Second Sunday of Lent – Year C Gen 15: 5-12, 17-18; Ps 27: 1, 7-8, 8-9, 13-14; Phil 3: 17-4:1 or 3:20-4:1; Lk 9: 28b-36
One of those biblical words that people hear, but that they don’t necessarily get in their bones, is covenant. Because we live in a world where our lives are sometimes ruled by contractual obligations, we hear the word covenant and substitute in our minds the word contract or even diminish it to be only a clause in a contract.
Contracts are important; we even have a phrase in our law that talks about the sanctity of a contracts. Butcovenants are at a whole other level.
In the 1988 vice-presidential debate, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen responded this way when Sen. Dan Quayle compared himself to a young Sen. John Kennedy:
“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
So, to paraphrase Senator Bentsen: “Contract, I know what a covenant is. Covenants are friends of mine. You, contract, are no covenant.”
Generally, you can say that contracts deal with goods and services, while covenants deal with relationships between people. Or, at a deeper level, contracts deal with rights and duties, whereas covenants establish permanent relationships of blood.
During Lent, the Old Testament readings present the great covenants of salvation history between God and his people. The five great covenants of the Old Testament are the Noahtic Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenants (presented in our readings today), the Mosaic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant announced by Jeremiah. All these covenants would ultimately be fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
In the time of Abraham, the promise of descendants was really a promise that your memory would continue forever. Although that promise was provisionally fulfilled through Isaac and his descendants, it is ultimately fulfilled in those who have been grafted onto the family tree of God’s people through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the waters of baptism into the Paschal Mystery.
During this Lenten pilgrimage, in a special way, we are being asked to journey with our catechumens and candidates who will be received into the Church this Easter and added to the Body of Christ.
The covenant of land assured Abraham and his descendants that they would continue to be God’s chosen people. That connection with the land and God’s election was so strong that if for any reason a family had to sell their ancestral land because of poverty, in a jubilee year that property would be restored to that family. To revoke the covenant of land was to revoke God’s election, which was impossible.
Again, although this promise was provisionally fulfilled by the Jewish people’s entry into the promised land, it is fulfilled in the promise of heaven with Christ, which is our true spiritual home.
The depth of God’s covenant love is shown in the strange prophetic action that takes place in today’s reading. The rite being performed is the same one done by a father adopting a child as his own.
The Jewish people understood that life belonged to God, and they also believed that the essence of life was located in blood. If a new kind of intimate relationship was going to be brought into existence, it could only happen through releasing blood as a sacrifice. The adopting father then walked between the two halves of the sacrifice signifying that if he ever failed in this new relationship, he put himself under a curse of death, of being split in two.
It is now God who puts himself under this curse for our sake, so that we can enter a new kind of relationship with him through the gift of descendants and land. Image that — a God willing to put himself under the curse of death in order to establish a new kind of relationship with us.
We don’t have to image because that is exactly what we celebrate each Lent and Easter. This Lent is a time to remember and enter into the promises made and fulfilled in God.