Disappointed or frustrated with the fact that the first covenant between God and the House of Israel was not embraced, God developed a second one, saying to us: "Behold, the days are coming...when I will conclude 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 day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they did not stand by my covenant and I ignored them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant I will establish with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts. I will be their God, and they shall be my people."
How disappointing and frustrating it must have been for God when the Israelites abandoned the covenant God made with them, after leading them out of Egypt, where they had been reduced to being slaves of the Egyptians. God, however, does not give up! These are His people, His beloved! He chooses another way, a more intimate way, putting His law in their minds and writing it on their hearts. "I WILL be their God, and they SHALL be my people!
God goes further with us! As we, like the Israelites abandoned our God, walking away from Him as did our first parents, choosing our will above His, God is determined to reclaim us, to make us His own. To prove His love for us and become even more intimate with us, God became one of us in the Incarnate Son of God who assumes human nature. God the Son becomes like us in all things but sin and shows us how to live and how to deal with rejection and persecution, forgiving his persecutors and executioners, triumphing over death and resuming His rightful place beside His Father, and ours, in heaven. Like Jesus, so, too, we! "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Whoever believes in me will never die," Jesus says to us!
God sealed the New Covenant with us in Jesus' life, death and resurrection. We proclaim and do the same both by the way we live our lives and every time we participate in the breaking of the bread and the blessing of the cup at a Catholic Mass, accepting Jesus' invitation to "take and eat; this is my body. Take and drink! This is the cup of my blood poured out for you!"
May you and I not walk away and do things our way when God's way is too inconvenient for us, too difficult for us to stomach, or too much of an enigma for us to understand. Let us truly embrace the way Jesus taught us, that is, to follow the Father's will when convenient or inconvenient, when easy or difficult, when an enigma or easily understood! Like Jesus, may we embrace the Father's will whether it is to climb the mountain and converse with Him on the Tabors of our lives or to climb the hill to Calvary where death and resurrection await us.
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