Robert Barron - Drinking the Blood of Christ
Peace be with you. Friends, now on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, things are intensifying as these marvelous, spiritually packed readings come to a kind of climax. We're preparing for Holy Week, and so we're dealing with some of the most sacred texts in the great tradition. Reading one, and I want to spend some time with this, is from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, and the passage here is one of the most pivotal in the Old Testament. Easy to remember, by the way. It's Jeremiah 31: 31 and then following. But remember that. Get your Bibles out, Jeremiah 31:31. Here's the text: "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah". Covenant language.
It was St. Irenaeus long ago who said the best way to read the Old Testament is in terms of the covenants that God makes with his people. Go back to a kind of covenant with Adam, a covenant with Noah, covenant with Abraham, a covenant with Moses, a covenant with David. What are these covenants? Not contracts so much, or like an exchange of goods, but more like a pledge of life. The basic form of covenant in the Old Testament is this: "I will be your God and you will be my people". A covenant means a sort of sharing of life. It's a pledge of life, one to the other. God's saying, "I will be loyal and faithful to you". Israel is saying, "Lord, we will be loyal and faithful to you". It's the heart of the Israelite religion, in many ways, is the fact and the struggle of the covenant because what do we know now from even the most cursory reading of the Old Testament? Very often, these covenants were violated. Hence, "I will make a new covenant".
See, what Jeremiah is envisioning here is the day when in a definitive way, God will establish this relationship permanently with his people Israel. Now, here's something very important to get when talking about covenants. They are almost invariably ratified in the Old Testament by blood. So think of Noah when God makes the covenant, and the rainbow in the sky is the sign of it, but it's sealed by a blood sacrifice that Noah makes. Think of Abraham when he makes his great covenant with the Lord. The Lord tells him to slice these various animals in two, remember that dramatic scene from the book of Genesis, and Abraham passes through the severed sections and then the light of a torch symbolizing God's presence. They say the idea was, the person was saying, "May this happen to me", what's happened to these animals, "may this happen to me if I violate this covenant". But they were sealed in blood.
Think of Moses when the Ten Commandments come and the Sinai Covenant, how's it sealed? Well, this great sacrifice of animals. And part of it is splashed on the altar. The other part is splashed upon the people. What's the idea? It's the exchange of blood. Blood meaning life. Israel, as it were, shedding its blood on God. God shedding his blood on Israel. Think of the old becoming blood brothers. If you cut the wrists and then you blended the blood of two people. That's the idea. See, so much more than a contract, which is sort of a legal contrivance, a legal arrangement. A covenant is a blood-bond between God and his holy people. And then think, the great covenant with David, which is sealed by the thousands upon thousands of sacrifices in the Jerusalem temple.
What was that but the pouring out of blood? Same idea. The one making the sacrifice saying, "May this happen to me", the death of this animal, "may this happen to me if I break this bond, and the blood poured out symbolizes my life blood, Lord, poured out for you". The blood then being sprinkled upon the people. Go back now to the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Israelite liturgical calendar, and the High Priest that day alone going into the Holy of Holies, and he would place the sins of Israel on the scapegoat and send them out into the desert. But the other animal he would slaughter, sprinkle the blood around the Holy of Holies, and then, carrying the rest in a bowl, he'd come out and sprinkle it upon the people. Same idea. The people saying, "Lord, we pledge our life to you". That's the sprinkling around the Holy of Holies. But then as the priest came out bearing the blood and then sprinkling upon the people, that's Yahweh, the God of Israel, pouring out his life upon his chosen people.
All right. That's the wonderful, rich, strange to us, but marvelous Old Testament theology of covenant. Blood sacrifice. Now, as I say, one of the sad marks of the Old Testament story is that the covenant, though ratified again and again, God making this agreement again and again with his people, it's typically honored in the breach. It's typically violated. So the prophet Jeremiah, who knew about all the covenants I've just mentioned, knew about that whole history of Israel, he's standing on the terrible brink of destruction because the Babylonians are about to come to destroy the temple of Jerusalem. But Jeremiah knows the long history of covenant and of blood sacrifice and of the attempt by God, see, to bring his life and his people's lives together. And he says, again, Jeremiah 31: 31, "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel".
So, all the old ones, he knew about those. Something new is coming. Now, what will be the mark of it? Listen as he goes on. "It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers, but this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel in those days. I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people". Okay. So the law, God's commands, I'll be your God, you'll be my people, and here's the way I want you to live. The law in a way was external to the people. It was out there and they were called upon to abide by it. What's he saying here, the prophet Jeremiah? The days are coming when I'm going to make a covenant where the law is not just outside of you, but the law is inside of you, that this sharing of blood will become so intense that God and his people will be melded together, God's law in their hearts.
Okay. The Church wants us to meditate upon Jeremiah 31:31 because, now fast-forward about six centuries from the time of Jeremiah, and we come to a Passover supper hosted by this young rabbi and his twelve disciples. Passover supper. Over the Passover bread, he says, "This is my body given for you". And then, over that second cup, he says this: "This is the chalice of my blood, the blood," listen now, "of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins". Nobody hearing him at that table that night would've missed the reference. These were intensely biblical people. They wouldn't have missed the reference to Jeremiah 31:31. What's he talking about? The new covenant that Jeremiah predicts, this ultimate sharing of blood between God and his holy people.
So Jesus, "This is the chalice of my blood, of the new and eternal covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins," and he's offering this blood for them to drink. Moses indeed splashed the blood on the people. The High Priest at Yom Kippur indeed came out and splashed the blood symbolically on the people. What's happening here? God himself is offering his life blood for his people to drink, to take into themselves, to become their life. What Jesus of Nazareth is saying here is Jeremiah 31: 31 has been fulfilled. And watch: Where does the law of God go now as the Church drinks in the blood of Christ? It's not out there any more, written on stone tablets. It's not just there as a moral challenge. Jesus is himself the law of God, right? Jesus himself is the Torah made flesh. Therefore, when we drink his blood, God is writing his law upon our hearts.
Everything anticipated, in other words, in the Old Testament history of covenant. Everything that Jeremiah foresaw is fulfilled at the Last Supper, is fulfilled with the pouring out of the blood of Christ. You know, I've said before, the whole purpose of covenant, law, temple, prophecy, everything was to bring divinity and humanity together, right? That was the whole purpose of it. Who is Jesus? He is in his person the coming together of divinity and humanity. He's the covenant in person. Therefore, watch: When we eat his body and drink his blood, the covenant comes inside of us, the law written on our hearts. The last step, we go from Jeremiah to the Last Supper now to every time you attend the Mass. "Oh, the Mass. It's a nice time to get together, celebrate our community, a nice time to hear the Word of God, to sing together," and yeah, great, I agree with all those things. That's not the heart of it though.
What's the heart of the Mass? Behold the Lamb of God. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb. And then, one by one, people come forward to eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus. The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. It will not be like the old covenant written on stone. Rather, I will write my law in their hearts. It comes true, everybody, every single time you come forward and you eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus. The Lord is writing his law, his covenant, upon your hearts. That's why, do you want to be happy? Do you want to find the point and purpose of life? Come to Jesus and stay with him. Eat his body and drink his blood. Bring his law literally inside your body. In that, God's great revelation comes to its fulfillment. And God bless you.