‘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 fathers.’ The passage from the Prophet Jeremiah that constitutes today’s First Reading is one of the key passages in the Bible that reminds us that God’s salvific plan for creation can never be thwarted by human action/inaction. The passage concerns a promise by God to make a new covenant with the sons and daughters of Israel, a move initiated by God that was aimed at preserving the life-giving relationship that ought to exist between creatures and their Creator. The promise of a new covenant is a common theme of the prophets, beginning with Hosea. The inability of the sons and daughters of Israel to remain faithful to their covenantal obligations had induced the prophets to “prophesy” about a new covenant. But it was with Jeremiah that the need for a new covenant acquired some sense of urgency.
Jeremiah plied his trade as a prophet at a time when the two kingdoms of Israel found themselves in a state of utter turmoil. The northern kingdom of Israel had been devastated by Assyria, and Jeremiah’s own southern kingdom of Judah was under Babylonian attack. As had been usually the case, the prophet had to step up and reassure the people that all was not lost. What Israel was undergoing was in effect “unavoidable” because of her disregard for the terms of the covenant she had made with God (the Sinai covenant). Although Israel had promised to remain a faithful partner to the Sinai covenant, Israel showed herself incapable of remaining loyal to what was covenanted. Israel’s uninterrupted tendency to sin against God and the covenant caused God to grieve because in addition to being a disgrace to the covenant, turning it into a curse rather than a blessing. However, this was going to be the last time this was to happen, for the Lord was going to make a new covenant with the people. It was going to be a covenant unlike any other that had been made in the past.
The Lord had always made covenants with his people, promising to journey with his people and to remain their God. In return, the people were to remain faithful to the Lord, observing the commands of the Lord and keeping the terms of the covenant. Whereas God had always remained faithful to the terms of the covenant, the same could not be said of the people. Over and over again, the people breached the covenant and rendered it unbinding. It was a situation that had come to fill the Lord with grief because of his love for the people. However, the people’s infidelity was not going to stand between God and the fulfillment of the promises he had made. He was going to try one last shot at “reining” in the people. The Lord was going to make another covenant with his people, a covenant whose terms the people would find impossible to breach. For unlike the covenants of old, the Lord was promising to establish an eternal one whose law was going to be inscribed in the depth of the people’s hearts. It was going to be a covenant made with the community as well as with individual persons. Because the Lord was going to inscribe the terms of the covenant in each person’s heart, the people’s knowledge of the Lord and his commands would henceforth be immediate and intrinsic. It was a prophecy that came to be fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ is the eternal covenant that God had promised through the lips of prophet Jeremiah. He is the new, unalterable covenant that was to eternally unite the people to their Creator. For in Jesus Christ, the Creator God comes to establish a personal, life-giving relationship with his people. As the prophet Jeremiah had prophesied, Jesus assumes the central role that the law had played in the covenantal relationship that existed between God and the people. Just as the knowledge of God was mediated through the law in the older covenants, in this eternal covenant, it is Jesus Christ who becomes the mediator of the knowledge of God. But unlike the law of old, Jesus Christ enables an immediate knowledge of God for he himself is God. Jesus is our eternal covenant because he has made it possible for us to attain eternal life that had slipped through our fingers because of sin. He is the eternal covenant because it is in him that we have come to encounter the Father as he is.