The Covenant and the Cross

Readings: Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16, Mark 8:31-38, Secrets of Heaven #1038 (see below)
See also on Youtube

So here we are, dear friends, in the Second Sunday in Lent. As we are prompted by the season to pause to take a hard look at our practices, our habits, our viewpoints, as we consider renewing our commitment to change and discipleship…our texts invite us to consider several questions: what does it really mean to take up our cross?  What does it mean to follow Jesus?  What does this have to do with covenant?

Since we already spent some time with the Mark text a couple of weeks ago, in regard to the transfiguration, lets begin with the Genesis text.

Our Old Testament text puts us right in the middle of the story of Abraham.  Abraham is considered the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Though in the Bible, God had previously been active in the lives of the first humans Adam and Eve, and Noah, and others, Abraham is special because of the covenant that God makes with him.  God made a specific commitment to Abraham and all Abraham’s descendants, to be with them and to be their God. Now this is not the first time God has made promises in the book of Genesis. Creation was a kind of promise, with the Garden of Eden being an implicit commitment to human flourishing. And a little bit later, God makes a promise of non-violence to Noah after the flood.  But God’s covenant with Abraham is much broader in scope.  God promises to make Abraham’s descendants into a great nation.  “I will make your name great” says the Lord, “and you will be a blessing…all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

Our text today is actually the third iteration of this covenant to Abraham.  The first time occurs in chapter 12, when God calls on Abraham (then named Abram) to leave everything he has known and travel to a new land.  The second time occurs in chapter 15, and God gets much more specific. By then, Abram and his wife Sarai are getting very old, and they are childless. There seems no way they could be parents to a nation. Yet, God promises them a son of their own blood.

But, many years go by, and Sarai does not become pregnant. Eventually, though, God appears to Abram again and reiterates the covenant for a third time, as we heard today, this time making sure to include Sarai, not as an extension of Abram but in her own right.  Both Abram and Sarai receive new names; they become Abraham and Sarah.  And this time, Sarah does indeed becomes pregnant, much to their incredulity, and delivers a son, Isaac.

There is so much to be explored in the story of Abraham and Sarah, but for the purposes of Lent, I want to focus on the spiritual meaning of covenant.  A covenant is an agreement between parties to do or not do something specified.  Now, this is slightly different from a promise.  A promise can be delivered in one sided way, but a covenant cannot.  It is an agreement between two parties, an explicit partnership. What makes this third covenant between God and Abraham special is that God declared it to be everlasting.  God was always going to show up with integrity to this covenant.  The quality of the agreement was then put entirely in the hands of Abraham and his descendants.  They would the ones to determine if the covenant was fulfilled; God’s part was ensured.

In a Swedenborgian sense, all the talk about covenant, marriage, and partnership in scripture represents at a deeper level, the impulse that God has toward conjunction with us.  Abraham was the first participant in a new kind of relationship with God, and so Swedenborg connects Abraham with Jesus, in a corresponding way, because Jesus, God’s experience in human form, was another reframing of God’s relationship with us. The origination of the covenant, and the reframing of the covenant, both in service of union between God and humanity. Jesus allowed God to come even closer to us, to fulfill that original covenant even more. 

Because, even though we were God’s creation, and beloved entirely from the very beginning, our necessary finite nature allowed for a self-created distance, as pictured by leaving the Garden of Eden. Or, imagine for example how we might float away from a dock on a lake if we give ourselves one mighty and petulant push.  The very separateness that allowed for our creation as autonomous beings, that allowed for our freedom, also allowed for an ever-increasing spiritual distance.  Now, God would never take away our freedom of choice.  So God decided to show up in a new way to the covenant.  God decided to connect God’s infinite essence to our humanness through Jesus. So, imagine now that God has extended a pool noodle, or a life preserver on a rope; space and freedom remain for us but we, the swimmer, will no longer be forever drifting further and further away.  God comes with us, in our shared humanity, wherever we go.

So, in a deep sense, a covenant indicates not only partnership but union, or an impulse toward union. We already know what God was willing to do for the covenant, and we are told about that in the gospels.  So what about us?

This brings us to the reading from Mark. Mark Twain said once, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”  (1) Our reading in Mark doesn’t require much exegesis. It is pretty darn clear.  And that is part of makes it so poignant and challenging.  It seems like Jesus is asking a lot of us.  Whatever happened to my yoke is easy and my burden light? Even when we interpret “the cross” metaphorically it still seems like a pretty hard word.  It must have seemed even more challenging to original hearers when crucifixion was a contemporary practice.  What is Jesus really asking us to do, to give up?  It is our very nature in cling to our lives, our desires, our wants.  It is probably our deepest human impulse.  So we resist. We resist often, and we resist hard.

But Jesus was not asking more than what God was asking of Godself.  We know that, even on the day before the cross, Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane praying that he should not have die, for Jesus was not human in an abstract or partial way.  Jesus was human even down to those deepest survival impulses that we all share. We all wish that suffering and pain should pass us by.  But Jesus knew that the covenant, God’s impulse towards conjunction, was too important. Humanity was floating away, and Jesus was throwing us the life preserver. Not forcing us into synchronized swimming if we didn’t want to, but keeping the option open. Showing up, tethering God to our human experience in order to maintain our ability to reciprocate should we wish to. Because a covenant is above all, about partnership between two parties. When there is no longer potential for partnership, the covenant must end. And God had declared the covenant to be everlasting, so God protected our potential to say yes, even when we are not ready or able to.  Jesus was simply one more manifestation of God showing up to the covenant even when humanity did not, or could not, even when *we* do not or cannot.

In the context of covenant then, what does taking up our cross and following Jesus mean?  How is taking up our cross to be understood differently when it is part of a covenant, a sign of our agreement to partnership? Because we might be tempted to understand taking up our cross as a test…to see whether we are tough enough or loyal enough or selfless enough to be a part of the kingdom.  And while cross-bearing can and does create toughness, loyalty and selflessness, I think rather it is more accurate to say that taking up our crosses leads us to connection.  Pema Chodron, a buddhist monk, writes:

“Only to the degree that we’ve gotten to know our personal pain, only to the degree that we’ve related with pain at all, will we be fearless enough, brave enough, and enough of a warrior to be willing to feel the pain of others.  To that degree we will be able to take on the pain of others because we will have discovered that their pain and our own pain are not different.”(2)

In willingly taking up our own pain, our own crosses, we can see in it that which has the potential to separate us from other people, and that which has the potential to connect us. We can see which parts of our pain are tangled up with ego and fear and trauma, which parts prevent us from saying yes to our covenants with God and with other people. We can see which parts, all parts really, are universally human experiences, and use these as an entrance to empathy, compassion, and solidarity.

Abram and Sarai had plenty of baggage, plenty of trouble showing up to the covenant, just like we all do.  But God was patient, and Abram and Sarai persevered and eventually their connection with God transformed their identities. Their names, Abraham and Sarah, came to reflect that.  In our Lenten reflections this week, we are being invited to contemplate how our challenges might transform us, how having a practice of fiercely showing up for our life and everything in it, can be connective.  

We are asked to take up our cross, because trying to follow Jesus while we pretending our crosses aren’t there is untenable.  We will be weighted down and we won’t know why. We are asked to take up our cross because everyone has a cross, and we are in it together.  We are asked to take up our cross because it leads to connection, and connection, with God and each other, is the whole purpose of the covenant.

Amen.

1. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-mark-831-38-4
2. Start Where You Are, by Pema Chodron

Readings:

Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16

1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty ; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. 2 Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.” 3 Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4 “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram ; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.” 
15 God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. 16 I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”


Mark 8:31-38

31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” 34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”


Secrets of Heaven 1038

…The purpose of any covenant is conjunction, that is to say, its purpose is that people may live together in friendship or in love. This also is why marriage is called a covenant. The Lord's conjunction with humankind does not exist except in love and charity, for the Lord is love itself and mercy. He wills to save everyone and by His mighty power to draw them towards heaven, that is, towards Himself. From this anyone may know and conclude that it is impossible for anybody to be joined to the Lord except by means of that which He Himself is, that is, except by acting like Him, or becoming one with Him - that is to say, by loving the Lord in return, and loving the neighbor as oneself. In this way alone is conjunction brought about; this constitutes the very essence of a covenant. When conjunction results from this, it quite plainly follows that the Lord is present. The Lord is indeed present with each individual, but that presence is closer or more remote, all depending on how near the person is to love or distant from it.