Jer. 31:31-34 Ps. 51:11-16
Heb. 5:1-10 John 12:20-33
Lectionary Link
Our appointed Scripture lessons for today provide us with at least three points for consideration, which I would like to unify in this presentation for some meaningful insights.
First, God is a God of new covenant.
Time means that contractual relationship have to be continually renewed. We always live knowingly or unknowingly in contractual ways: I will do this for you; and you will do this for me and each other. The big contract that we have, whether we know it or not is with God. "I will do this for you God, and whether I regard you or not, I expect this of the great plenitude of life." In fact we could say that the predictability in what we call natural law can be seen as a contract. "If I throw an apple into the air, it will faithfully come down into my hands, given usual conditions." One could say that the entire universe makes a contract with us all of the time. That being said, we know that when it comes to human social behaviors, we are not as precisely predictable as the consistency of natural laws.
In relationship between parties with high degrees of freedom, different times require that covenant with God be articulated differently. Why? As Joseph Campbell once observed, ancient virtue can become modern vice. Why? People understand covenant within their limited cultural context. The former covenants included the tolerance of slavery, subjugation of women, ethnocentric exclusivity, ignorance of recognition of diverse but significant personal identities, and diet limitations. Covenants can be understood to protect exclusive communal identity which in effect locks lots of people out, from being accepted as beloved persons made in God's image.
What does a new covenant look like. It is a covenant which proclaims the omnipresence of God in all people by an interior law, an interior order. What is the interior order within all people? It is having language. It is the image of Christ, who is called Language or Word from the beginning.
Since we are ordered by language in how we speak, write and act; we need forgiveness where we have practiced disorder. We need our inner scripts corrected by Christ the Word and great playwright of life. And we need to practice acting out the new scripts provided by the witness of Christ. The new law written upon our hearts is this ordering process toward surpassing ourselves in excellence in future states.
Next, we are called to be priestly because Jesus was priestliness itself.
Jesus was not a Levite, and he was not a priest in the Temple, yet the writer to the letter to the Hebrews declares him to be a priest with a timeless connection to the ancient archetype of priesthood, Melchizedek.
Christ is the priest of God for humanity. Followers of Christ are called to be priestly. And followers of Christ have a vocational priesthood for a few designated persons, not to exhaust the priestliness of Christ, but rather to model and call the followers of Christ to their own priestliness.
And what is the nature of that priestliness? Well, following Christ, it is to be both sacrificial offering, and offerer of that offering.
It is to make our lives of suffering an offering to God on behalf of bettering our world.
This is most poignantly experienced when we quit taking our own suffering as uniquely individual, and accept it as in solidarity with the suffering within our world. And since we are not our own but belong to Christ, with him we offer our suffering to God because being human is to be subject to suffering as an unavoidable probability of living.
Accepting our priesthood with Christ, means that we do not pretend to exempt ourselves from the specific requirements of the conditions of our lives which happen to us. Living all our lives as offered to God through Christ is to accept our part in being a member of the kingdom of priest to serve our God.
What does Covenant with God, and accepting our priestly calling require?
Lastly, It requires accepting the time cycles in life as being transformative and redemptive. In the words of Jesus channeled through the Gospel of John, his life was like a seed which falls into the ground and dies. It changes and becomes the sprout, stem, leaves, and fruit.
There will arrive in human existence new circumstances which forces radical change of life/death comparison in appearance and experience. Being in covenant with God with a priestly ministry means that we identify ourselves with the transformative processes encompassing the agony and the ecstasy and we do this with the witness of the Risen Christ providing the hope of a surpassing and reconciling future glory to do the impossible, which will provide us with a convincing meaning of suffering and the purpose of life itself.
Let us be in a renewal of our covenant with God based upon the continuing new circumstances of our lives; let us accept our priestly ministry, of being both victim and priest, those who suffer, and those who offer their sufferings to God in solidarity with the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the world.
And finally, let us commit ourselves to continual transformation in the cycles of time, as we humbly accept the profoundly difficult transitions, in the hope of being lifted up to future glorious meanings. Amen.
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