By Fr. Jeremy Miller, O.P.

It has always struck me that the most uninteresting part of the Bible is the Book of Chronicles. I do not intend any irreverence to God’s inspired word but reading through the long lists of tribal names and cultic classification is sheer dogged plowing. But like all desert experiences, whether of reading or of life, there comes suddenly and unexpectedly the oasis.

If you can thumb through your Bible before coming to Mass this weekend, take a look at II Chronicles, Chap. 36, from verse 14 on, at the very end of the Book. For those with older Bibles, it is call II Paralipomena. What a painful scene is described! For their sins against the covenant with God, the Jews are leveled. The young, the old, men, women, children, are slain within the Temple confines itself. Then the Temple and the city walls are reduced to sheer rubble by the Chaldeans. It is an “oasis” only from the dulling lists of names in Chronicles, but the change of description to this painful scene is no place of refreshment.

For seventy years says the Prophet Jeremiah, my namesake, the survivors are to languish in numbed exile, without affirmation, with the sign of God’s presence to them (the Temple) in dusty ruins. I think the closest experience we can imagine to this is the breakdown of a marriage covenant in divorce. What a numbing experience this is. How little we, as Catholics, go out to the divorced members of our parishes to understand their pain, their dashed hopes, their feelings of personal failure when the recriminations against a spouse are later turned against self and one struggles for feelings of self-worth. At the very time when the divorced most need affirming support, they are often left in isolation to ponder the pain of a broken covenant alone.

The signs of the former covenant lie in ruins. An empty house. The absence of father or mother from the day-to-day life of the children. Financial security stretched or threatened. Sexual affection cut off. A life in exile in a world so couple oriented. This is the numbing and painful living -- out in personal life of the “broken covenant” described in II Chronicles. The Jews as a community were painfully leveled and exiled.

Let me extend the broken covenant story into the other two Sunday readings and then return to the expressions in our personal lives. “When we were dead in sin,” Paul writes in the second reading this Sunday. How easily we read over that if we have not had the experience of deadening broken covenants, of lonely exile, of aimless directions. Do we feel what being cut off from a covenant partner means? Can we imagine being exiled from God, not from His doing but from our stupid affirmations of self against a covenanting partner? Where do we turn to escape our numbing exile and hear a word of affirmation and see a sign of the covenant again, a Temple as it were, standing there as an enduring commitment to us? And He is there, speaking a word of affirmation out of His pain to ours. The sign standing there for us overcomes our numbness precisely because it is so numbing. “If the Son of Man be lifted up...whoever believes in Him will not remain dead but have life (again).” That enigma challenges us again, the one I have drawn out week after week in these meditations. The Cross is never far removed from the Covenant. The Covenant does not seem to take root without the Cross anchoring it.

We all bring our personal experiences to this ever present linking of Covenant and Cross. And we all bring an exile experience when our covenants hang in jeopardy. It is on that note I end and address my experiences to you and ask you to address yours to your God and to those other covenant partners who enter your life.

How do we handle our own “seventy years of exile?” I speak in metaphor, for the terms of our exile and their lengths are mostly self-imposed. How long do we remain exiled from God, from the other? There are two questions here, both crucial, both primary.

How badly do I want to remain in covenant? In an age so characterized by forgetfulness of God, and not merely denial of God, we may not get by this very first question. In a marriage, it would translate as, “we have to fight for this marriage.” The second question is harder still. “Am I willing to be lifted up?” Again I speak in metaphor, but for those who experience covenant and desire its blessings, the meaning is painfully clear. Am I willing to deny myself and embrace the Cross of what it means to be a sinful, weak, selfish, and proud covenant partner? Am I willing to affirm the other by saying I love you as much as I am able and with all my faults?

The One lifted up on the Cross said, “I love you with all your faults and in the face of your sins.” Can we this Lent come to some terms with our covenant sins and say, to God and to others in our lives, “I love you with all of my faults and in spite of my faults.” If the Covenant is worthwhile, it is worth being lifted up for.