Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

"The Lord Remembers His Covenant Forever."
 
'Covenant vs. contract' has been on my mind these days. My husband Jim and I are in the final weeks of a ministry of accompaniment with an engaged couple, one month to go now before they will pledge their futures to each other on an afternoon in May. I feel such tenderness for them -- and a spirit of protection, too. Who knows what is ahead? Will the vows they make be sufficient for the journey? What a sign of hope they are -- their willingness to risk a life of witnessing to love as a sacramental sign of of God's covenantal love for us. 
 
The courage to yoke lives, faith, fortunes, and futures to each other is even more poignant against the backdrop of our friends of a certain age, with wedding vows 50-plus years in the rear view mirror, forced to look very starkly at the 'in sickness and in health' clause in their marriage covenant. Arranging at-home care when one can find it, making endless doctors' appointments, circumscribing a life to what is physically possible for one's spouse -- this is a vow in action. (Contrast this with a promotional piece from a Bed and Breakfast we saw recently: "We do elopements, minimonies, microweddings, barn weddings, and commitment ceremonies." Sign a marriage contract, two witnesses required, and off you go! What is a minimony, by the way?) 
 
Our Gospel reading today finds Jesus in his continuing, strident, back-and-forth debate with Jewish authorities on what covenantal love looks like. What does it mean to bear the moniker 'Son of Abraham', 'Daughter of Abraham'? What new thing is afoot? Can it be of God? If so, how can the bedrock, unchangeable Covenant still stand? I ponder this aware of how carefully we must probe these readings in John with their anti-Semitic undertones, thinking of my Jewish friends who are some of the most faith-filled, generous, and kind people we know. We hear the reading from Genesis and the covenant with Abraham and are reminded of what is at stake here: God pledges to Abraham that he will be a father of a host of nations, where kings will arise. The land of Canaan will be given as a permanent possession. And the final covenant promise, "You will be my people, and I will be your God." The Psalm response we pray today, "The Lord remembers his covenant forever," would have been proclaimed with joy in the synagogues. What a treasure this Covenant is; what a blessing. Is it any wonder that the response of the authorities was one of a fierce protection of its own?  
 
In his Gospel, John says that it was written 'that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name." (John 20:31). We do believe. The takeaway for us may be a new sense of gratitude for our Christian way of being in the world -- gratitude for the gift of faith in seeing Jesus, the great 'I Am', as the fullest expression of that covenantal love and God's call, 'blessed to be a blessing' -- a covenant newly sealed for us with Good Friday death and Easter Sunday resurrected joy. Another Lenten to-do, perhaps: culling out any smugness and arrogance, any prejudice or pride that stops us from seeing the new things that God is about in our own day and time. How might we have closed ourselves off to even dreaming of a new way, a new possibility? How might we receive the covenantal love of our God and transform it to a blessing for another today?