Friday in the Second Week of Ordinary Time, January 22, 2021

Hebrews 8:6-13

Brothers and sisters: Now our high priest has obtained so much more excellent a ministry as he is mediator of a better covenant, enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, no place would have been sought for a second one. But he finds fault with them and says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will conclude a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they did not stand by my covenant and I ignored them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant I will establish with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts. I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his fellow citizen and kin, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know me, from least to greatest. For I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.”  When he speaks of a “new” covenant, he declares the first one obsolete. And what has become obsolete and has grown old is close to disappearing.

God made two covenants with the humans he had created over the course of time before the coming of his Son into the world.  He made one with Abraham, in which he promised to make a great nation of him and give his descendants the land of Canaan to live in.  When the descendants of Abraham had become the great nation of the Hebrews and were journeying to this land from their slavery in Egypt, God made a covenant with them through Moses: they would obey the laws which the Lord their God had made for them, and he, for his part, would never abandon them and would make them his own possession: “If therefore you will hear my voice, and keep my covenant, you shall be my peculiar possession above all people: for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a priestly kingdom, and a holy nation” (Exodus 19, 5-6).  Effectively, the Lord transforms the covenant he had made with Abraham.  We can understand this “new” covenant as an expansion or evolution of the former covenant.  Likewise, the New Covenant in the Blood of the Lord Jesus can be seen as a transformation — the fulfillment — of this covenant, which had bound the people to obey the laws given through Moses.  But in the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the inauguration of the New, the Old Law is also fulfilled: there is no longer any need to worship in the Temple in Jerusalem, for Christ himself is the true Temple; circumcision is fulfilled in the sacrament of Baptism; the sacrifices in the Temple come to an end because they were only signs of the Sacrifice of the Lord Jesus; and the old priesthood ends too, as it is fulfilled in the One who offered himself as the perfect Sacrifice on the Cross.  The old law, in fact, becomes “obsolete”.  The “new and eternal” Covenant is the fulfillment of the old, and so far surpasses it in its promises that it really is “new”, and certainly the Apostles spoke of it in this way.  This is what St. Paul means when he declares: “Now our high priest has obtained so much more excellent a ministry as he is mediator of a better covenant, enacted on better promises.”  

We can see the progression of the covenants: in that with Abraham, Almighty God promised to make of Abraham a great nation;  in that with Moses, God promised to make this great nation a “priestly people”; in that with humanity, God promises eternal life through the Blood of the Mediator of that Covenant, the Lord Jesus.  The earlier covenants of Abraham and Moses were sealed with the blood of animals, but this one, the fulfillment of these, which were signs of it, in the Blood of the God-made-man.  It makes the best promises and cannot in anyway be surpassed.   The first two covenants were entered into by the blood-line, through physical descent, and so was limited to the Jews.  The New Covenant is entered into through being washed with the Blood of Christ in Baptism, and is open to all.

The quote at the heart of today’s First Reading is from Jeremiah 31, 31-34.  In it, Almighty God announced to the Jews, in the years before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, that he would make a “new” covenant, but that “it will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers”, for the people “did not stand by my covenant.”  This new covenant would not merely legislate behavior, but would convert hearts: “I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts. I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  We see the Lord Jesus instituting the laws of the New Covenant through the fulfillment of the old when he says, for instance, “You have heard that it was said to them of old: You shall not kill. And whosoever shall kill, shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you, that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judgment” (Matthew 5, 21-22).   The Lord Jesus gives the new law as the fulfillment of the old, gives the promise of eternal life as the fulfillment of life in the Promised Land, and then ratifies this New Covenant not in the blood of beasts, but in his own Blood.

Almighty God says of the New Covenant, that “I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts.”  For those who are incorporated into the New Covenant, God writes his laws on their hearts with the pen of the Cross, the ink of which is the Blood of his beloved Son.  Let us be true to him who mediated this Covenant for us.