Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B
St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Sacred Scripture is littered with so many amazing and pivotal quotations, but what we see in our first reading for this weekend is one of the most crucially important quotations in the entire Bible. From the lips of prophet Jeremiah, we hear: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt…” (Jeremiah 31:31-32) “I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (33b). The central word in that prophetic declaration is “covenant,” bĕriyth in Hebrew, and it is absolutely central to biblical revelation. The great St. Irenaeus said that the best way to understand salvation history is to see it as the establishment of covenants between God and his people. God made covenants with Adam, Abraham, Noah, Moses and David. But what is a covenant? It is not so much a contract, which is about exchange of goods and services— you do this for me, and I will do that for you. A covenant is rather a bond, a personal bond, a sharing of life. We don’t speak of marriage contract, rather marriage covenant: I will be yours and you will be mine. This is what covenant life is about. So, the great feature of the biblical covenant is indeed, “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” It is not an exchange of goods and services, rather an exchange of life and exchange of persons.
How is a covenant done in the Old Testament? It was typically sealed in blood and sacrifice. When Noah and his family exited the ark, he built an altar and offered an animal sacrifice to establish a covenant with God (Genesis 8:18-20). After God made a covenant with Abraham, he took three different animals (a heifer, a goat, and a ram) and cut them in two signifying the seriousness of the covenant. The animals represent Abraham and Yahweh, and the cutting of the animals in half represents the pledging of their fidelity to each other (Genesis 15:9-21). When Moses and the Israelites got to Mount Sinai on the way to the Promised Land, God made a covenant with them and renewed the one he had made with Abraham. After that, Moses sprinkled blood first on the altar and then on the people (Exodus 24:1-18). David’s covenant with the Lord was signed and renewed for about a thousand years through the blood sacrifice of the Temple. But why is blood and sacrifice used to seal a covenant? Firstly, because blood signals life and the exchange of life. God wants to get his life into his people, Israel. And he wants their life to be given to him in return. Secondly, because we’ve gone off-kilter with divine life. So, getting on line through the covenant will hurt. It is said that when people brought animals to the temple in Jerusalem for sacrifice, what they were saying symbolically was, what was happening to this animal by right should be happening to me. The blood of the animals symbolizes the life blood poured out in reparation.
With this background in mind, let’s go back to Jeremiah, one of the greatest prophets of Israel. And by the way, Jeremiah prophesied during one of the trying times in Israel’s history. Babylon was encircling Israel and they were deeply threatened by their enemies. Jeremiah knew Israel had failed to live up to the demands of the covenant. He knew the Law given to Moses. He knew about the hundreds of thousands of sacrifices offered in the temple. But he also knew that none of them was working. Israel did not belong entirely to the Lord. So, out of the depths, he prophesied about a day to come, a day of fulfillment when the covenant would definitively be sealed and lived out, when the Law would no longer be a dead letter, honored and written only in stone. As he put it, it would be written on the hearts of the people of Israel. He prophesied the day when God will entirely be Israel’s God and Israel will entirely be God’s people. This is prophetic vision on full display. Six centuries after Jeremiah’s prophecy, a young Jewish rabbi, who performed great miracles of healing and demonstrated a mastery over the forces of nature, enters the Upper Room situated in the holy city of Jerusalem. Surrounded by his disciples for Passover supper, he takes the cup of blessing in his sacred hands and makes an extraordinary pronouncement: “This is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
We know those words well from the Mass; they are the words of the consecration. But when Jesus’ disciples first heard those words, what came to their minds wasn’t the consecration of the Eucharist. What they heard was how Jesus is evoking all the great covenants of Israel. Jesus is demonstrating an exchange of life between God and his people— the chalice of his Blood. More to it, he is boldly associating his covenant with the one predicted by Jeremiah six centuries earlier. Jesus is saying the sacrifice of his life, the shedding of his blood, his death on the cross the next day will at last initiate an unbroken bond between God and his people. All the great prophets acknowledged that Israel did not fulfill the covenant God made with them. But in the Upper Room, on the Last Supper, Jesus declares that the shedding of his Blood, which Jeremiah saw centuries ago, has now become a reality. He is now fulfilling it on behalf of Israel and the whole human race. This is why in our Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (John 12:32). What’s the lifting up? It is the lifting up of crucifixion. The shedding of sacrificial blood. In that act, Jesus is saying, “I am making the whole world into the new Israel. I am making the whole world blood brothers and sisters of God. Jesus is the coming together of divinity and humanity. He is the moment when faithful Yahweh meets faithful Israel. He is the Law of God inscribed on the heart of humanity.
God is nothing but love. Therefore to have the divine life in you is to comply with that love. To have the law written on your heart is to live out the law of the gift, namely that my being increases in the measure that I give it away. If you live that way, you are a blood brother or blood sister of God. The divine life is not something you hold on to yourself as a private privilege. It is something that flows through you into the world. This is exactly why Jesus said in our Gospel today, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.” This is the law of divine life, everybody. That’s the law of the gift. Unless you give yourself away, you remain just a single grain. The selfish philosophy that says, “my life, my ego, my accomplishment etc. is not of divine life. But if I become a blood brother or sister of God, I will give my life lavishly away just as Jesus gave his life lavishly away. And that’s when I will produce much fruit. This is the covenant. This is what the covenant means. This is the fruit of the covenant. At every Mass, we are invited to drink the cup of this new covenant: “Take this all of you and drink from it.” What does that mean? It means we take into ourselves exactly what this sacrifice calls for. The great St. Thomas Aquinas said, the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Law because the Eucharist is the moment when that Law of God is indeed written in our hearts, when the covenant is not just external Law but becomes our flesh and blood.
Veni Sancte Spiritus!
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