III SUNDAY OF LENT
FROM THE ANCIENT COVENANT TO THE NEW TEMPLE
By our Pastor, Fr. Carmelo Jiménez
We continue our Lenten journey. Incredibly we can connect the readings from past Sundays to those from this Sunday. This connection we will call the COVENANT.
The first Sunday we remembered through the scripture readings, the covenant of God with Noah after the flood. The sign of this covenant is the rainbow. The rainbow that God put in the sky after the flood was a sign of the covenant he made with man. All of nature had been reborn from the flood and God hands over a clean earth to man.
The second Sunday was the covenant of God with Abraham. God chooses a people who would be born of the sterile loins of the elderly Abraham and the sterile Sarah. Isaac is born and is the beginning of a people through whom the promises of salvation with be fulfilled, because from there will the Redeemer be born. Faith is what would distinguish men from here on out.
And many centuries later, God makes a third covenant which is the one that appears in the scripture readings from this Sunday. It is about Moses. The book of Exodus is a dogmatic book, like the doctrinal nucleus of this entire people who are born of Abraham and the patriarchs. I put special emphasis on the world people because that is who this third pact will be with. This formed people were taken to Egypt by hunger and in Egypt they had spent 4 centuries and there became an enslaved people. God has not forgotten his promise! The promise that God made to Abraham will be fulfilled. The Exodus captures this precious moment in which God chooses a leader to guide his people from slavery, through forty years in the desert, to the Promised Land.
In the Exodus to the Promised Land, in front of Mount Sinai, God reminds them that they have a law, a Decalogue. And together with the Law, also come the prophets, and God says in Exodus: “I, the LORD, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall not have other gods besides me.” (Ex 20:1) Jesus Christ repeats: the law and the prophets, to point out the importance that the law had in marking the pact, the covenant. But a law without spirit leads to death. And that is what happened with the third covenant, because God gave them the Ten Commandments, but the Jews made many, many laws. They had more than 600 laws to follow.
Jesus Christ is the New and Definitive Covenant. He reveals himself as such when they ask the reason behind his actions in the Temple in Jerusalem: “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” (Jn 2:19) Christ is the true rainbow because in his Easter Resurrection, nature rises again and is offered over to man, so that purified of sin, he may know how to manage it better.
That is why we prepare ourselves in Lent for a renewal of humanity, of history, of ourselves, members of this history. That is why this time of Lent is of conversion, to the Covenant of God and us his People. This people which does not consist of Jews and non-Jews, but rather believers and unbelievers, but still a people. With the firm promise that everyone “who believes in him might have eternal life.”
Today we can pray: come Lord Jesus. Cleanse my heart of all the things I carry in it. Cleanse my interior temple, throw out the bad attitudes, the bad words, the hate and selfishness, my pride, my…and you can, Lord, rebuild it into a place of worship, honor and glory to you. That by living out your commandments, I may gain eternal life. Amen.