Cutting the Covenant

Scriptures: The Second Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

This morning, brothers and sisters, we read together an astonishing story: the story of Abraham’s covenant with God. More than 2000 years before the birth of Jesus, 2000 years before God became flesh and walked on earth as one of us, this same God made a promise to our ancestor Abraham.

Abraham was an old man to whom God kept making promises so lavish, so superabundant, as to seem ridiculous. He promised that Abraham would have a huge family, even though he was pushing 100 without an heir to his name. He promised that Abraham’s family would become a priestly nation, innumerable as the stars in the heavens. And He promised that this nation in turn would become a blessing to all nations, bringing the salvation of God to the entire world. Ridiculous promises. Superabundant promises.

Yet Abraham, against all odds, believed in God. I don’t know if this was due to wisdom or senility or just having nothing left to lose, but he had faith that these promises would not be broken. And God reckoned this faith unto him as righteousness. In response, God did something incredible: He cut a covenant with Abraham. Now, cutting a covenant was an ancient ritual in which someone quite literally cut a series of animal carcasses in half and then walked through the midst of them, as if to say, “May what happened to these beasts befall me as well, should I ever break my faithfulness to you.” See, a covenant is not a contract. It’s much more open-ended than that. A covenant is a promise of faithful relationship, no matter what.

But in the story of Abraham’s covenant, it isn’t Abraham who walks between the beasts, is it? Abraham doesn’t say, “May I be killed if I break my promises to God.” No! Amazingly, it is the Spirit of God who passes through the bisected animals. God cuts the covenant, not Abraham. In the midst of a darkness most terrible, the fire of God appears and proclaims, not in words but in deed, “I will be with you. I will be faithful to you. And I will keep every single one of My promises to you, and yet more than these, even if it kills Me.” God here promises, brothers and sisters, to be faithful to us even unto death—not simply our death, but His own. Faithful to this covenant, faithful to this relationship, even if it kills Him. Faithful to us, even if we kill Him.

Imagine the Source of All Being, the One True God Most High, who created and sustains all things in the entirety of existence, proclaiming aloud, “I love this silly old man whom I have made so much that I will lay down everything I am and everything I have just to love him, to abide with him, to be faithful to him forever.” It’s insane. When we talk about being heirs of Abraham, my brothers and sisters, this is what we’re talking about. Not the bloodlines of Isaac and Ishmael, but a promise so powerful that the very Author of Life would lay down His own Life out of love for us.

How does that even make sense? It’s too ridiculous, too extravagant, too impossible to believe. You’d have to be a crazy old man even to entertain the notion. Yet by God, it is true.

More than 2000 years later, the same God who appeared to Abraham became one of us, and our Creator entered His Creation through the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He came to keep His promises, not simply to save the family of Abraham from Rome but to save all the nations of the earth from our far deeper and eternal slavery to sin, death, and Hell. He came to walk amongst us as He once did in the Garden Eden before the Fall, before we betrayed Him and broke the world. He came to love us, to forgive us, and to reconcile us to His own eternal life. And He did all this knowing full well that we would react in fury and fear: that we would nail Him to a Cross and murder Him for the unmitigated gall of proclaiming our sins forgiven.

I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

He knew what loving us would cost Him. He always knew, from the beginning of time. He knew what we would do to Him, and He came anyway. The Crucifixion was not God’s idea but ours—yet He came anyway. Came to that rock, came to that Cross, came to that tomb. And they are all still there in Jerusalem, testifying as to the lengths to which our God is willing to go in order to bring we wayward sinners home.

Because our God promised to love us even if it killed Him. And brothers and sisters, we made sure that it did.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.