Day: March 21, 2021

“For this cause he is the Mediator of the new covenant”

For centuries in the Western Churches, the Passion Sunday Gospel was from John 8. 46-59. That passage highlighted two things: the identity of Jesus with the revelation of God to Moses as “I am Who I am” (Ex. 3.14); and the rejection of Jesus by the Jews. “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they took up stones to throw at him” (Jn. 8. 58,59). That conclusion of the chapter complements its beginning in the story of the woman taken in adultery which is a critique and an attack on Jesus through her. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Jn. 8. 7). The images speak to the deeper realities of human sin. We are meant to see ourselves in the beginning and the end as those who condemn others and reject God; in short, as sinners. That ancient Gospel reading also complemented the Epistle reading from Hebrews to highlight the nature of Christ as the Mediator of the new covenant. As Mediator he is both God and Man.

The thematic idea that lies at the heart of the Passion is atonement, the idea, as Paul puts it in 2 Cor. 5, “that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (vs. 19). That idea continues in the Gospel reading which is the Matthean  account of the Gospel from Luke read on Quinquagesima Sunday about going up to Jerusalem. With Matthew the focus is on two things: our knowing and unknowing about what we truly seek and desire, on the one hand, and the sacrificial service of Christ who has come “not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mt. 20. 29), on the other hand.

Atonement belongs to the rich seam of reflection about human redemption. It concerns the relation of the divine and the human, of God and the world, of divine justice and mercy, of human sin and evil. Thus it belongs to the core elements of theological thinking. Passion Sunday inaugurates deep Lent which is our attempt to ponder the mystery of human redemption as divine love, the love which seeks the reconciliation of all things to God. But this can only even begin to make sense only if we take seriously the idea of sin which is really about taking seriously human agency and divine truth. The awareness of our separation from God belongs to a deeper reflection about the reality of the human experience in a world of uncertainty and confusion and of our own hearts in disarray. The radical nature of this separation is the infinity of sin, if I may put it this way. Sin creates an infinite barrier between us and God and between ourselves, our world and one another. By infinite I mean a chasm, an abyss, which we make and cannot unmake, a negative infinite.

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