It’s an interesting thing when March 17th falls on a Sunday: because not even the feast of a patron saint, even a saint so great at St. Patrick, can displace the Sunday of Lent in terms of the readings and prayers used at Mass this weekend.  So we’re still in purple today, not in green and gold.  But that’s all right.  I don’t think St. Patrick would mind too much, because everything in his life was about Christ.  Living for Christ.  Bringing others to Christ.  St. Patrick is a wonderful example of God’s grace dwelling in a human soul in an intense relationship of love and mercy.  Through the prophet Jeremiah, God promised a new covenant, and not just a new covenant, a new kind of covenant.  And God explains, “It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers…because they broke my covenant, and I had to show myself their master.”  The people couldn’t remain faithful because they kept forgetting the most basic truth of them all: there is a God, and I’m not him.  And God kept having to back up and remind them, again and again.  You’re not God.  He kept having to spend all his “energy,” as it were, on that basic truth: you’re not God, okay?!  “But this is the covenant that I will make,” says the Lord, speaking of what will happen in the person of Jesus Christ: “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts.”  And here’s the difference.  Here’s what makes this new covenant, this final covenant, utterly different: in this new covenant, the laws, the rituals, the relationships: they no longer come from the outside.  The covenant is not written on tablets or in signs from heaven.  The covenant now comes from within.  We say that we have become temples of the Holy Spirit in baptism.  The life of God is inside of us now.  The covenant, the relationship isn’t defined by externals.  The new and eternal covenant in Christ is made real and personal within each and every soul that is washed in the Blood of the Lamb by Holy Baptism.   

The Lord then explains through Jeremiah what this means: “No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord.  All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.”  In this new covenant, every part of our lives is guided and defined by this relationship, by this love of God dwelling deep within our hearts.  It affects every part of us.  And this is what we see in the lives of the saints, like St. Patrick: one who really lived this relationship, who really deeply internalized his identity as a beloved child of God and lived out the consequences.  The covenant is now a person with whom we have a real, living relationship.  In Christ, God and man have the closest relationship possible.  They are together in his person.  He is true God and true man: and so, God and his people are permanently, definitively, and perfectly united forever and ever.  Christ says at the end of today’s Gospel, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”  He was indeed lifted up, high on the Cross.  And in doing so, he has indeed drawn all people to himself and given us all a role to play in his ongoing mission.  Again, we see this in the lives of the saints.  Contrary to the caricature, St. Patrick is not some cheeky little cartoon.  He is a fierce and inspiring defender and promoter of the Catholic Faith; he cast out the snakes from Ireland, both literally and figuratively.  He converted that entire island to the Christian Faith: he was a shining example of God’s love and mercy for the land of Ireland, and beyond.  Think of how God used St. Patrick to draw all people to himself: Patrick’s influence reaches to the corners of the world: in the churches and shrines and monasteries he built to the glory of God; in the introduction of the Faith by him and his successors in so many parts of the world; right down to the Faith brought by Patrick’s spiritual sons and daughters to this little hill right here in South Nashville.  The covenant, at work in Patrick’s heart, is why we’re here.  That’s what it means for God to place his spirit within us, and for him to draw all people to himself.  We will be part of his great mission to draw all people into this relationship with him, through the mystery of his Holy Cross.  May Saint Patrick, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the saints, inspire us to receive this grace of Christ into our hearts, and to accept the task he gives each one of us to help spread his love and mercy here on this earth.