WEEK 05 04 – Year I
A Covenant Relationship of Intimate Love
(Gen 17:3-9; Ps 105; Jn 8:51-59)
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Robert was a very popular but alcoholic priest. Unfortunately, he ended up in the hospital after having an alcohol-related accident. There he confided with a friend who had come to visit him that alcohol wasn’t his problem – it was his solution. His real problem was loneliness.
The readings today invite us to live within an intimate, life-giving covenant relationship with God and one another that can eliminate loneliness from our lives.
The yearning for intimacy is perhaps the most common human phenomena, whether it is recognized or not. A young couple asked a missionary newly assigned to their community if he was “going to grow old with them.” That same priest later participated in a sabbatical program. There, during a workshop on journaling, he heard another participant, a religious sister, express the same yearning for intimacy that he had. They got together to talk, shared their stories and began a life-long, life-giving intimate relationship as soul mates, sharing their feelings and life events with complete transparency within appropriate boundaries.
It just so happens that our God is also yearning for intimacy, a life-giving intimacy with us, God’s own people. That desire for intimacy with us by God takes the form of a covenant relationship. Through history, God has always established covenant relationships with God’s people, beginning with a couple (Adam and Eve), then a family (Noah), and a tribe (Abraham) then a nation (Moses).
With David, the covenant relationship became one of unconditional love. David’s experience of that love through his repentance of grave sins and reception of God’s forgiveness transformed David into the one true king that Israel ever had, and explains why Jesus would call himself Son of David (and never Son of Moses), because King David prefigured the covenant relationship that found its fulfillment in Jesus.
That is why in the gospel Jesus speaks of himself as equal to the Father, and uses the high Christology expression Ego Eimi (I Am) twenty-four times in John’s Gospel. God now yearns for an intimate relationship with us, through our intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, the Son of God and third person of the Trinity or Divine Dance of life-giving, eternal outpouring of love.
How can we best live within this intimate covenant relationship with our God and one another? There are some clues in the readings. One is to try to walk with God, one day at a time, relying on God’s strength to live God’s way for that day. That means turning to God in prayer for the Spirit each morning, the lesson that Peter learned walking on the water. Peter hung on to Jesus walking back to the boat, after Jesus picked him up out of the water.
Another is to keep God’s word, to immerse one’s self in the scriptures, to read and pray with the Word of God everyday. The best way to do that would be to practice Lectio Divina, daily spending time just listening to the Spirit within us and soaking up God’s unconditional love. Perhaps the best way, however, would be to seek out a soul mate, a friend who can be trusted totally, and with whom one can share everything without fear. That will banish any loneliness from life.
Lastly, living covenant love involves living the commandments Jesus gave us: love God with our whole being, love others as we love ourselves, love one another as Jesus has loved us, and above all, love our enemies by forgiving them from the heart.
Two particular priests who are soul mates walk around the medicine wheel when they meet. They share how they are doing physically, mentally, emotionally and relationally (our relationship with God, others, themselves and all of God’s creation). Then they actually dare to share how they are handling their human sexuality – a topic basic to our being created in the image and likeness of God, but so often shunned by most of us. That experience of intimacy in the Lord leads them to experience serenity, joy and a feeling of mellowness, perhaps best described by Julien of Norwich: “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of being will be well.”
The Eucharist is our greatest sign of this new covenant established by the Father through the sacrificial unconditional love of Jesus on the Cross. It makes that love present for us through Word and Sacrament.
So let us remember to live within an intimate covenant relationship with God and with one another, soaking up God’s love for us, and sharing that love with all others.
