COVENANT. The ‘Old Testament’ is the ‘Old Covenant,’ the agreement that was arrived at between God and Israel at Mount Sinai. The following sums it up pretty well: “I shall be your God and you shall be my people” (Leviticus 26:12). If you obey God’s commandments, God will love you – pretty clear it seems to me.
The ‘New Testament’ is the ‘New Covenant,’ the agreement that was arrived at by God alone in an upstairs room somewhere in Jerusalem – Jesus was present. Jesus sums it up with these words: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” (1 Corinthians 11:25).
Like Israel, Jesus believed that if you obey God, God will love you. Jesus is also saying more. He is saying if you don’t obey God, that doesn’t mean that God won’t love you. It means, it seems to me, that God’s love becomes a suffering love: a love that suffers because it is not reciprocated, a love that suffers because we who are loved suffers and suffers precisely IN OUR failure to reciprocate.
Consider, gentle reader, that by giving us the cup to drink, Jesus is saying that in loving us God ‘bleeds’ for us – NOT ‘even though’ we don’t give a care, but precisely ‘because we don’t.’ God continues to keep God’s part of the covenant whether we keep our part or not; it’s just that this way costs God more.
What IS new about the New Covenant is not the idea that God loves the world enough to bleed for it but that God is actually making a ‘flesh and blood’ commitment to do so. As a father, when my son was quite ill I remember saying: ‘I will do anything to help you get well – I will even change places with you.’ Well, God acts. What God does is Jesus the Christ. The cross becomes the central symbol of God’s covenant; God’s covenant made flesh.
I am smiling for I am recalling the story of the Middle Ages Archbishop who was heard muttering over his mutton chop at the grand feast, “This mutton is as hard to swallow as the Lamb of God.” God suffering for us: There are some who find the whole idea unswallowable – just the idea of GOD, let alone the idea of God in Jesus-the-Christ suffering for us; suffering on the cross for love’s sake.
Yet, for centuries past – and perhaps for centuries to come – there have been countless imperfect human beings, who with varying degrees of difficulty have been able to swallow it and have claimed that what they swallowed made the difference between ‘life and death.’
Jesus suffered not because he brought us ‘news’ from God. Jesus suffered because he brought us ‘new, good news’ from God. He offered us a ‘New Covenant.’ God, being a loving God, continues to wait patiently for our commitment to reciprocate. When I, you, we withhold our response-in-love, God lovingly suffers.
Searcher-Seeker 
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