By Fr. Jeremy Miller, O.P.

I am writing this on a sunny weekend, the first sun-drenched weekend North Georgia has had in months. Just as the mood of the weather can change from somber rain to shiny warmth, so the mood of the Covenant and Cross can change from last week’s tones of broken Covenant and exile to affirming closeness.

Jeremiah comes into our hearing again, not in the tones of last week’s gloomy prediction of seventy years of exiled isolation, but with the “good news” that a loving covenant partner, God, will reclaim and remake His Covenant by writing His message, not on tablets of stone, but deeply in our hearts. “I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

Something resonates deeply within our hearts when we hear a story. Good news always becomes better news when it can be captured in a story. This week I would like to tell you three short stories, in the first two of which I was recently involved, and the third is the story of stories.

Last Sunday I was invited to a home by a family that I count special and one for whom I sense I am special. In this deep bond between us, I think they sensed I needed some lifting up from burdens I was bearing, and they were right. We sat around their dinner table and it came time for a very lovely moment. The father took a book of biblical stories, adapted its language to children, and read the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Ray, Chris, Dorothea and Monica followed his words closely. Then the parents questioned them on what this story meant, what God was telling them through the story, and what it meant for Abraham to believe God with his whole heart and soul.

After that was finished, we then cut out magazine pictures of people and situations to pray for and wrote out little prayers which were placed in a prayer jug to be used during the week. It struck me powerfully how close a religious covenant this family enjoyed, how much they brought into a family circle that was heard in very adult language earlier that morning. The power for me was who was speaking this “good news.” The parents were speaking to their children in way many parents do not or cannot, and they were placing important words of God deeply in their hearts.

My second story is also a message of “good news,” spoken by one who cared, and shared with me to remind me that One who really matters cares, a God who loves me and you. I will share with you the content of the story. It came originally from Bishop Topel, an extraordinary man of God, which he wrote in the Lent of 1976 and I share with you in the Lent of 1979.

“The greatest human joy in this world, bar none, is knowing and loving someone worth knowing and loving, and being loved in return. Everyone who has experienced such human love knows this is true. The more worthy the other is of our love, the greater our love and joy. How great then will be the joy that will be ours with God in heaven. We will know him as we cannot know him now. We will love him as we cannot love him now. We will know and love him beyond what we can imagine. Forever!” Again it depends on who is speaking to us if it is to be really good news.

The third story is spoken to us by the most extraordinary person who has ever lived, one who is so much a man of God that we can truly not pause to make a difference between them. His story is also one of good news, and since it too talks of what a covenant ought to be about, he brings to it the once-again enigma that his story of the covenant cannot be told without his cross. You will hear his story this Sunday, a story at once embarrassing (for us) and affirming, painful yet loving, reminding us of the hurts we cause our covenants and at the same time a healing word.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a grain...yet what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ Father, glorify your name...I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” The story of course is the Cross, not as an isolated exile and broken covenant, but of good news, of glorification. The good news is spoken by the Father, by one who really cares for the Son. Its message is one of standing-by, being with, ready to glorify, and in some enigma we cannot fathom, the Cross cannot be bypassed in this “hour” from which Jesus by a very human and understandable desire wished to be saved.

In all these cases, who speaks the story is so important. A parent, a friend, the Father. We hear not only words of the story but also the person of the speaker.

I would hope your own hearing of these stories would suggest to you, without my drawing out all the implications, the directions your own meditations should take. Perhaps I might end with one question to you. To whom, recently, have you spoken a story whose good news has penetrated to the heart and lifted up? Whose mood have you changed to one of uplift and closeness?