Today let’s look at the reading from the Hebrew Bible appointed for Sunday, about a surreal experience Abram has. God has promised the childless Abram that he will have descendants more numerous than the stars in the skies. If that is not preposterous enough, he promises to give him all the land around him. Abram reasonably asks, “How will I know I am to possess it?” and God instructs him to get a heifer, female goat, a ram, a turtledove and a pigeon, and cut the mammals in half (why not the birds?). Abram then sits guard over the carcasses, chasing away birds of prey.
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates."
This covenant is formalized by a ritual common in the Ancient Near East at that time – this bizarre cutting in half of sacrificial animals goes back to covenant ceremonies of the 2nd millennium BCE. The bloody ceremony is what scholars call a “self-maledictory oath” – the parties to the covenant would walk between these cut up animals to signify their agreement that this should happen to them if they violate the covenant; their bodies should be broken like the bodies of these sacrificial animals.
But here God moves between the pieces in the form of a smoking firepot with a flaming torch; in the Bible God often manifests in the form of fire. It is God, not Abram, who goes between the pieces – meaning the penalty will fall on him if the covenant is broken. That is what God has done in the New Covenant (or Testament) that he has made with us through Christ. He met the terms of the Old Covenant. He himself provided the offering for the sacrifice, his own son, whose body was broken on the cross, as the ceremony signified would happen if the covenant was broken.
Jesus, sitting on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, laments this broken covenant, knowing he will pay the price with his own blood: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”
It was not God who broke the covenant, but humankind, over and over. Yet it was not we who paid the price, but God Himself, in Christ. This man who is revered as a model of non-violence; this man whom we recognize as the Living God; this Prince of Peace who never attacked anyone becomes a victim of the violence we call the Cross. Not a chance victim – a willing victim, going deep into the heart of evil in order to break its hold. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross was the end of a system of blood sacrifice that had operated until then. In Christ the New Covenant was born, which ended all previous covenants. It was sealed in His blood – and never needs to be repeated. We celebrate our freedom in the meal of broken bread and blood we share each Sunday, but we do not repeat his sacrifice. That was once, and for all – for all time, for all humanity, for all creation.
Lent is not a time to wallow in our sin and regret; it is a time to sharpen our focus on how we live in the freedom from fear Christ has won for us. How will we respond to this gift, sealed by a covenant in which God makes all the promises, and all the guarantees?
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