The covenant of death (one that condemns) was carved in writing on stone. It is always never easy to reconcile the position of Paul as a staunch defender of Judaism and Paul the apostle of Jesus Christ. For as an apostle of Jesus Christ, Paul turns out to be the harshest critic of what he had once believed in and defended with the entirety his being. In the passage from his letter to the Corinthians that constitutes today’s First Reading, Paul refers to the law given on Mount Sinai as covenant of death even as he warns the community about its ‘lost glory’/transitory nature (cf. vs. 11: it was meant to fade away). To Paul, the law given on Mount Sinai and written on a stone tablet, just like the old covenant that it midwifed, had been superseded and replaced by a new law/covenant in the person of Jesus Christ. It is this new law whose minsters the Corinthians, through their baptism in the name of Jesus, had become. Unlike the law given on Mount Sinai which was condemnatory, the new law is focused on giving and nurturing life.
Paul should not be seen as degrading the ‘old’ law. The law given on Mount Sinai was transitory in nature and was meant to pave way for an ‘eternal’ law, a law which is to be inscribed in the hearts of people. This new law has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Jesus becomes the fulfillment to which the Sinai law pointed, and it is this fact that makes the old law obsolete.