The New Covenant

Even the best of quotations and slogans has a built-in problem. Years and use can turn them stale and ineffective. They  lose their punch or flavor. For example, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” or,“Christ is the answer” are now just clichés, no longer catchy as they used to be.“Love God above all else.   Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  We’ve  heard it too often.   It has  lost its punch. 

Perhaps to capture its  original thunder  we can contemplate three scenes: Jesus surrounded by Pharisees, Jesus surrounded by his  disciples, Jesus surrounded by  you and me. First,  picture Jesus surrounded by Pharisees.  Somewhat like annoying reporters hustling a celebrity or political candidate, everyone rudely shouting out his question. 

A  clever lawyer tries to trap Jesus, outsmart him: “Teacher, which is the great commandment of the law?”A tricky question. Why? Because the law had 613 commandments: 248 dos  and  365 don’ts.  Pick the wrong one and you’re doomed.   

Many a Pharisee would have nodded approvingly, had Jesus stopped after a single sentence, his excerpt from the great prayer in Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel!   The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your  soul, and with all your  strength…” (Deut. 6: 4-8)

This is the prayer devout Jews recited long before Bethlehem; here was their exultant proclamation of faith.  A book of law expressed the relation of man and woman to God in terms of love:  Israel’s love for God and God’s love for Israel. 

At no moment might the Israelite forget that love.  It had to be transmitted to the next generation, a  total love, for the word  “heart”  includes  mind  and  will  and  emotions. “Soul”  was the whole, vital human person.

But no, it is not with this response that  Jesus surprised the Pharisees. What shocked them was a “second” commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt. 22:39) 

It startled them because  to find it they would have to dig through all sorts of rules in the Book of Leviticus. It startled them because  Jesus proclaimed that  this second  commandment was “like” the first.  Loving the neighbor  is  like loving God?  Unthinkable!    It startled them because for them  the neighbor was only a fellow Israelite  or a  resident alien. 

For Jesus, the  neighbor was the despised Samaritan, the idolatrous Gentile, and the  enemy.  It startled them because Jesus proclaims, “On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”  Live these two and you live them all.  Live these two and you are doing God’s will, His total will.

Now move to the next scene –Jesus surrounded by his disciples.  Notice the twin commandment is so  all embracing,  so  ingenious, so  liberating  that we might think it takes care of Christian existence as well.  But  note what the question was: “Which is the great commandment of the law?”  In the law… in the  Jewish law. 

This is the question Jesus answers.  We too have to love God above all else, love others as we love ourselves.  Do that and the  God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will be happy with you. Happy,  but not satisfied.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob  is also  the God of Jesus.  So, sneak into the  Last Supper room.  Focus your  eyes  and  ear  on Jesus and his disciples. “A new commandment I give you: Love one another as I have loved you.”   

Not just  “Love one another.”  Not simply  “Love one another  as you love yourselves.”  No,  “Love one another  as  I have loved you.”  (John 15:12) What precisely is it that is  “new”  in this commandment? You may say that what is new is  the model of love: Our love for one another  must reflect Jesus’ love for us. 

And  how did Jesus love us?   You can hardly count the ways.  For love of us,  he  gave up the glory  that was his with the Father, was born of a teenage Jewish girl, took on a  human body like ours, grew up in a small village,  where everyone knew all about him except the  one big secret  –that  he was not Joseph’s son but God’s.

For love of us,  he  walked the dusty roads of Palestine, healing  the sick,  restoring  the dead  to life, comforting the afflicted  and  afflicting the comfortable.  He was  hungry  at times and  thirsty, with  no set place to rest  his head.  Each word,  each  gesture speaks of love, all of it  crowned by love’s agony on a cross.

  No greater love than this, to lay down your life for a friend – or for an enemy. This indeed is  the way we ought to love.  But you will not fathom  how new the commandment is unless you put yourselves within the Supper that gave it to us. 

The context of the  “new commandment”  is the  “new covenant.”  “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” 

Both expressions,  “new covenant”  and  “new commandment,” reflect an  early Christian conviction: In Jesus and his followers the  dream of the prophet Jeremiah is fulfilled: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, says the Lord.  But this is the covenant, which I will make with the house of Israel after those days. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 

No longer will they need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the Lord. ‘All from the least to the greatest shall know me,’ says the Lord; for I will forgive their evil doing and remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah: 31: 31-34)

What is it that distinguishes God’s covenant love from the noblest form of  human love? It is so wonderfully  spontaneous. Love is  not forced from God  by some power outside, not by any  magic prayer formula or  seduced from God by our lovable personalities.  Quite the  opposite  –  God’s love goes out to men and women who are sinners, who are  utterly unworthy of love divine, who cannot demand that love.

They  become God’s beloved simply  because He wants it so, can love God  only because He wants it so, can love God  only because He loves them.  This kind of love we Christians find  “new,” discover in its most radical form, when  God gives us His only Son  – to  reveal that love  and to  live it in death.

Such should be our new love.  It is the  prayer of Jesus to his Father at the Last Supper: “I in them and You in me, that they may be perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17: 21-23)       

This brings us to the  third scene –  picture Jesus surrounded by you and me.  It’s a  larger crowd  than the  Pharisees, larger  than the original disciples.  As we crowd toward him, press him off dry land and into the boat, what question should we ask him? Not  “the great commandment.”  We know that.  Not  who our model is in loving.  That is  still Jesus. 

Today’s question is a  “how” – How ought we to live the love commandment today and here? There is  no single answer  for all. God speaks to us in varied ways.  We have to keep asking with  St. Paul, “What do you want me to do, Lord?” 

The danger is, I may sit comfortably in my lounging chair waiting for Jesus to knock me over and spell it out. Knocking Christians over is not the Lord’s standard operational procedure. He works  more subtly,  through his grace in our hearts.

Love of God and of others has a  basic problem  – my  experience,  better  my  inexperience.  It is supremely difficult to love God above all things, specifically in crisis, if I have not touched God, if  God is an abstraction: Creator of the universe, Lord  of the living and the dead, Author  of the Ten Commandments. 

There is  no thrill,  no  excitement  –  my heart  does not tingle with a  one-on-one relationship  here.  I am not speaking of  vision  and  ecstasy, and a  “wow” experience,  something out of this world. Have I encountered God in a personal meaningful way?  If I have not, it will be extremely hard for me to love God more than I love myself, more than I love another whose eyes I can meet, whose flesh I can caress.

The 26-year-old  Jesuit scholastic  Richie Fernando encountered Christ and  fell in love with him in a personal way to heed the  call for the mission in Cambodia  some years ago.  He  met Christ and loved him in the young Cambodians he worked with.  He  literally followed Jesus’ command of love by  sacrificing his life to protect students, including the  troublemaker  from a  grenade blast.

Experience of God,  experience  of evil, on second thought, maybe like St. Paul, I do need to be knocked to the ground… if I am to get up as a Christian.