“The Lord God took Abram outside and said,

‘Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.

Just so,’ he added, ‘shall your descendants be.’

Abram put his faith in the LORD,

who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.

He then said to him,

‘I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans

to give you this land as a possession.’

‘O Lord GOD,’ he asked,

‘how am I to know that I shall possess it?’

He answered him,

‘Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat,

a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.’

Abram brought him all these, split them in two,

and placed each half opposite the other;

but the birds he did not cut up…

When the sun had set and it was dark,

there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch,

which passed between those pieces.

It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram,

saying: ‘To your descendants I give this land,

from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates’”

In the first reading from Genesis, quoted above, we see that God establishes a covenant with Abram (later Abraham). God working in history to bring salvation to his people, what we call salvation history, can be understood in one way as a story of covenants. A covenant is more than just a contractual agreement between two parties with rights and obligations. A covenant actually establishes a new relationship in which the parties make a total gift of self to the other, a total commitment, and is often accompanied by a covenantal sign, as we see above. In this case, it is the sacrifice of animals and a smoking fire pot and flaming torch passing between the pieces. A covenant demands of both parties fidelity, exclusivity, and fulfillment of promises. In the Bible, there are seven covenants between God and human beings.

It is beyond the scope here to go into any depth about these covenants, but they are the Adamic Covenant between God and Adam and Eve, the Noahic Covenant between God and Noah, his family, and all creation, the Abrahamic Covenant between God and Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, the Mosaic Covenant between God and his people he has led out of slavery, the Davidic Covenant between God and King David and the Nation of Israel with the promise of a king forever, the Prophetic Covenant between God and his people in exile and under foreign rule with the promise of a messiah, and the New Covenant in Jesus’s blood. God has always been faithful. It is of note, with the exception of the New Covenant, that each of these was broken within the first generation, some much sooner, on the part of humanity. One simply has to think of Moses coming down the mountain with the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments only to find the people worshiping a golden calf. 

The New Covenant, however, is different. Jesus, as God made man, sits on both sides of the covenant relationship. As one of us, Jesus perfectly fulfills the covenant on the part of humanity. He offers himself on the cross completely to his Father in love. Humanity, in Jesus, does not break the covenant, but fulfills it. United with Jesus, we are heirs to the promise eternal life. In the Eucharist, we are in communion with Jesus, body, blood, soul, and divinity, his sacrifice made present on our altar. Whatever our individual failures, our covenant is renewed at each mass in Jesus as we are united with him. It is the covenantal sign of our salvation in Christ.