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God’s covenant with His people

Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Jeremiah 31:31-34.

In this year’s series of Lenten Old Testament readings we have heard quite a bit about covenant. We heard about God’s covenant with Noah, about God testing Abraham’s loyalty to their covenant by asking him to sacrifice his son, about the 10 commandments which would be part of the children of Israel’s response to the covenant that God made with them at Sinai, and, finally, about the seeming dissolution of the people into exile when their response to the covenant was so deficient as to amount to a rejection of it.

On this Sunday, we hear about covenant again. This time the sacred writer is not dealing with God’s outreach in past covenants, but about a new covenant, a different relationship that would come in the future and that would never need modification or change.

This Sunday’s reading is from the section of Jeremiah’s prophecies that is called the Book of Consolation, chapters 30 to 33. This is a collection of the comforting pronouncements that Jeremiah had made throughout the course of his prophetic career. It does not seem possible to determine at exactly what time each portion of these chapters was first proclaimed.

Our reading is composed of four verses from chapter 31. Each verse contains the phrase, "says the Lord." This repetition is probably intended to underline the importance of what is being said and to guarantee that the prophet is proclaiming God’s word and not his own.

The first verse announces the coming of a new covenant between God and His people. In the next verse God says that this new covenant will be different from the one offered to the people when they left Egypt, the covenant that they eventually rejected.

The difference, our third verse says, will be that the new covenant through which God enters a relationship with His people will be written on the hearts of the people (not on stone tablets).

Finally, this covenant still to come will involve deep personal knowledge of the Lord and the definitive forgiveness of sin.

This passage has been called the highest peak of Jeremiah’s spirituality. Yet what Jeremiah says here about future relationships between God and the people is not totally without parallel. Ezechiel (36:26 f.) speaks of God’s putting a new heart and a new spirit within His people. In Isaiah 55:3 (from the time of exile) God promises to renew an everlasting covenant with His people. Similar promises are in Isaiah 59:21 and 61:8 (from the time after the exile). But Jeremiah’s proclamation has found a special place in the hearts of Christian believers.

What God promises in this new covenant is a new and deeper level of relationship between Himself and the people. This covenant will not be able to be broken as the old one was. It will not be an agreement that calls for merely external observance or formal compliance. It will not be political or legalistic. Rather, it will be a matter of the heart, a covenant that people will observe because of what is within them rather than because of external pressures. It will be shared not so much by the teaching of detailed prescriptions as by the covenant participants showing by way of example what it means to be in touch with the Lord. The newness of the new covenant consists to a great extent in its interiority. It’s a matter of the heart.

Matthew (26:28), Mark (14:24), and Luke (22:20) all recount Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist at the last supper. Each of them shows us Jesus speaking in terms of covenant. As Luke has it, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood which will be shed for you."

What Jeremiah had foretold, Jesus now brings to fulfillment. His suffering and death would constitute a sacrifice that would mark the beginning of a new relationship, a new covenant between God and human beings. This new covenant would consist in what the Christian tradition has come to call grace.

This new relationship is not a kind of contract between God and humanity as other covenants had been. It is not a matter of God looking out for us and of our observing certain formalities to express our acknowledgment of God’s goodness. No, the new covenant consists in our sharing in the life of God, in our accepting the life of the risen God-man Jesus Christ into our hearts and minds and extending it into our life and our world. It’s not primarily a matter of learning things or doing things. It’s rather a matter of following our hearts, hearts which are no longer just ours but which are also the dwelling place of the Lord.

For reflection and discussion

How do I experience God’s law in my heart?

How does the covenant nature of the Eucharist influence my Eucharistic devotion?