Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent

I will maintain my covenant with you

and your descendants after you
throughout the ages as an everlasting pact,
to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

By invoking the memory of Abraham, Jesus teaches us – even as he challenges his opponents – that he is the fulfillment of the old covenant. And he is the New Covenant. Christians of every race have received the faith of Abraham, and rightly call him “the father of faith,” only through Jesus. We do not know him apart from Jesus. 

God the Father now says to Jesus what had been said to Abraham:

I will render you exceedingly fertile;
I will make nations of you;
kings shall stem from you.
I will maintain my covenant with you
and your descendants after you
throughout the ages as an everlasting pact,
to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

In today’s gospel Jesus opponents seem to disown their own faith when they ask:

Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? 
Or the prophets, who died?

Only in the most literal sense can anyone say that Abraham and the prophets are dead. They are most certainly alive to anyone who believes. But this is precisely the crisis of Saint John’s Gospel. There is no middle ground between believing in Jesus and damnation. If you do not believe in Jesus then Abraham and the prophets are dead to you.

We do not, of course, consider the Jews a condemned race. Christians and Catholics should be nothing but grateful for their fidelity and their gift to us. But Lent demands that we set aside the interesting speculations of religious anthropology and even the polite conversations of inter-religious dialog. We must now rejoin the Church that follows Jesus to Jerusalem, Calvary and Easter. 

In this place we hear daily his agonized question: Will you also turn away? Reverence for other people and their beliefs does not mean that we qualify our own response to him. With Saint Peter and all the Church we say: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God."