From today’s
First Scripture reading from the prophet Jeremiah we read: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I
will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…I will
place my law within then and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.”
Jeremiah’s
mission was to reshape the people of Israel into something beautiful for God. What would it like if we were ever to think
that our mission as a faith community was to shape the Town of Penfield into
something beautiful for God. Is that a
crazy thought? What would it be like if
that was the focus of our March Madness?
What some of us in our parish community are presently engaged in is
ChristLife. This is our spiritual
renewal initiative to encounter Christ more personally in our life. But it is so important to focus on our
goal. ChristLife is not merely an effort t to make
us feel good in an individual way; rather we seek to discover Christ in our
lives so that we can be Christ for others.
Going back
to Jeremiah, there is so much beautiful humanness that can be found in the
faith journey of Jeremiah. I recommend that we can find our own faith
journey in the story of Jeremiah. In the
first chapter of the book we learn that God shaped Jeremiah in his mother’s
womb for this important work. The
prophet’s first reaction was fear and said that he was not qualified. He was much too young. We might say “we are too old. It’s someone else’s turn.” But God was able to break through the
resistance of Jeremiah. With the simple
yet powerful faith assurance that “I will be with you,” God was able to break
through the resistance of Jeremiah, and he opened himself up to the mission
that God had for him. I wonder what would
happen if all of us opened ourselves up to the plan that God has for us. My hunch is that the whole community we live
in would experience the love, the service, the friendship that would radiate
out from us. We would value the dignity of
each and every person.
Jeremiah
used the awesome image of clay in the hands of the potter as a way of
describing God’s desire to shape and form us into a community that has a
spiritual center of trusting in God’s plan for us and how we are called to be
for one another as brothers and sisters.
God’s plan is to fashion us into a people who trust and care for one
another. But like clay unresponsive in
the hands of the potter, the people of Israel remained unresponsive to the Word
of God.
To call the
Israelites back to their original mission as a people of God, Jeremiah uses the
expression “new covenant.” The Scripture says the “Days are coming when I
will make a new covenant with the House of Israel.” What makes this covenant new is not its
content because God still speaks of my law, but the newness of the covenant
refers to the place where it can be found.
The old covenant was associated with commandments written in stone. The people had to match to standards that were
outside of them. But this proclamation
from Jeremiah says the covenant is written in their hearts. Instead of giving them rules to follow, God
wants to infuse their hearts with the fire of divine love. When the covenant is scripted in their hearts,
they will share the very passion of God.
The
Israelites are to experience the presence and the forgiveness of God written in
their hearts. They would be a people no
longer commanded by external standards, but God’s love and God’s law is to
found with them. By faithfulness to
God’s covenant that is within, we become our best selves, the people we are
called to be.
As we
reflect on this Jeremiah reading, this leaves us with one question. Are we willing to risk the cost of having
God’s law written on our hearts? Our spirituality is part of our DNA. Yes, we all have demons that can throw us
off-center, which can derail us from being our best selves: our self-centeredness, our greed, our lust,
our need for power and control.
If our
covenant is written in our hearts, it is not enough to set aside an hour a week
to give thanks to God at Mass, or even to tithe 10% of our time, talent, and
treasure; it is not enough to be a
part-time disciple of Jesus. We need to
be all in. Everything we say and do is part of our spirituality and our
covenant with God. God is present to us
24/7.
The Letter
to the Hebrews, the second Scripture reading, then points us to the new
covenant. The new covenant is the
mystery of Jesus that is written in our hearts.
The spirit of Jesus is within us, the community of the baptized.
This Letter
to the Hebrews points to the mystery of Jesus within us and also the shocking
truth that “Jesus learned obedience through suffering.” Jesus had to struggle to live his vocation. As a man Jesus become conscious of fulfilling
his Father’s will through suffering, the cross, and the crucifixion. Jesus had already gone to the heart of the
human struggle for meaning, and by his suffering he learned obedience. In the mystery of the Incarnation, Jesus was
fully man and experienced the suffering of humanity.
In the
Gospel, Jesus describes his own paschal mystery with the imagery: ”Amen,
Amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it
remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” The grains of wheat need to die to be
reborn. Jesus died out of love for us
and rose again in His risen life so that we might share in the Lord’s eternal
life. Thanks be to God.
Jesus
explains in the Gospel that his moment of glory is about to arrive and does not
hesitate to say that he knows what it will cost. He then teaches his disciples what it means
to hate the life this world offers. This
is not an easy message to grasp. I bet
we all agree to that. We are left with
the question can we abandon the love of this world for the sake of life in God? Can Pope Francis, Mother Theresa, and the
martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero be mentors for us to teach that the covenant
of God’s love that is written in our hearts is our pearl of great price.
The world we
live in has embraced the notion of personal perfection through education,
exercise, diet, travel, and aesthetic beauty.
This gives us the lifestyle that passes for a full, satisfying
life. What else is there?
Jesus shocks
us with the paradox he is about to embrace:
death on a cross. Jesus reveals
God as the One who empties his heart into the world even as the world rejects
the divine offer of reconciliation.
God’s unconditional love transforms enemies into friends, cleanses the
heart of selfishness and restores the center of balance to a world disjointed
and disoriented by human self-centeredness.
In our daily
parish email blast, we ask you the question:
Will you encounter Christ today?
The Bible is asking us what part of ourselves and our way of life are we
willing to die to so that we can encounter Christ more fully today?
Have a
Blessed Day.
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