How Is the Eucharist a New Covenant?
The readings chosen for today’s feast of Corpus Christi, or the Body and Blood of Christ, has a different theme each liturgical year. As I have mentioned before, the Bible passages read at Catholic Sunday Masses are divided into a three-year liturgical cycle and there is a difference in the themes of the readings used for this particular feast in each year. The readings for this feast in Year A focus on the idea of the Eucharist being the food and drink of our spiritual life, (a theme I visited last year when I explored what we mean when we say Jesus’ body and blood are present in the Eucharist - What does the Eucharist mean to me?). Year C focuses on the priesthood of Jesus, and in our current Year B, the focus is on the Eucharist being the sign of our covenant with God. Consequently, all three readings this year speak of the covenant with God - first of the Jews with Yahweh - while the second and third readings speak of the New Covenant with God that Jesus establishes with his life and death, and for which he gave us a memorial that we call the Eucharist.
Some of us would tend to use the word ‘contract’as a synonym for the term ‘covenant’. This may tend to make us forget some essential differences between these two terms. As Brad Hambrick, a pastor in Durham, suggests, a contract (like a business contract) says “what’s in it for me?” while a covenant says “what can I give or sacrifice for the sake of the other?”. A covenant is based on a relationship of trust, rather than the lack of trust that seems to underlie a contract (“I need to be sure you do not cheat me!”). And so, in the Bible, God’s promise to human beings is called a covenant precisely because it is based on God’s desire to trust human beings, and give them chance after chance to fulfil that trust. When relationships are rooted in a covenant, they become a mirror through which we can see the kind of relationship that one wants to have with the other. So, a marriage relationship, for instance, rooted in a covenant is rather different from one rooted in a contract.
This idea of the “covenant’ plays a very prominent role in the Bible. In a very significant manner, it reflects the various understandings of the Jews’ regarding who God is in relationship to themselves. This pilgrimmage in understanding starts with God the absolute Creator who out of his own will, chooses to create human beings and promises them the option to live eternally in the Garden of Eden as long as they obey him. But human beings choose not to do so, and so God the Punisher chooses to throw them out of Eden, and takes away their immortality. Human beings then continue to grow in depravity, until the same punishing God cannot bear their sinfulness and an Angry God decides to destroy the whole world that they inhabit. But as a just Judge, God makes arrangements to save Noah and his family, who are not ‘sinners’. And at the end of the Flood, God the Merciful again offers a covenant (Genesis (9:15), a promise to never destroy the world again, and the rainbow is the sign of this promise or covenant to the entire human race.
But the world falls into sin again, so God, the ever Faithful looks for a way to continue to bless human beings, and decides to do this by choosing a single person, Abraham, and making a covenant with him (Genesis 15:18 and 17:2). Through this covenant, God, the Rewarder, promises Abraham (who has no child at that time and is already 99 years old), that he will have many descendants and that they will inherit a land that would be spread out from the river of Egypt to the River of Euphrates (Genesis 17:5). This God would be Abraham’s God, - thus fostering an understanding of God as special or exclusive to Israel.
But once again the descendants of Abraham fall away from God, and God the Powerful Warrior (Exodus 15:3) offers them a covenant (Exodus 24:7-8) in which all their needs would be taken care of, and they would be defended from all their enemies, if they followed God’s commandments. And though the Israelites agree, the subsequent history of Israel shows that very often they failed to keep God’s commandments, and end up being conquered or taken as captives. But since the ever faithful God had promised Abraham to be the exclusive God of him and his descendants, God eventually chooses to give them an earthly King who would be the earthly representative of their real King who is God. And it is to this King David that God makes a promise that his descendants will continue to reign forever, and even if they fail, God would chastise them but never abandon them.
And so, even as Israel once again and repeatedly falls away from God, the faithful ones among them await with longing for God to come to them again, - a promise repeated by various prophets since the fall of the Kingdom of David.
But when Jesus does come, Israel rejects him. And this is because the kind of new covenant that this Jesus offers is based on an understanding of God who is quite different from the God of the earlier covenants, - for this God is an Abba Father who forgives unilaterally and seventy times seven, who sends his rain on the just and the unjust, and unlike the mighty Yahweh of the older covenants, does not (or cannot) save Jesus or his friends from suffering and death. He is not at all the kind of God that they had experienced - not a judge, nor a powerful warrior, king, destroyer, punisher or rewarder (in the way that they saw it). He was a God who offered them freedom from a kind of religion that had overburdened them with a myriad commandments if they wanted to retain God’s favour. This God of the New Covenant only asked of them that they love their neighbours, a law/command that was put into all their hearts. There is no promise of any physical land because the Kingdom of God/heaven that this God promised was within their hearts. Moreover, this God was, and would always be, a God for all, and was not exclusive to any group of chosen people. A significantly different God who offers a NEW Covenant!
So the Biblical story tells us of all these different understandings of the covenantal relationships that the Israelites grew through - and perhaps also reflects many of our own understandings of God. But the Eucharist, functioning for us today as the central symbol of God’s New Covenant with all human beings, is telling us of a God who is significantly different from those other images of God that the Old Testament and we too often harbour, - in that the focus is not on God doing things for us, nor even on us doing things for God, - but on us doing things for others, even if it means to break ourselves like the bread or shed our blood like the wine, for others. The understanding of this new covenant was not something that the disciples of Jesus (or the Jewish establishment of that time) could really understand, steeped as they were in the various Old Testament understandings of of God. And so I sometimes wonder whether Jesus towards the end of his life, realising this complete lack of understanding on the part of his disciples, decided to do away with all the words that he had used to teach them, and to offer them two actions/practices that he hoped would sub-consciously spark in them an understanding of what he came to teach them. These two ‘poetic’ acts that we still practice today were the washing of the feet (found only in John’s Gospel), and the breaking and sharing of the Passover bread and wine (found only in the other three Gospels). It is interesting that Jesus knew they would not understand the meaning of these acts immediately, and so we have Jesus telling Peter: “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.”(John 13:7)
Unfortunately, today, these two powerfully evocative acts have become routine rituals that have lost their rich significance, - so that the ones who are called to serve and wash other’s feet (and do so in a ritual every Maundy Thursday) become the ones who ‘rule’ the Church community. And the call to go and break oneself for others that was exemplified in the breaking of bread at the Last Supper has now become a bread that is worshipped - as in the Monstrance raised during the Benediction service, or enthroned in perpetual eucharistic adoration chapels. The reality is that we find it so difficult to get out of our focus on the ‘vertical’ relationship with God (worship and prayer etc), even though Jesus kept insisting that the ‘horizontal’ (loving and even dying for one’s neighbour) is the essential aspect of his teaching and of the new covenant. Maybe, then, this feast of Corpus Christi offers us a chance remind ourselves to renew that covenant in the way Jesus intended.
First Reading: Exodus 24: 3-8
Moses went and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances, and all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do.” And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. He rose early in the morning, built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and set up twelve pillars, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. He sent young men of the Israelites, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed oxen as offerings of well-being to the Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and half of the blood he dashed against the altar. Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” Moses took the blood and dashed it on the people, and said, “Here is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”
Second Reading: Hebrews 9: 11-15
But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God! For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.
Gospel: Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26
When it was evening, he came with the twelve. And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, “Surely, not I?” He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me. For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born.”
While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
When they had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.
Comments
Post a Comment