A New Covenant

Maundy Thursday, April 9, 2009
Rev. Amy Sens
Scriptures: Exodus 24:3-8, Mark 14:12-26

Every year at my job during this time of year, I interview bunches of people who are interested in being volunteers as their full-time job for a year, and then my coworkers and I decide together where each person we’ve let in should go – which jobs, which cities, across the country. So, yesterday, I found out about 12 of the 19 or 20 people who will be coming to my cities next year. It’s a very exciting moment, even though most of these people are just names on a page, or sometimes voices over the phone for me. I begin to wonder, based on the barest of biographical data, what they will be like. Will they be kind and generous, or hard to please? Will they be good workers, or cause trouble at their jobs? Will they get along in community, or will they make their housemates’ lives difficult?

It’s a very exciting moment, thinking ahead to the new year that starts in August. And yet, it contains within it the seeds of disappointment, because I know that some of my volunteers will not be easy to work with. Don't get me wrong - they're all really great, but they're human, too. They will have trials and disappointments, and disagree, and make trouble. That’s part of the deal. That's why I have a job in the first place. It's to be expected.

So it’s amazing to me to see how Jesus handles setting up a whole new way of life with his disciples in our gospel reading. This moment is a very dramatic one in the lives of Jesus and his disciples. They have come into Jerusalem, the big city, to bring Jesus’ big and wonderful message of the kingdom – the realm – of God. There has been success and excitement, yes, in the entry into Jerusalem, in Jesus’ intellectual sparring with the chief priests, the temple authorities, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scholars, and other important people. And yet, there is danger in the air, too. Jesus, looking ahead, knows this is the last time he’ll be with his disciples, and what he chooses to do is to make a new covenant with them out of his own body and blood.

What Jesus’ covenant is modeled on, we hear in our story from Exodus, when Moses takes an animal and kills it to seal the people’s covenant with God. Moses presents the people with all the rules and regulations they are to obey, and they agree. “Everything that you have said, we will do,” they promise. It is a time of a new beginning, a new promise, and Moses will go with them to lead them into it.


And yet, when Jesus stands up to make a new covenant, he takes the place of the sacrificial animal, and he does it knowing full well that one of the very people he is eating with that night will be the one to betray him to that death. This is a new and bright beginning, but within it are the seeds of bitterness, suffering and death. A strange new covenant, indeed.

And yet, that is how God is with us. God doesn’t wait until we’re perfect to reach out to us and love us. God doesn’t wait until we have withstood every test, overcome every obstacle, and accomplished every lofty goal before being bound to us. Jesus covenants with Judas, even as he sits at the table, betrayal in his heart.

What I leave with in this story is that even though the new covenant Jesus begins on this night, bravely, with his own sweat and tears, with his own body, blood and soul, even though that covenant is already compromised, even before it is begun, in spite of all this, Jesus knows that God is at work and will bring about the new kingdom – the realm of God. “Truly,” Jesus declares, “truly I tell you, I will not drink the fruit of the vine again until I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” Thanks be to God, Amen.