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The Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

We’ve all heard of the Old and New Testaments, but what does the word “testament” mean? It comes from the Latin word testamentum, which is the Latin term for “covenant.” So, what we really mean is the Old and New Covenants. This is important because it helps to shed light on today’s lectionary readings taken from Deuteronomy 11, Psalm 31, Romans 3, & Matthew 7.

In the first reading, Moses says, “I set before you here, this day, a blessing and a curse: a blessing for obeying the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on your today; a curse if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord, your God” (Dt 11:26-28). A covenant always has terms by which to keep the covenant. If one keeps the covenant, he is blessed by God. If he should fail, he receives the covenant curses or judgments. The terms of this Old Covenant are what we call the “Mosaic Law” because this law was given by God to Israel through the mediator of Moses.

The problem with the Old Covenant is that Israel fell into idolatry over and over again, which brought Israel under the curses of the covenant, which are given in great detail in the Book of Deuteronomy. So, Israel had to be delivered from the Old Covenant altogether. In the second reading, St. Paul exclaims God’s mercy:

“All have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood. For we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:23-25).

Here, St. Paul is responding to the Jew who believes he is righteous before God because he’s an ethnic Jew and has the Mosaic Law. This paragraph is a part of a much larger argument, wherein St. Paul shows how the Jew is actually much more culpable (guilty) than the Gentile (a non-Jew) because he has been given the Law, yet he sins against it. This places the Jew in a conundrum. He’s subject to the covenant curses and needs a redeemer, a deliverer… a savior.

In baptism, the Jew dies with Christ and therefore is delivered from the Old Covenant. He rises to new life as baptism brings the Jew into the New Covenant (See Romans 7:1-6). This doesn’t leave the Gentile in the clear, however, because the Gentile has the moral law of God written on his heart, and when he sins against his conscience, he too is guilty and in need of Jesus.

In the Gospel, Jesus emphasizes the importance of faithfulness, which is the way one keeps covenant with God in the New Covenant. If one is unfaithful he will receive the covenant curse of eternal hell (See Matthew 7:21-27). Faithfulness is required of us by the New Covenant, and if we respond faithfully to God’s initiative, his grace, the blessing of heaven awaits us.