On the New Covenant
Q. What is the New Covenant?
A. The New Covenant is the new relationship with God given by Jesus Christ, the Messiah, to the apostles; and, through them, to all who believe in him.
Having wound our way through the Ten Commandments, Sin and Redemption, and God the Son, we return again to the concept of covenant—specifically the New Covenant. We have already dealt at length with the general notion of covenants and with the Old Covenant, but it may be helpful to summarize some of the key points found in those discussions. Covenants in general can be thought of as agreements between two parties, sometimes conditional and therefore very much like contemporary contracts or treaties and sometimes unconditional, such that they remain in force even if one party fails to follow through with its obligations. There are many covenants, both conditional and unconditional, recorded in the Old Testament (which, as we pointed out, is actually just another way of saying “Old Covenant”), but the Catechism sees the Old Covenant primarily through a prophetic lens, as the inauguration of a called-out-of-the-world, set-apart community, a chosen people (Israel) bearing witness to God and the hope of God’s universal reign, serving as the vehicle through which God will eventually gather all the peoples of the world to Godself.
This brings us to the New Covenant, which stands as the covenant through which the promise and purpose of Israel is fulfilled and all the peoples of the world may become God’s people. It is in and through Jesus, the Messiah and Son of God, and especially through his suffering and sacrificial death, that this Covenant is inaugurated. This close identification of the New Covenant and Christ’s death and passion is seen in Jesus’s identification of the cup of wine at the Last Supper with “the new covenant in [his] blood” or the “blood of the covenant” (1 Corinthians 11:25, Matthew 26:27-28, Mark 14:23-24, Luke 17:20). The establishment of this New Covenant through Christ’s sacrificial death is recalled every time we celebrate the Eucharist and shows the integral connection between this sacrament and our being sustained in the (New) Covenant community that is the church.
One question that naturally arises is how exactly Christ’s sacrificial death inaugurates the New Covenant. The author of Hebrews in chapters 8-10 offers the deepest reflection on this, being the place with the most extensive and explicit engagement with the New Covenant in the Bible. Here the idea is that the offering of blood was necessary for reconciliation between God and humanity, but the offerings made by priests under the Old Covenant can only have temporary effect, needing to be repeated daily and yearly. The sacrifice of Christ, the perfect one, made not with the blood of some other animal, but with his own blood, offers, in the words of eucharistic prayer 1 in Rite I “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” His perfection, as God’s very self offering God’s self, allows his sacrifice not only to stand for all time but to cover the sins of all peoples. This points, then, to the fact that this New Covenant is deeply intertwined with the question of how humans are reconciled with God, for to be reconciled with God is to be made part of the people of God, to be brought into the household of God, to be made God’s children (and, in the Roman legal context, rightly to be made God’s sons and heirs, both men and women) by adoption. How we might begin to understand the mechanics of this event for reconciliation I’ve talked about in the posts on suffering and death, adoption, and redemption, among other places. It’s important, though, to have enough humility before the mystery of the atonement and see the multiple images used throughout the New Testament to get at Christ’s work in his death, as I’ve written about in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s engagement with atonement theory.
Another point that may cross one’s mind, then, is why the New Covenant is specifically rooted in Christ’s death. Certainly one of the collects during the Easter Vigil expands the scope to both Christ’s death and resurrection, saying that God “established the new covenant of reconciliation” “in the Paschal mystery” (BCP 290). Granted, theologically and liturgically, as seen in the unity of the Triduum liturgies, the death and resurrection of Jesus really make up one single event, but I think there is room for saying that in a way the whole sweep of the incarnation represents a kind of part of Christ’s passion. Philippians 2:7-8 connects the death on the cross to the whole self-emptying of the divine prerogative and glory that was the incarnation of the Son. So, once can see the whole sweep of Christ’s life as in some way part of the inauguration of the New Covenant. Nonetheless we should be careful about seeking to downplay the centrality of Christ’s death in this—Christ himself, and Paul and the author of Hebrews following him, place the suffering death at the unambiguous center of establishing this New Covenant.
We have touched on the first part of this answer—the establishing of a new relationship through Jesus Christ. The other half, that this comes through the apostles to all who believe in him is relatively straight forward. The community of the New Covenant is the church, and the church is constituted through faithfulness to Christ’s teaching and the proper administration of the sacraments, both of which things are guarded and handed on by the successors to the apostles. What is significant here, though, is that this pushes toward a robustly ecclesial and communal Christianity. What Christ brings and brings us into is not and individual relationship with God, communicated to us by the bare words of the Bible, but rather a living community with the living Word of God at its center. Certainly each of us are individually reconciled to God, but we are reconciled to God as individuals in and for communal life under God’s reign.
Another point that needs to be addressed before going deeper into the implications of the New Covenant is how rarely this phrase appears in the New Testament. The Old Testament precedent for the coming of a new covenant is Jeremiah 31:31-34, a passage dealt with at length in Hebrews 8. However, outside of the institution narratives in the synoptic Gospels and 1 Corinthians and Hebrews, this phrase appears almost nowhere else in the New Testament. However, the infrequency of explicit references to the phrase itself does not mean that the concept of a New Covenant is unimportant in Scripture. As Paul Avis points out, the concept underlying the New Covenant—a new people called out of the world through the reconciling power of Christ’s death and resurrection—abounds in the New Testament (The Vocation of Anglicanism, 76-7).
Finally, as was brought up in the discussion of the Old Covenant, one cannot properly address the assertion of either an old or new covenant within Christianity without commenting on the church’s ugly history of anti-Judaism. The concept of the church as the people of God has served as the grounds of horrendous anti-Jewish violence throughout its history, potentially seeing Israel as the withered husk from which the church emerged and the Judaism that continued alongside the church as a group needing to be repressed or even eradicated for their particularly obstinate refusal to see Christ as messiah. Such repression and violence must always be condemned in the strongest terms, and fidelity to Christ requires us to hold biblical Israel and Judaism in the highest esteem precisely because of how integral they are to his identity.
And yet we walk a tightrope. It would be too easy to move to the opposite extreme and claim that the concept of a New Covenant or of Christ as the fulfillment of the law does nothing to the Old other than, perhaps, offering a parallel way of salvation for Gentiles. Christianity and contemporary Judaism make different and incompatible claims about a number of things, most especially about the person and work of Jesus Christ. Fidelity to the witness of the New Testament and respect for the integrity of contemporary Judaism demand that we not seek to minimize these very real differences for what amounts to avoiding uncomfortable conversations. Ultimately, Fr. Sam Cripps, my colleague here in the Diocese of Wisconsin, probably offers the best and most succinct method of making this tightrope walk here:
God has not cast off “blood” Israel. He has not forgotten his promise to Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. He will not be proved faithless, even amid faithlessness (Rom 11:1-2). But the promise made to Abraham has been fulfilled in Jesus and his children, who are as many as the stars (Gen. 15:5; 22:17; 26:4), are both Jew and Greek (Rom. 4:17-18)… “Blood” Israel has not been cast off, but like the Gentiles has been transfigured, with the eyes of all of us looking toward the eschaton, toward a fuller consummation. This does not mean we cease our work of witness to all nations. Our mission is visible unity. Yet, until that day, we hold onto our hope that our unity is knit together through and by Christ.
Gentiles have, as foretold in Zechariah 8:23, grabbed hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and said, “Let us go with you because we have heard that God is with you.” Christians, whether Jew or Greek, do the same. We recognize our salvation as coming from the root of Jesse. Our salvation is from Israel, our salvation is Jewish, yet the medium for that salvation is now almost fully Gentilic. It is a mystical cooperation, a union, that will exist until the eschaton, when cooperation will be visible, and God’s people will fully be made one. (Read the full essay here and the essay that sets it up here)
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