Lent V: Jesus is the New Covenant

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

A common theme in today’s readings from Jeremiah and John is hope: hope that is grounded in God’s New Covenant with His people. 

Jeremiah 31 prefigures this covenant with God’s comforting words: His ultimate desire is to forgive Judah and forget their iniquity. 

In John 12, the person of Jesus and his sacrificial self-offering is the realisation of this New Covenant of forgiveness and love.

Jeremiah is primarily concerned with the downfall of Judah and the apparent fracturing of the covenant between God and his people. 

Also known as the “weeping prophet”, Jeremiah laments the faithlessness of Judah, Jerusalem’s fall and God’s just punishments. 

But Jeremiah also dares to speak of God’s power to create new beginnings.

God is not only a judge, He is also a creator and a nurturer.

Chapters 30 and 31 in Jeremiah form the so-called Little Book of Consolation, revealing the steadfast determination of God to save His people. 

They reveal the sovereignty and power of God to rise above Judah’s corrupt affairs to fulfill His own purposes. 

God can and will bring to fruition what has been planted  and rebuild what has been destroyed: a work that finds its perfect expression in the self-offering of Christ in John. 

In  Jeremiah Chapter 30, God speaks of His resolve to bring life where there appears to be only death, and this resolve gives birth to a new hope for Judah and for us.

Nonetheless, this new future comes with a price, as Jeremiah makes clear.

It is a future that requires Jerusalem to fall, and for prophets, priests and people to experience bitter exile in Babylon.

But with these requirements having been met, the stage is finally set for God's work of regeneration and redemption.

God will speak a new word of creation, a word that will one day restore Judah. From the bitterness of exile will emerge a strengthened bond of trust and forgiveness. 

“The days are surely 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 that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt”

No longer will the law be imposed on people from the outside; rather, it will be put within people, made a part of them as a gift from God.

Walter Brueggemann offers four observations on the nature of the New covenant God will inaugurate with his people, as described in Jeremiah.

First, His people will be in solidarity.

Second, there will be full knowledge of God.

Third, all people will be on equal ground before God.

Fourth, this renewed relationship between God and Judah is possible only because God will break away from a system of rewards and punishments and move towards a system of Grace. 

God will forgive, and His forgiveness will transform everything. 

No one will be left behind in this new relationship that God seeks to establish with Judah. 

God says "I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more”.

God invites Judah to receive His forgiveness in the New Covenant that He will establish.

This theme of hope, grounded in this New Covenant, finds its completion in John.

If today’s passage from Jeremiah highlights the shift from the Law and Grace, this shift reaches its climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, which is prefigured in today’s passage from John.

Jesus declares his death will be the principal means by which the Father and the Son are glorified, thus permanently shifting the role of Forgiveness in God’s economy. 

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus is the New Covenant that Jeremiah foretells in his Little Book of Consolation. 

This New Covenant is grounded in Grace and Forgiveness and the self-offering of Christ. 

John uses striking literary contrasts to highlight the extraordinary nature of Jesus’ sacrifice and the New Covenant it establishes. 

Crucifixion was considered shameful, but in John’s Gospel the Cross brings glory to Jesus and to God, because the Cross expresses God’s love for the world and brings to completion the life-giving work of the Father through the Son.

Jesus is the grain that “dies” by falling into the earth, yet which lives by bearing much fruit: life from death, forgiveness from sacrifice, love from hate. 

In John, the Cross is a means of God’s glorification because in Jesus’ death God draws all people to Himself.

Jesus’ death on the cross signals God’s victory over the world. Yet, it is the world that rejects Jesus that God loves, and which is redeemed by Cross itself. 

God’s desire for closeness with His creation is such that His son must become Incarnate of the Virgin Mary to achieve as much intimacy as possible with his creation. 

The Incarnate God, Jesus Christ, is the Law that God places “within” His people; not a voice from above but embedded within Israel itself.

In Jesus’ resurrection and ascension it is not just the divinity of Jesus that returns from death to life, and from earth to paradise but his humanity too, and by extension ours as well. 

And this should give us hope. 

Firm hope, grounded in the New Covenant, is not simply extracted from the actions of God, remote in time, found only in Jeremiah’s Judah or Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary.

We participate in the New Covenant in this place, St Peter’s, every day. 

At the Last Supper, Jesus instituted the New Covenant in the Eucharist where he offered his Body and Blood to the disciples as bread and wine. The New Covenant found its completion the next day when He shed His blood on the Cross for our sins.  

Whoever, then, partakes of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist is a participant in the New Covenant. 

That is to say, we partake of the gifts of Grace and Forgiveness that Christ purchased for us on the Cross by eating His Body and drinking His Blood.

This knowledge: of God’s living amongst us and offering us eternal life through His death, should indeed be our Little Book of Consolation, an addendum to the lamentations of Jeremiah that inspires firm hope.

If the Old Covenant, established between God and Abraham, was concerned primarily with the Law, the New Covenant, established by the Body and Blood of Christ, is concerned primarily with Grace. 

If the Old Covenant taught us to live in obedience, the New Covenant has taught us to live in love. 

If the Holy of Holies was formerly found only in the Tabernacle of the Temple, it is now found in our Tabernacle at St Peter’s. 

May this reminder of God’s life-giving purposes, given us in today’s readings from Jeremiah and John, and the Sacrifice of Praise we share at the altar be a comfort for us as we head towards Holy Week and Easter. Amen.