These last weeks, we’ve moved steadily through the history of God forming relationships with his people: we’ve seen the Almighty stretching forth from heaven to create “sacred family bonds” with his people: in the dramatic incident of Noah and the ark, in the faithfulness and trust shown by Abraham, in the law given to Moses and the People, and even in the times when the people strayed away.  And now we come to the heart of it all, the promise a new and different kind of covenant.  Through the prophet Jeremiah, God promises a new covenant, and not just another covenant like those we’ve already talked about.  It will not only be a new covenant, it will be a new kind of covenant.  And God explains why.  He says, “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.  “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 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, is not something outside of us.  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 Covenant Lamb in Holy Baptism.   The Lord then says 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.”  When we are part of this new and eternal covenant in Christ, we still learn things about God, sure.  We try to understand the gift we’ve been given in our Faith, certainly.  But something more fundamental is going on.  He has actually changed something within us, at the deepest possible level.  He has put the covenant inside our hearts.  His life, the life of God, is no longer something that we just grasp at, that we try to hang on to through shadows and symbols.  The life of God is in us.  We don’t just know about him.  We now know him. 

His covenant can never fail now, because he’s made the glorious, reckless decision to share his own life with us.  He gave it to us first in baptism; he deepens it in confirmation; he gives it to us anew in confession when we reject it by our sins; he nourishes and cultivates it in the Holy Eucharist.  The covenant is no longer just a verbal or written contract.  The covenant is now a person.  The person of Our Lord.  The Old Testament covenants were about forming a relationship between God and man.  But now, 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, definitely, and perfectly united forever and ever.  When we are baptized into Christ, we enter into that union as well. 

And Christ not only connects us to God, perfectly and permanently.  He also saves us, so that we can enjoy that relationship forever, even when we pass from this life: by his Cross, he even makes it possible for the gates of heaven to be open for us, for us to enter and remain for all eternity in the sacred presence of Almighty God himself.  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.  And in doing so, he has indeed drawn all people to himself.