Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. When it comes to family or friends, we probably have some sort of red line that, if crossed, would mean a break in that relationship. For me, loyalty and honesty are two virtues that I insist on in order to maintain a friendship. If I find out a person has lied to me, or has been disloyal, I find it very difficult to continue that friendship. It may seem fine at the surface for a little while, but I tend to disengage that friendship until the friendship dies from lack of contact.
Thanks be to God that our God does not operate in the same way! God remains faithful to the covenant He entered upon, even when we don’t hold up our end of the bargain. And, in fact, God outdoes Himself by not only upholding a covenant that we break time and time again, but even giving us a better covenant than we had at the beginning.
St. Paul mentions in our epistle how God made a covenant with Abraham and to his seed. What was that covenant? In Genesis, chapter 15, God promised to be Abraham’s God and to give Abraham the land of Canaan, and to multiply Abraham’s descendants so that they would be as numerous as the stars in the sky. God’s People were then to simply follow God and His will. To enact this covenant, God asked Abraham to cut a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, and a three-year-old ram in two, and then to sacrifice a turtledove and a young pigeons as well. This action, sociologists tell us, was to signify the penalty if either party broke their side of the bargain: what happened to the animals (death) would happen to the one who broke the covenant. As another sign, God commanded Abraham to be circumcised and to circumcise all the male descendants as a sign that they belonged to God.
The first few generations did ok: Isaac, Jacob, and his twelve sons (though the twelve sons did try to kill their brother, but instead sold him into slavery into Egypt, which ended up saving the day). But then the people, now enslaved in Egypt themselves, forgot the Lord.
But God remains faithful to His covenant, and leads them to the Promised Land, even though they complain regularly that the food isn’t good, or that Moses has too much power, or that they’re going to die of thirst. Time and time again, the people do not live up to their side of the covenant. Even at the door of the Promised Land, the people lose faith that God can grant them entry and push out foreign armies, even though they had just destroyed a couple armies of pagan kingdoms, and so they have to wander in the desert for 40 more years.
But God remains faithful to His covenant, and gives them the Promised Land, displacing kingdoms and entire peoples. But even then, the Chosen People follow false gods, then get into trouble, then are oppressed, then cry out to God. And God saves them time and time again.
God sends prophets to remind them to follow the law, to care for the poor and the orphans, to live justly and walk humbly with God. But they always end up rejecting God and not living according to the covenant. And while God does allow the consequences of their disobedience and idolatry to fall on them (like the exile and dispersion of the ten northern tribes and the destruction of the temple and the exile into Babylon of the two southern tribes), He remains faithful to His covenant, and sends a Messiah. While the people expect an earthly Messiah to free them from Roman oppression, God provides a true Messiah who frees them from slavery to sin and death and opens up heaven. God even takes upon Himself the punishment for infidelity to the covenant, though He was the only one who had remained faithful to the covenant, and did not deserve death.
All of this is to say that God remains faithful in the midst of our infidelity. God fulfills His promise even when we don’t. And He does so to draw us back to Himself. He lets the rain fall on the good and the bad, and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust in order to woo us back to Him, our Lover, so that we can enjoy the close relationship that He desires for us.
As we look at the Gospel: only one leper returns to give thanks, and He’s outside this covenant. But God doesn’t give the other nine leprosy again. They are healed, even though they do not give thanks to God for the miracle they received.
At one point, though, our ability to turn back to God will end. When we die, we no longer have a chance to return to the covenant that Christ made with us in Holy Baptism. If we, in the end, reject that covenant, then we will face the punishment of breaking the covenant: eternal death in Hell. But if we turn back to God, if after the disease of sin has affected us and we ask God to heal us and we return to Him to thank Him for that healing, then we will receive the rewards of the covenant that we did not deserve, strictly speaking, but that God will grant to us as a merciful and loving Father: residence not simply in an earthly Promised Land, but eternal life in the true Promised Land of heaven. May God’s patience with us allow us time to convert and do our best to be faithful to the covenant sealed in the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit are God, for ever and ever. Amen.
