Readings: Jeremiah 31:31 34 Hebrews 5:7-9
John 12:20-33
As we move closer to Holy Week, our Lenten readings on God’s covenant probe the interior renewal God wants to work within us. In Jeremiah, we hear of the prophet’s longing for a new covenant when God’s law will be inscribed in the human heart. The epistle and Gospel readings show us the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy in the person of Jesus, the obedient Son, who embraced suffering and death and thereby becomes the source of life for all who follow him. In our longing for the full realization of the new covenant in our lives, each of us can pray the refrain of today’s responsorial psalm: “Create a clean heart in me, O God” (Ps 51:12).
Jeremiah’s prophecy of a new covenant was forged in the crucible of Judah’s defeat and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Babylonian armies at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. In the years leading up to this disaster, Jeremiah stood virtually alone against kings, princes, priests, prophets, and the people of the nation, as he repeatedly urged an interiorized commitment to God’s covenant law and warned of the impending destruction of the nation. In the darkest hour of Judah’s tragedy, however, when the Babylonian armies were besieging Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s message suddenly became hopeful. He bought a plot of land that he had a right to purchase in the tribal system of family land inheritance in order to assure the people that “homes and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (Jer 32:15).
Convinced that God “will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more,” Jeremiah proclaims that “the days are coming” when the old covenant made with the fathers who were brought out of Egypt will be completed in “a new covenant.” Although the forefathers broke the old covenant and the Lord had to “show (him)self their master,” Israel and Judah will again be bonded by law to God and one another. But, unlike the old covenant in which the law was written on tablets of stone, the Lord promises to inscribe the law upon the people’s hearts (the seat of intelligence and will in Hebrew psychology), so that “all from the least to the greatest, shall know me. ...”
The reading from Hebrews presents Jesus as the obedient Son, who in his flesh lived out the commitment to God’s will envisioned in Jeremiah’s prophecy. According to Hebrews, the earthly stage of Jesus’ life in which he learned sympathy for our weakness by enduring temptation was preparation for his heavenly high priesthood. Jesus did not exercise an earthly priesthood by offering animal sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple; rather, in the flesh he learned to be an obedient Son. In an allusion to Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Hebrews reminds us of his “prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to God,” as he faced death in faith that God was able to save him. Only through his obedient endurance of death in faith did the Son become perfected so that he might become the source of eternal salvation for all who follow him in obedience. Later, in chapters 8-10, Hebrews describes the heavenly priesthood of Jesus who is the mediator of the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah (see Heb 8:1-33) by offering his own blood in the heavenly sanctuary.
The Gospel reading from John continues this Sunday’s theme of the life-giving power of Jesus’ death. At the final Passover in John’s Gospel, God-fearing Greeks, representing the whole Gentile world, arrive in Jerusalem and ask to see Jesus. He now knows that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” His hour of glory involves death, but, like the grain of wheat which must die in order to produce much fruit, it will be a glorious lifting up which will draw all to him. Although his soul is troubled at the prospect of death, Jesus refuses to ask the Father to save him from this hour and instead embraces it by praying, “Father, glorify your name!” As we move closer to Christ’s Passover from death to life, let us ponder his words to those who would follow him:
“I solemnly assure you, unless the grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains a grain of wheat. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.”
