The new covenant: instead of giving the Israelites rules to follow, God wants to infuse their hearts with the fire of divine love.

 

Fifth Sunday of Lent  B  2021

 

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.”

There is so much beautiful humanness that can be found in the faith journey of the prophet 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 just the opposite of Jeremiah: “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.  Is this true also for us at times?  Even in the season, we can be deaf to the voice of God in our lives.

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.

They will 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 be found with them.  By faithfulness to God’s covenant that is within, we become our best selves, the people we are called to be.

It is so important to hear that God will pardon sin and no longer remember them.

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 covenant with God is written in 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.

But if our covenant is written in our hearts, it is not even 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 revealed God’s merciful love for us and became the source of eternal salvation to all who believe in Him.  Jesus had already gone to the heart of the human struggle for meaning, and by his suffering he learned obedience through suffering.

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. 

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?   This makes sense only we embrace the covenant of God’s love that is written in our hearts and we see that this covenant is our pearl of great price.

How do we die to ourselves in order to regenerate?  We know that our “daily deaths” exhaust us but strengthen us spiritually.  So many of our present values want us to act as though this life is the only life, that there is no life other than the one we know now.  Today’s scriptures invite us to live with values that will last forever.

To summarize, I go back to my friend, the prophet Jeremiah.  He too resisted the call of God in his life.  Plain and simple, God was asking too much of him.  The point of conversion for Jeremiah was when he become convicted of God’s promise: “I will be with you.”  May we too be convicted of God’s promise to us: “I will be with you.”

Have a Blessed Day.