 30:14), God is moved to help them. “The character of God is so bent toward compassion, toward caring for those for whom nobody else cares, toward protecting those who are ‘my people,’ that the will to judge is overcome by the will to care” (Interpreter’s Bible, p. 808).

God says, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” God makes a new covenant, or promise. From now on the sins of the former generations will not be visited upon the children. They—and we—will be accountable only for our own response to God. And God will write this new covenant on people’s hearts so that we will choose to be in right relationship with God.

All this newness is possible because Yahweh has forgiven, and this forgiveness “permits [people] to begin at a new place with new possibility” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 294). God’s forgiving and forgetting opens the way for us to live in relationships once broken, because our offenses are no longer in the way. God’s gift of Jesus Christ embodies this new covenant and shows how far God has gone to reconcile us and bring us back into loving relationship.

Pastor Bruce Boak wrote, “God sees that forgiving allows for mistakes and offense,” and “forgetting places their remembrance behind, so that they can no longer be a barrier to relationship. . . . God sees that forgiving informs another about the removal of grudges” and “forgetting halts the continual negative references. . . . God sees that forgiving accepts sincere regret” and “forgetting releases harbored anger and hurt. . . . Forgiveness receives apology and accepts blame” and “forgetting closes wounds and fades scars. . . . Forgiveness soothes disgust and disappointment” and “forgetting builds determination to deter such disappointment in the future. . . . God sees that forgiveness is an act of compassion prompting worth and value in another” and “forgetting is an act of love that reinforces the desire that the relationship not be broken” (Feasting on the Word, Year C, vol. 4, p. 174).

Friends, believe the Good News. God not only forgives you but refuses to remember all that has stood between you and God. We should not assume if our sports team or political party wins that God is on our side and against the other. But we can rejoice that God is for us through amazing grace. God has not abandoned us, in spite of whatever we have done. Nothing can separate us from God’s love. God never gives up on us, relentlessly seeking us, freeing us, shaping us, to be in a mutually loving relationship with God, marked by fidelity and steadfastness.

So celebrate your newness. Be embraced, and in gratitude, love God back.