Friday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Today's passages highlight for me the importance of establishing a relationship and attachment to Jesus Christ. That attachment in turn leads us directly toward God because Jesus mediates that relationship.

Initially, the verse that stood out for me in today's reading from the Letter to the Hebrews (8:6-13) was: "[They] did not stand by my covenant and I ignored them, says the Lord." The author is quoting from the prophet Jeremiah. God's people did not uphold my covenant and so I (God) did not uphold my end of the bargain either. This is a rather despairing note to me – the idea that God would ignore people, any people. Some people read passages like this and say that therefore we do not need to consider the Old Testament much, because it is an account of the Old Covenant. But note, the quotation from the Old Testament does not end with the Lord ignoring them, but rather with Jeremiah proclaiming that God will "put my laws in their minds", write the laws in their hearts, and that all people shall know God. The Old Testament proclaims the New Covenant just as much as the New Testament does.

What is that New Covenant? In verse six, the letter writer says that Jesus, our high priest, is the mediator of a better covenant. In the Old Covenant, humans did not quite relate so well to God – awesome and powerful but also strange and utterly unlike us. In the New Covenant, though, Jesus who is God-made-flesh mediates our relationship with God. Now we have a direct way into God's own life. This new priesthood of Jesus allows us the possibility to be closer to God than we have ever been before – because Jesus is human, and because through Jesus, God meets us in even ordinary substances like bread, wine, and water.

As baptized Catholics, we note this new priesthood of Jesus in at least two particular ways. First, we are invited to become attached to Jesus' own life to the point that we become part of Jesus' priesthood. When we are baptized, we become part of the "priesthood of all believers", devoting and offering ourselves to God in personal ways.

We read about the other form of priesthood in today's Gospel (Mark 3:13-19) when Jesus calls the twelve apostles. Jesus was not like the modern day Hollywood star – he did not call the Twelve merely in order to have groupies. He calls the Twelve for the specific purpose of preaching and having authority over demons. They also become the ones who represent the community as a whole. Thus, the ordained priest represents the devotion and offering of the entire Christian community. The Christian community involves Christ, his Church as the Body of Christ and the Church's worship of God are represented in the ordained priest, who offers the Eucharist and the other sacraments. Those are not personal acts of devotion on the part of the ordained priest (though a priest surely also has personal acts of devotion.) A priest is ordained not for himself but for the whole people of God.

God has established a new covenant with us and made us priests in the priesthood of all believers. How is the Way, Jesus, coming to us today? What is he asking us to do?

- Jana Bennett