The Path to the New and Eternal Covenant, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B
March 17, 2024
Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51, Heb 5:7-9, Jn 12:20-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Throughout the Sundays of Lent this year, in the Old Testament readings we have been encountering the various covenants God has made with his people. On the first Sunday, we looked at the covenant with Noah after the flood. On the second, God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. On the third, the Covenant with the Moses in the Ten Commandments. Last week, we pondered, with the help of Second Chronicles, how the infidelity to the covenants led to the Babylonian exile. Today we come to the culmination of the series, what God through Jeremiah promised his people before the exile. A covenant is a sacred family bond, like a marital vow, in which God espouses himself to his people and his people give commitment themselves for life in return. It was always made by a blood sacrifice, since blood is the source of life, and God, the Lord of life, was promising to give his people life. Noah sacrificed one of every beast and bird he had brought on the ark (Gen 8:20). Abraham sacrificed a heifer, she-goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon and walked through them, and later was willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac (Gen 15:9; 22:10). Moses sacrificed bulls and sprinkled half the blood on the altar representing God and the other half on the people (Ex 24:6-8).
• Today God tells us through Jeremiah about the covenant God would himself make after the expiation of the exile. “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house or Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers, when I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant. … This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people. No longer will they need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord. All from the least to greatest shall know him, says the Lord, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.” This is the only time the word “new” is used with Covenant in the entire Old Testament. And Christ fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah with his passion, death and resurrection, and did so with his own blood, which he didn’t sprinkle upon us on the outside, but wanted us to drink on the inside. During the Last Supper, he took the chalice filled with wine and prayed, as we reiterate each Mass: “Take this, all of you and drink from it. For this is the chalice of my blood. The blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” Jesus sealed this special spousal bond with his own blood in the new and eternal, the definitive, covenant not only with the houses of Israel and Judah — all twelve tribes — but with all the nations.
• This is what we prepare for throughout Lent. We prepare for the Sacred Triduum in which we, in time, enter into the new and eternal Covenant, which Jesus effectuated in his divinity and humanity. Those preparing for baptism are preparing to become parties to this Covenant at the Easter Vigil. Those already baptized are preparing to renew, through our baptismal promises, our covenantal commitment to believe in, love, and serve God and renounce the person, lies and works of the devil. Our anticipation is supposed to be growing week-by-week, day-by-day, as we draw closer to the Sacred Triduum.
• Today in the Gospel Jesus indicates to us the path of this new and eternal Covenant. It’s a path both historic and moral. Some Greeks come up to the apostle St. Philip in the Gospel and tell him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” On the surface it seems like an ordinary occurrence. Jesus, by this point, was well-known and lots of people wanted to meet him. But when Philip told Andrew and Andrew told Jesus, Jesus didn’t say what we might expect, like “Okay, bring them to me,” or “Fine, please take me to them.” Instead, he exclaims, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Throughout the Gospel of St. John, Jesus was speaking about his “hour,” the time of his suffering. He had hesitated to work the miracle in Cana because it wasn’t yet his “hour.” He told the Samaritan woman that when his “hour” came, the Samaritans would worship in spirit in truth. St. John says multiple times that those seeking to arrest Jesus couldn’t, because “his hour had not yet come.” And Jesus, as soon as he heard that Greeks were seeking him, cried out that now was his hour of glorification. It would be the time when the covenant long foretold would be opened for all the nations represented by the Greeks.
• Then he described what his glorification would be. It wouldn’t be a public manifestation of the glory he shown Peter, James and John at his transfiguration. It wouldn’t be a celebration like one might expect for the accession into power of a great civil leader. No, Jesus said the Greeks representing all of the nations would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross. It’s then that Jesus, in fulfillment of Daniel’s, Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s prophecies that eventually the light would be given to all nations, would draw all people to himself. To see that light, to behold Jesus who is the Light of the World, they would have to recognize him as a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, landing cold on the ground and being covered with dirt, but then raised as the new Tree of Life. If we’re seeking Jesus, this is where, he says, we must look for him and find him. He tells us in today’s Gospel: “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find Jesus, we have no alternative than to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it, of denying ourselves rather than affirming ourselves, picking up our Cross and dying to ourselves on it. To enter into the new and eternal Covenant, we must only receive the unmerited gift of Jesus’ going the way of the grain of wheat for us, his losing his life to save ours, but we must also follow him along that path of the grain of wheat, of losing our life in order to be saved. In order to be glorified with Jesus, in other words, we must ourselves experience a crucified exaltation; like a magnet, our Cross has got to be lifted up on Calvary with Jesus’ cross, our life, our body and blood, together with his.
• Pope Benedict commented this reality of what this new and eternal covenant is back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). Evoking the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt that was part of the covenant of God with the Israelites through Moses, Pope Benedict wrote, “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” The essence of love, the deepest meaning of human life, Pope Benedict underlined, is this exaltation through exodus, this glorification through self-giving. Jesus, the grain of wheat who fell to the ground three times on the way of the Cross and died on Golgotha in order to give us life to the full, turns to each of us and says, “Come, follow me!” “Come, join me!” “Come enter into the new and eternal Covenant.”
• This new and eternal covenant Passover on which Jesus as the new Moses wants to lead each of us, is, Pope Benedict describes, an “exodus from the inward-looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only find the meaning of our life, we will only discover God and come to see him, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” and learn to give it like a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. Each of us must travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it, from the inward-looking self to the freedom of giving ourselves in loving sacrifice for God and others. How do we do this?
• The exodus needs to occur first in our prayer, in which we “lose our life” in communion with God in order to “preserve it.” This is the way we come to see Jesus intimately with the eyes of the soul. Very often our prayer can be more about us than God. We can focus so much on our petitions that we can forget about praising and thanking God. Unlike Samuel who said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” we often say by our posture, “Listen, Lord, for I’ve got the floor.” We can come to the Lord with so many of our problems and occupy all our time with them that we can fail to lift up our hearts to God who is and has the solution. The first way to see Jesus is by living the exodus out of ourselves to him and others in prayer.
• An exodus also needs to occur in our almsgiving. We’re called to die to our obsession with our own interests and begin to see Jesus in others, especially in those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, ill, in prison or otherwise in need. When we sacrifice generously out of love for them, Jesus tells us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, we sacrifice for him. The more we give of ourselves, the more we gain ourselves. We can only keep what we give away. We’ll only bear fruit that will last forever when we follow Jesus down the path of the grain of wheat in charity.
• An exodus also needs to occur in our moral life, from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Our will wants to save itself, to preserve itself, to assert itself. We need to discipline it through obedience to God. We need to put to death life according to the flesh in order to live according to the Holy Spirit. That’s what Jesus did, as we see in the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. The sacred author tells us that Jesus was perfected through his obedience to the will of God the Father and thus he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Likewise, we will become perfected — and become an instrument of salvation in the lives of those we care about and so many others we may not even know — only through our obedience to God’s will, by morally dying to our own self-preservation and self-affirmation so that God may live. In some cases, as in Jesus’ life, as in the lives of the prophets who pointed to him and the apostles who announced him, this moral path may lead to our being literally lifted up on the Cross, to being martyred out of obedience to God. But for most of us, our perfection will happen through little things each day. It will happen through our fasting. It will happen through our self-denial in order to prioritize the desires of God needs of others. If we remain faithful in these daily little exoduses, then we will be strengthened to remain faithful in the supreme moments and save our life forever.
• That’s the application of today’s Gospel to our discipleship, to our own personal following of Jesus. But our keeping the new and eternal covenant with Jesus involves more than our personal sanctity. It involves seeking to bring his light to others, to helping them learn the essence of love and of human life itself by joining Jesus and us on the path of thee grain of wheat. So let’s apply what God is teaching us today to our apostolate, our vocation as fishers of men, our mission and duty to bring others to the Lord.
• So many today, like the Greeks in today’s Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look to those in the Church, like the Greeks looked to Philip, to try to bring them to Jesus. And each of us, and our communities, need to be ready to help them find the face of Jesus when they come. This is especially important as we approach Holy Week and look across campus at all those we know who are searching for God, hunting for love, foraging for meaning. How can we help them? How must we help them?
• First, we have to help them find Jesus by the life we lead. There are many who are longing for Jesus, but they don’t find him in the Catholics they know. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi. He was always fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary, E. Stanley Jones, asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” These are stunning words. Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something far more severe: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” Just think about what history might have been if Nietzsche, who took his own life, and whose thoughts contributed to Hitler’s craziness, to the concentration camps, to World War II, if only he had found someone truly redeemed, someone who reminded him of Christ the Redeemer. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” By our fully Christian life, we are called to reveal, not conceal, Christ’s face for whom they seek.
• Second, we need to reveal Christ by the way we approach him as he speaks to us in Sacred Scripture. People expect, for example, that when they come to Mass in Catholic churches or chapels, they’re going to find people who believe in what Jesus taught, that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. They expect that they’re going to have people who know that Jesus has the words of eternal life, who love word of God, not do not just hear it, but know and live it. They expect they’ll find ministers and people who are on fire, who long to see Jesus and hear his words. Yet, this is sadly not the reality everywhere. One of the reasons why so many in Latin America are going to the Pentecostal churches, and why so many ex-Catholics are found in storefront pentecostal churches in our country, is because they expected to find a real love of the Word of God in Catholic Churches, but in many places didn’t. People are hungering for Jesus to nourish them with the word of life and we need to help them find him through our own holy habits and hungers.
• Third, we need to reveal Jesus by the joy we have in encountering him in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. When they come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate that they’re going to find people who are the most joyous on earth, who rejoice to be in the presence of God, who know how blessed they are to be called to the Lord’s Supper. They expect to see incredible reverence for God who comes down from heaven to earth and hides himself humbly and miraculously under the appearances of bread and wine. They expect to find people who are giving their best in terms of prayer and singing, who are wearing their best, who are behaving the best. They want to befriend people who are centering their lives of Jesus in the Eucharist as the source and summit of their life, who order their entire life around the celebration of Mass rather than just try to squeeze it in and check it off a to-do list. And, yet, when they come to churches in many places, that’s not their experience. One of the reasons why there is a need for the Eucharistic Revival in the Church in our country is because the worship in a sizable percentage of the 17,000 Catholic churches in the country is rather moribund. The first pillar in the parish phase of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival is to “revitalize worship,” so that through the way we celebrate Mass we communicate clearly and contagiously that we are celebrating the truth that the same Christ who was in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, the same Christ who was lifted up on the Cross, the same Christ who rose from the dead, is here with us; he just looks different. If we don’t celebrate with that joy and reverence, if we don’t behave like those who know they see, encounter and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, it is harder for everyone to see Jesus, too.
• Fourth, we need to reveal Jesus by the love we have for others. Jesus called us to love others as he has loved us first. When people come to Catholic Churches, when students approach campus ministry, they anticipate they’re going to encounter love, love for them, love for each other, love for those who are not there. They expect to find a community where not only everyone knows each other’s names, but where they care for each other, cheer each other up when they’re down or suffering, help each other when they’re struggling, pray for each other, and enjoy each other’s company. They expect that the Catholics they meet are going to sacrifice to care for those in need, through the corporal and especially spiritual works of mercy, passing on the faith to others with zeal as the greatest good and charity to others as a real privilege. They also expect — and deeply desire — that others are going to look at them with the eyes of Jesus, warmly embrace them into the community, help them to feel truly at home in God’s house, take an interest in them, and seek to help them become better friends with Jesus and all Jesus’ friends. In short, they expect to see and find Jesus acting in his Mystical Body the Church, which continues to follow the path of the grain of wheat together with the Lord. When they find it, they feel at home and begin to try to make up for lost time. When they don’t find it, they become spiritually disoriented and their restless hearts, which will only rest in God, begin to look for God elsewhere.
• So today God is asking that each of us become like St. Philip, approachable, someone who is willing to be a bridge of others to come to Jesus because we are already following Jesus the Way up close on the path of the grain of wheat. I’d urge you, as we draw closer to Holy Week, to think about those whom you might be able to invite to join you here as we all seek together to follow Jesus as he prepares to be glorified for us on Palm Sunday, on Holy Thursday, on Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and beyond.
• As I alluded to above, the greatest way of all to find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus is the grain of wheat who dies, but from that lifeless grain that fell along the way of the Cross has come forth the great multiplication of the Bread of Life that will endure until the end of time. This is how we enter into the new and eternal Covenant in his blood, the way we keep our end of the Covenant as we seek to do this in his memory. The Eucharistic Lord Jesus is the divine response to the hunger of all humanity that longs not just to see God’s face but to become one with him in love. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi, if people had “somehow arrived in Jerusalem after Pentecost and had felt the desire not only to have information about Jesus of Nazareth but rather the desire still to be able to meet him, [they] would have had no other possibility … of a true encounter with him” than coming to the celebration of the Mass with the early Christian community. Hence Pope Francis says, “For this reason the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’”It’s at Mass that Jesus, who gave his body and blood when he was lifted on the Cross, continues to be elevated and to give that body and blood for the world. It’s at Mass that he seeks to transform us to follow him down the path of self-giving love for our and others’ salvation. All those who wish to see Jesus here behold him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It’s here that that Lamb comes to see us, feed us and send us forth as grains of wheat to be scattered fruitfully throughout the world. The Eucharist is the means by which Jesus transforms us from within to become his face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, and so be able to draw everyone attracted to him onto his path, the path of the exodus that lead to life eternal. Getting on this path is the ultimate purpose of Lent. It is the fulfillment of all the covenants. It is, as Pope Benedict tells us, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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