As we ministers from CTBB gathered last month, we asked: what shall we do in Lent this year? And Sue Hobley said, ‘At St Mark's we're going to think about covenant.' Now I'm not too proud to borrow an excellent idea from a colleague - and I don't feel too bad about borrowing this one, for the whole idea of covenant has been important in our tradition of Reformed Christianity. So as at the beginning of March we survey the Lenten landscape, let's unpack that a bit.
Covenant is one of those off-putting theological words. We vaguely feel we should know what they mean, but in ordinary life they don't arise much. Until the arrival of Gift Aid we used to set up covenants to get tax back on charitable donations, but that can't be the same, can it?
In fact, it is the same root meaning. A covenant is simply an agreement between two parties: if I do this, you'll do that. If we declared a certain amount of money was going to a charity, and we were UK taxpayers, the Government agreed to refund some of our taxes to the charity. But covenants were in operation thousands of years ago.
In the Bible we find many covenants between God and people. After the flood, God made a covenant with Noah that never again would such a disaster befall him, his descendants or life on earth. When God called Abraham to leave home and family, promising him innumerable descendants, that covenant was sealed by circumcision. When the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, God remembered that covenant with Abraham and freed them; the Law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai as a renewed agreement between God and the whole people, with conditions: if they were to keep the land God had promised them, they must worship only God and observe all God's laws.
Of course, the people didn't keep God's covenant: they didn't worship God alone; they didn't care for vulnerable members of society. So prophets like Hosea and Jeremiah foresaw the time when God would make a new covenant with people, not written on tablets of stone, but inscribed in our hearts. Then no leader or expert would need to tell people about their covenant agreement with God, for it would be a living part of everyone's experience.
Christians believe that new covenant was signed between Jesus and his followers in his heart's blood, as he showed us through his dying and living the power of God's love for us and for all. We are invited to bring it to mind every time we eat bread and drink wine together. But otherwise, what (you might wonder) has the idea of covenant to do with us in St Andrew's today?
Every time we bring a child of Christian parents for baptism, we declare that God's covenant with us is already in force before we are aware of it; that God's love always precedes our recognition of it. And that doesn't just apply to babies. God always makes the first move in our relationship; we cannot make God love us by doing good things, but we don't need to! And one more thing: the relationship between God and each of us never depends on anyone else's say-so. As Jeremiah predicted, ‘None of them will have to teach their fellow-citizen to know the Lord, because all will know me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive their sins and I will no longer remember their wrongs. I, the Lord, have spoken.' You see why I like the idea of covenant?