Philip Potter: 'Covenant' (berith, Heb., diatheke, Gk.) is such a key word that the Bible is itself called the Old and New Covenants ('Testament' being the Latin word for 'Covenant'). Covenants in the ancient Near East were a means by which relationships were entered into by unrelated persons or peoples on a basis of a community of interests and purpose and in order to maintain those interests and fulfil the purpose. Hittite records of the second millennium before Christ show that covenants were a normal feature, of international relations.
Behind this practice of making covenants was the situation of a world divided into rival empires and nations. These nations were constantly watching each other and were often at war with each other. They were all seeking, to quote Genesis 11:4, 'to make a name for themselves,' and so found themselves in conflict with one another. The threat of chaos was keenly felt. Hence the feverish efforts of kings and chieftains to make covenants with each other in order to preserve and extend their national life and to maintain or establish cosmos, order. This was the recognition that without certain conditions of mutual trust and support man cannot fulfil his function of multiplying and living in peace and order. It was the attempt of man to be his brother's keeper for the purpose of mutual preservation. This is a principle which operates to this day in the relations and alliances between nations.
The Bible uses this principle of the covenant to describe the relations between God and man and between God and the people, Israel, old and new. In doing so, the Bible transforms the very nature of covenant as conceived then and now. In the first place, in antiquity, covenants were never made between a god and people. This was no doubt because god and people were so identified that a covenant was unnecessary. But in the Bible God is always the true subject of covenants and it is he who lays down the conditions of the covenant and not some powerful ruler for weaker rulers or chiefs; nor is it after some kind of negotiation with the People. Moreover, his conditions are based on his free action as Creator and Deliverer and on his character as holy, righteous and merciful, and not on political or economic expediency, as was the case, with covenants among the surrounding nations. And the aim of the covenants with God is that the benefits promised should be freely shared by all peoples, and not confined to certain allies. Thus covenant in the Bible is directly related to God's purpose in creating mankind for unity. In the covenant, God in his divine freedom wills to take up the work of creation and to bring it to fulfillment through man.
In Genesis 12:1-3; 17:1-14, we see God entering into a covenant with man in Abraham. Genesis 3 and 4 present the picture of man submitting himself to creation in the symbol of the serpent in an attempt to become independent of God. Turning himself away from God, not being before him responding to his call and his purpose, man becomes irresponsible - Adam can no longer respond to God with and for Eve, and Eve can no longer respond for herself as a being made for communion with God, but acknowledges that creation has gained dominion over her. And this irresponsibility, this loss of responsibility to God and for each other ends in destruction with Cain's murder of Abel and in the saying: 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Made free for God and his fellow men and free from nature, man loses his freedom from nature and so is no longer free for God and for man.
Creation and man go astray and are, nearly destroyed in the Flood, but for the faithfulness of Noah. God makes a covenant with him that creation would not be destroyed (Gen. 9:8-17). Whatever man's behavior might be, 'while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease' (Gen. 8:22). But the problem of man and of nations remains, as Genesis 11 shows. Indeed, in our atomic age with our great inventions and our astonishing skills the problem is still man himself. In Abraham we have one with whom God begins the process of uniting men and nations together again.
God calls this representative man, Abraham, out of his particular nation, culture and religion in Ur of the Chaldees and sends him out into another nation, culture and religion, Canaan, to create a quite new community within it: 'Go ... to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation.' (Gen. 12:1-2). In doing this, God wills to remove any of natural ties of kinship or culture or commerce or religion as the basis of this renewal of man and society. Something radically new is about to happen. Abraham's very foreignness in Canaan represents an incursion from outside, a definite break with the past, and yet a recognition that God's purposes have to be carried out within history and so within cultures and nations. This covenant emphasizes Abraham's dependence on the God who calls and promises. This sense of the free, sovereign, self-initiating will of God is later emphasized the in the calling of the slave people Israel (Deut. 7:6-8).
John's prologue is relevant here:
To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to
become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will
of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:12-
13).
Similarly, the Epistle to the Hebrews, speaking of Abraham,
declares:
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign
land.... For he looked forward to the city which has foundations,
whose builder and maker is God (Heb. 11:9-10)
This surely has implications for our discussions on the relation between faith and culture, and on the call and place of the missionary today. There is a sense in which all those who in faith have accepted this covenant relationship are foreigners even in their own land. This is the scandal of the missionary, covenant people of God. Their primary allegiance is to the Creator and Covenant God whose will is supreme for every nation or culture. In fact, the true aims and interests of nation or culture can only be discerned and realized from the perspective of God's will and purpose.
A new order of man in society, then, is about to be created through this covenant with Abraham, for which God promises his blessing. In Genesis 1, God blesses the living creatures and man: 'Be fruitful and multiply.' So he does in Genesis 17:2,6. Now the term, to bless, barak, means to communicate one's strength, one's vitality, one's self to another, to enable another to achieve his aims, to give him the capacity to be vigorous, effective - in brief, to be with him. Blessing belongs to the relations between persons. On the other hand, to curse, qillel and 'arar in Hebrew, means to withdraw one's support from another, to leave him alone or desert him, so that he becomes weak, directionless, and so loses weight, cracks up and is destroyed. To paraphrase, then, Genesis 12:2-3: 'I will make you a powerful and extensive community. I will be with you and will support and strengthen you, so that you can support and strengthen others. I will strengthen those who acknowledge add accept your strength, and he who refuses to have fellowship with you, who turns away from you, who treats you with contempt, I will abandon him and let him perish. Through you all the families of the earth will find their true being and strength.' In a word: Through you I will fulfil the purpose man's creation.'
This blessing of God includes the whole of mankind organized in nations and cultures. God's covenant aims at fulfilling the nations' longing for order and a common life (Gen 17:5-6). Here again, we see that the covenant with Abraham is God's new action in establishing that unity of mankind which was foreshadowed in the creation of adam, man.
What then are the conditions for the fulfillment of this covenant promise? Genesis 17 gives two. Verse 1 says: 'Walk before me and be blameless'; and verse 10 enjoins: 'Every male among you shall be circumcised.' The first condition reminds us of Luther's definition of faith: Coram Deo, before God. He who lives before God, in a face-to-face relationship of faith and trust and humble dependence, is the true partner in the covenant. In Genesis 15:6 we have another expression of this pregnant phrase, 'Walk before me': 'And Abraham believed the Lord; and he reckoned it to him as righteousness.' The God of the covenant is the God who is present in his righteousness to bless. Man's true place as made in his image is to be constantly and single-mindedly before him. We derive our life and our way of life not from ourselves or from our culture, but from our just and merciful life-giver, God. But this we receive in order to participate in renewing and fulfilling our culture. Micah summed up the eighth-century prophets' teaching on the life of the covenant when he said:
He has showed you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice (Amos), and on love mercy (Hosea),
And to walk humbly with your God (Isaiah)? (Micah 6:8).
This brings the conditions of the Covenant as outlined briefly by the Priestly writer into line with the mom extended Book of the Covenant of Exodus 20-23 where just and merciful dealings with members of the covenant people are enjoined along with humble dependence an the covenant God alone.
This condition of trust and dependence is symbolized by circumcision, as an act of initiation into the covenant people. Circumcision was not peculiar to the Jews It was practiced by the Canaanites and Egyptians, but not by the Assyrians or Babylonians. It was (and is in many countries even today) the rite of initiation into society, into the duties of manhood by facilitating the ability to increase the population and thereby ensuring the continuance of the life of the tribe or nation. Thus in some fashion it represents the act by which a man can best obey the creation injunction: 'Be fruitful and multiply.' But it is significant to notice that the prophets had misgivings about this practice among the descendants of Abraham who seemed to have reduced circumcision to a mere kinship act. The fact that circumcision was a symbol of a wholehearted consecration to carry out God's will as contained in the Book of the Covenant (Ex. 20-23) tended to lost, particularly as Israel got more and more enmeshed in the culture of the surrounding nations. Under the influence of the prophets, therefore, we find a constant recall to the true significance of circumcision. Deuteronomy refers the covenant people back to the Book of the Covenant, and appeals to them to love and reverence God with all their heart: 'Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn' (10:16; see also 30:6). Jeremiah equates circumcision with obedience when he says of the people of Judah: 'Behold, their ears are uncircumcised, they cannot listen' (6:10), i.e., their ears closed to listening and therefore they are closed to obeying. He even goes as far as saying in 9:23-26 that God will punish both the circumcised Jews, and the uncircumcised nations because they have not practiced kindness, justice, and righteousness in the earth - and it is these qualities which constitute the heart of the covenant.
The drama of Israel's life was precisely its failure to maintain the life of the covenant - a fact which was the major preoccupation of the prophets, and especially of Jeremiah. The descendants of Abraham went through the institution of circumcision, but its central content, the event and the demands which lay behind it, the mighty saving work of God in redeeming his people from slavery, and his demands in the Book of the Covenant ratified by the outpouring of blood, the blood of the covenant (Ex. 24:3-8) - all this was ignored. Something radically new, then, must take place - a wholly new covenant. And this is what Jeremiah foresees in 31:31-34. Man's heart must be circumcised, his inner being be recreated.
At the beginning of the Book of the New Covenant we am reminded of the Old Covenant and its coming fulfillment. Jesus Christ is traced back as 'the son of Abraham'(Matt. 1:1). St. Luke also prefaces his own account of the revelation of the New Covenant by drawing attention to the covenant inaugurated through Abraham, in the Songs of Mary and Zechariah, usually called the Magnificat and the Benedictus; (Luke 1.46-55, 68-79). When the precursor John the Baptist arrives on the scene to prepare the way for the New Covenant in Christ he faithfully and forcefully represents the prophetic criticism of a kinship covenant through circumcision. He challenges the people to renewal of life through baptism.
You broad of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits that befit repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire (Luke 3:7-9).
It is interesting to note that the Baptist's deepest preoccupation is with the life of covenant, a life marked by the practice of justice and mercy and the affirmation and maintenance of life together, according to the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 20-23 (Lake 3:10-14).
So Christ comes as the Word made flesh, the Proper Man, he who has in fact existed in the eternity of his sonship with the Father before Abraham (John 8.58). He comes as the initiator of the New Covenant through his life offered up in sacrifice for all men. In his teaching and his whole ministry Jesus re-interpreted the life of the covenant people - he called his disciples together to share his blessing, not because they were at all worthy to be with him, but because he chose to do so. He taught them the true content of the covenant in the commandments to love God totally and to love their neighbor and one another. It was he himself who identified his sacrifice with 'the blood of the covenant':
'Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins' (Matt. 26:27-28).
In I Corinthians 11:23-29 St. Paul appeals to the Corinthian Church to remember that they are part of the new covenant people of God. This he does to a community of people who had heard the call of faith through the preaching of Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:26- 2:5). They had come out of a most varied community of different nationalities, races, classes and religions - indeed, Corinth was in every way representative of the human situation in all its variety and divisiveness. Through baptism, the Christian circumcision, they were brought into one Body and were all made to drink of the one creating Spirit (1 Cor. 12:13; cf. Gal. 3:27-29). The new covenant people also partook of the Body and Blood of Christ and so entered into the deepest communion with him (I Cor. 10:16-17). This communion in the Body of Christ means the closest communion with believers, however different they may be from each other in nationality, race, culture or social status. The Christian community, the covenant people of God, transcends all human frontiers. They proclaim to the world the essential unity of mankind.
When, therefore, Paul hears that a few privileged people are trying to establish a clique and have separate tables, because they feel superior to others and do not wish to associate in this most intimate meal with their less privileged brethren, he is most indignant:
What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to You? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not (1 Cor. 11:22).
The English theologian, Richard Hooker, commented on this: 'Christ could not permit that the temple should serve for a market-place, nor the apostle of Christ that the Church should be made an inn.' Hendrik Kramer used to express the same thought when he said: 'The Church is too often a hotel church rather than a family church as it should be! In a hotel or inn there are separate tables.' Church Father Chrysostom also commented: 'The Lord's Supper ought to be common. For the property of the master does not belong to one servant and non to another; it is common to them all.'
H. M. Gwatkin makes the following judgment:
'In the whole range of history there is no more striking contrast
than that of the Apostolic Churches with the heathenism around
them... . Within their limits they had solved, almost by the way,
the social problem which baffled Rome, and baffles Europe still.
They had lifted woman to her rightful place, restored the dignity
of labor, abolished beggary, and drawn the sting of slavery. The
secret of the revolution is that the selfishness of race and class
was forgotten in the Supper of the Lord, and a new basis for
society found in love of the visible image of God in men for whom
Christ died. (Early Church History I, 1909 p. 73.)
Paul, then, reminds the factions Corinthian church of the New Covenant in which they stand. He had in fact handed down to them, he shared with them, the offer of the Lord, made on the same night that he was handed over to death, when man, represented by Judas, isolated himself from him and rejected him to death (1 Cor. 11:23). The phrases 'handed down' and 'handed over' actually translate the same Greek word used by Paul here, paradidomi. The first sense evokes the blessing - Paul had offered the Corinthians the good news of the Lord's self-offering for and to men. The second sense indicates the cursing - Judas had rejected, cut himself off from his Lord and handed him to death: 'Cursed be every one who hangs on the tree' (Gal. 3.13; note that this verse occurs in a passage in which the promise to Abraham is recalled: v. 6-14). Thus, on the very night that man in Judas went out to betray him, our Lord did not separate himself from or reject man, but shared his life with him. Man may reject the covenant, but God through his grace remained and remains faithful in his Son.
'When he had given thanks' - eucharistesas - (v. 24). This word, from which we get Eucharist, has as its root the word charis, which means both 'grace' and 'thanks'. It calls attention to two realities. First, God's covenant with man is an act of his grace, his free gift on his own initiative and not because of any merits of man. By grace he created man in his own image. By grace he called out Abraham to be the vehicle of a new deal, a covenant with man for the fulfillment of his image in man. By grace he sent his own Son to become flesh and bring us his blessing, his life. Secondly, a man' response to this grace of God is to give thanks to God. God's grace received evokes man's grace. And this grace of man is the manifestation of the image of God, of the covenant - to offer himself freely. As God's grace is the offering of himself for man, so man's thanksgiving is the offer of himself to God for others. Therefore, in giving thanks, Jesus the incarnate grace of God offers to God man's proper response - himself. No one who can truly give thanks can be exclusive and excluding.
This thanksgiving which is his self-offering is symbolized by Jesus' action - He broke the bread in taken of his sacrificial offering to God and as a gift of his flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51). Even more, it is expressed in his declaration: 'This is my body which is for you' (v. 24). In these two words 'for you' is contained the whole meaning of God's covenant with man. God's action in creating and redeeming man shows that he is always 'for us'. As the Nicene Creed puts it: 'Who, for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate....' We have not understood our relations with God and with each other, as man made in God's image, unless we have learnt in the depth of our being to say, 'for you'. The Corinthians had failed to understand this and so were desecrating the Body of the Lord. They were companions of Judas and not of the Lord.
'Do this in remembrance of me.' This does not only mean: 'Go on participating in the Eucharist'; but even more: 'Go on offering up yourselves for each other and for the world as you say in deed and in attitude: "This is my body which is for you."' This central act of the Church's life has a direct missionary intention. In the consecration of creation in the bread and the wine we are consecrating ourselves to share the fruits of creation with our fellow men, as we are offering new life to men in the crucified and risen Lord.
This is also true of the cup, which is 'the cup of blessing' (1 Cor. 10:16). Paul here brings together the blessing in the covenant with Abraham, and the covenant in the blood made with Moses and the people of Israel (Ex. 24:8). To bless, we said earlier, means to share one's life, one's vitality with another. As often, then, as we drink this cup we am reaffirming our covenant vows in the circumcision of the heart cleansed and renewed by Christ's self-offering in sacrifice upon the cross, and we are pledging ourselves to share our life together for the life of the world (cf. Gal. 5:1-6, where physical circumcision is substituted by 'faith working through love', which is the determining center of the covenant).
Indeed, the whole act of Eucharist is a proclamation of the Lord's reconciling death until he comes to complete his creation (v. 26). St. Paul began this letter to the Corinthians by throwing down the challenge of the one sacrifice of Christ to the divided Corinthian church (I Cor. 1: 10-13, 30). Christ's undivided act of sacrifice to unite men in him is one which must be proclaimed and demonstrated until the end of history. A disunited church, a broken congregation, separate table, impair and make void the proclamation of the Gospel, and impede God's purpose through his covenant people to unite all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10, 22-23; 4:1-6).
In the Roman Empire covenants were considered by authorities to be acts of illegal secret societies. Already the Christian community was thus considered illegal. Any cliques or closed groups within the Church would indeed give the impression of secret societies and could be of on real value to Church and state alike. Paul was concerned that the Christian community should be an open example, indeed a proclamation to the Empire and to the world of a of a reconciled humanity. Hence his solemn warning in verses 27-29. He who fails to discern that he is a member of the covenant Body of Christ and that Christ's life courses through the vein's of every member, is rejecting Christ and so brings the terrible judgment of God upon him. Paul's warning is corroborated by Christ's picture of the judgment in Matt. 25:31-46.
Paul's words are significant for our discussion on the structure of the missionary congregation. The central structure of the congregation in the word and the sacraments of the covenant has revolutionary implications. It should turn upside down the natural tendencies of our members and of our institutions to be divisive and excluding, and should create a new outward-looking life within the community, which will in turn help to renew the various political and social structures in which we are set.
The Covenant, therefore, is God's way of bringing mankind back to the source of our life in him and into unity with each other, expressed in a common life. This he started in Abraham and revealed fully in Christ. In the Eucharist we are brought most deeply into communion with God and with each other. But in the Eucharist we are sent forth to invite men and women into the covenant through the thank-offering of ourselves. 'My body and blood are for you.' When we truly learnt to say that to God and to our fellow men, then we are truly part of the covenant missionary people of God.
This Bible Study was presented by Philip Potter to the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism, Mexico, 1963.
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