The Fifth Sunday of Lent – March 10, 2024
Today’s first reading continues our Lenten journey of restoration. The prophet Jeremiah’s writing focuses mostly on Judah’s faithlessness and exile. But this part, called the “Book of Comfort” (chapters 30–33), describes what awaits God’s people once they are brought home.
To those who broke the Mosaic covenant, God did not simply say, “Just do better.” Instead, God did something entirely different! What is new is not the covenant’s “content”—God still desired total faithfulness. What has changed is how humanity enters that covenant.
In Christ, what is restored is not an impersonal set of rules but an intimate relationship with the One who has always loved and longed for us.
No longer will we need external forces, such as fear or acquired knowledge, to draw us close to God, as if God required from us holiness or sacred expertise to be called God’s own. Instead, God said, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people,” no matter what, for in the heart of every person, God has planted the desire for the infinite that will always lead them home.
Through Jesus and the cross, God has established a new covenant with us. In Jesus’s obedience, all humankind has been given a new heart—a divine heart—so that our desire for God would be a mere echo of God’s desire for us. In Christ, what is restored is not an impersonal set of rules but an intimate relationship with the One who has always loved and longed for us.
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