A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20 July 2025
Jeremiah 33.14–18; 31.31–34
John 17.1–8
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord…” (Jeremiah 33:14)
It’s a phrase we’ve heard before.
A declaration from Jeremiah,
the prophet who saw the destruction of all he held dear
and still dared to imagine a better future.
“The days are surely coming…”
For Jeremiah, this was not a pious platitude;
it was a cry of defiant hope against the crushing weight of exile and despair.
Jeremiah lived through the disintegration
of everything that defined his world:
the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple,
the exile of the people.
He watched the collapse of monarchy, the failure of religion,
the betrayal of neighbour.
And yet, from the ashes of that ruin,
he did not call simply for repair.
He envisioned something deeper:
not a return to the old ways, but the revelation of something new.
Not nostalgia for what was lost, but covenant reborn.
And so Jeremiah gives us two visions
—closely connected, yet profoundly radical in their own right.
The first is the promise of just leadership:
“a righteous Branch to spring up for David” (Jer. 33:15),
one who will enact justice and righteousness.
The second is the promise of a new covenant:
not written on tablets of stone, not mediated by kings or priests,
but inscribed on the heart—written within each person.
These are not simply parallel ideas
—they are two dimensions of the same divine promise.
For justice to flourish outwardly,
it must be rooted inwardly.
And for the heart to be transformed inwardly,
there must be a community shaped by righteousness.
The days that are surely coming, according to Jeremiah,
are days when the personal and political are reconciled;
when knowledge of God is not the property of the elite,
but the birthright of all.
But to grasp the full power of Jeremiah’s vision,
we must not rush too quickly to its fulfilment.
Rather, we must dwell for a moment in the grief that precedes it.
Jeremiah’s prophecies, you see, emerge amid devastation.
The monarchy, which was supposed to embody divine justice,
had become corrupt.
The temple, which was supposed to house divine presence,
had become a symbol of privilege and exclusion.
The covenant, once forged on Sinai,
had been broken again and again.
This is no distant history.
In our world too, systems have failed.
Leaders have exploited. Religion has wounded.
Power has corrupted.
And the human cost
—measured in lives displaced, rights denied, dignity destroyed—
cries out to heaven.
Into such a moment, Jeremiah speaks
—not to deny the pain, but to imagine its transformation.
The answer to faith betrayed is not cynicism.
The answer to collapse is not despair.
The answer is promise—a new thing,
born of the old, but surpassing it in every way.
Jeremiah 31 offers one of the most striking theological reimaginings
in the whole of Scripture:
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…
They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest”
(Jer. 31:33–34).
It’s a reversal of everything that had gone before.
The covenant was no longer mediated by priests or scrolls or institutions.
It would not rely on compliance to external rules.
It would not be enforced by fear or shame.
Instead, it would be written within.
What Jeremiah sees is a shift
from religion as something imposed,
to faith as something internalised.
A relationship with God not filtered through hierarchy or ritual,
but encountered directly, intimately, inwardly.
It is a deeply democratic vision:
“from the least to the greatest.”
There is no spiritual elite here.
No insiders and outsiders. No sacred and profane.
All are included. All are known. All are called.
And crucially, all are forgiven.
“For I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
In the heart of the covenant is mercy.
The newness does not come through perfection, but through grace.
The future does not emerge by erasing the past, but by redeeming it.
If Jeremiah 31 speaks of the inward transformation of the covenant,
Jeremiah 33 speaks of its outward embodiment.
A “righteous Branch” from David’s line.
A leader who will execute justice and righteousness in the land.
It’s tempting to hear this as a messianic promise, fulfilled in Jesus
—and of course, Christian tradition has read it that way.
But before we rush to that conclusion,
let’s hear what this text meant in its own time.
In Jeremiah’s world, kings were meant to guarantee justice.
Their failure was not just political—it was theological.
A corrupt king was not simply a bad ruler;
he was an offence to the very covenant he represented.
So Jeremiah’s vision of a new king
is not nostalgic longing for monarchy,
but radical hope that power might yet serve the good.
Whether in ancient Judah or modern Britain,
this vision calls us to imagine leadership not as domination, but as service;
not as spectacle, but as integrity.
The righteous branch is not just an individual
—it’s a principle, a pattern, a possibility.
It names a world where power is exercised for the sake of the vulnerable,
and justice is made visible in public life.
Which brings us to John’s Gospel.
In chapter 17, on the night before his arrest, Jesus prays.
And he speaks these words:
“I have glorified you on earth
by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”
What is that work?
It is not spectacle. Not conquest. Not even religious revival.
It is the quiet, difficult, costly work of making God known.
Jesus says, “I have made your name known
to those whom you gave me…”
In other words, Jesus has enacted
the very covenant Jeremiah foretold.
He has embodied a relationship with God
not built on exclusion or hierarchy,
but on intimacy, justice, mercy, and love.
And this knowing is not simply intellectual.
It is participatory. It is lived.
In Jesus, the law is not only written on the heart
—it takes flesh in human life.
The covenant becomes a person.
The justice becomes a presence.
The knowledge of God becomes a community shaped by grace.
But what does it mean to know God?
In both Hebrew and Johannine theology,
knowing is never abstract.
It is not simply about having correct beliefs
or assenting to doctrinal statements.
The Hebrew word for “know”—yada—
is the same word used for the deepest of human intimacy.
“Adam knew Eve…” it says in Genesis, and she bore a child.
To know, in this sense, is not to observe from a distance
but to enter into relationship.
It is to be shaped, changed,
and even created anew through encounter.
This is the knowing that Jeremiah imagines in the new covenant.
“They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”
This is not a command to master information about God.
It is an invitation to participate in the life of God.
And it is offered equally to all
—no matter their education, their background, their place in society.
From the prisoner in exile to the scribe in the palace,
from the street sweeper to the synagogue elder:
all are addressed, all are embraced.
And in John’s Gospel, this knowing takes on flesh.
In Jesus, the name of God—the character of God—is made visible and personal.
Jesus doesn’t just talk about God. He shows God.
He heals the outcast, welcomes the sinner,
breaks bread with the poor.
In Jesus, to know God is to encounter justice embodied in mercy,
holiness embodied in hospitality,
truth embodied in love.
And that same knowing
is what Jesus prays will continue through his disciples.
“They have kept your word,” he says.
Not in the sense of rote obedience,
but in the sense of abiding relationship.
The Word has abided in them. They have lived it.
And that Word, that covenant, is not a burden to bear,
but a joy to share
—a transformation from within
that leads outward into acts of liberation and love.
This has profound implications for how we understand discipleship today.
If knowing God means entering into covenantal intimacy,
then spiritual growth is not about
accumulating theological knowledge
or perfecting moral performance.
It is about becoming ever more open
to the movement of grace in our lives.
It is about letting the law of love be written on our hearts
—until justice becomes instinct, mercy becomes habit,
and hope becomes second nature.
This is why we gather as a church
—not to preserve tradition for its own sake,
but to become a living community of covenant.
A people who know God by living God’s justice.
A people who enact the Word
by becoming a sanctuary for the wounded
and a sign of hope for the weary.
A people in whom, somehow, someone else might come to know
that they, too, are known and loved by the divine.
So where does this leave us,
at Bloomsbury, in 2025?
We, too, are people living amid the fractures of our age.
The collapse of trust in institutions.
The failure of leadership.
The loss of a shared moral vision.
We see inequality deepening,
climate crisis accelerating,
war and violence multiplying.
We know what it is to feel exiled
from a world that once seemed more secure.
But into this, Jeremiah speaks still.
“The days are surely coming…”
And our calling is to live as if they are already here.
To embody the covenant written on the heart:
a community not built on conformity, but on compassion.
A people not defined by doctrine, but by justice.
A church where knowing God means acting for the good of others.
And so our calling is to be branches of the righteous tree:
to lead not from the top down, but from the margins in.
To resist the temptations of domination
and embrace the power of service.
To proclaim the reign of God not in triumphalism,
but in tenderness, truth, and solidarity.
The days are surely coming
—and indeed, they are already here:
in every act of mercy, every movement for justice,
every heart opened to the knowing love of God.
And maybe the most important truth is this:
covenantal hope isn’t abstract.
It’s not just about nations or movements
—it’s about you.
God’s new covenant is written on hearts,
including yours, including mine.
Which means our story matters.
Our longing, our doubts, our wounds, our joys
—they are not marginal to our faith;
they are the very soil in which the covenant is planted.
You don’t have to be perfect to carry the promise.
You don’t have to have all the answers to know God.
You don’t have to wait for some future time
when you’ll have more faith or less fear.
The days are surely coming, yes
—but the day is also now.
Today is the moment for grace.
Today is the day God remembers your sin no more,
and instead remembers only your belovedness.
Let me tell you a story.
A member of a church—not here, but a place like this—
had grown up in a faith where shame was preached more often than grace.
They knew the Bible backwards,
but had never been told they were loved.
After decades of trying to “get it right,”
they finally stopped going to church.
It just felt like too much.
Too heavy. Too hard.
Years later, they found their way into a small congregation
—one that wasn’t flashy, or loud, or particularly large.
What it had, though, was warmth.
No one quizzed them at the door.
No one checked their theological credentials.
Someone just said:
“You’re welcome here. We’re glad you’ve come.”
And it changed everything.
Because in that space,
they encountered something they’d never known before:
the God Jeremiah describes.
The God who writes on hearts, not scorecards.
The God who says: “You are mine. You are known. And you are loved.”
That church didn’t give them all the answers.
But it gave them something more precious: a community of grace.
A glimpse of the covenant alive in people’s lives.
Friends, this is who we are called to be.
A church where justice and mercy meet.
A place where covenant lives in the love we show one another.
A people whose lives proclaim:
the days are surely coming
—and by the grace of God, they are already here.
So let us be people of the promise.
People of the covenant.
People of the Christ who makes God known.
Amen.
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