A HANDOUT THAT SEEKS TO EXPLORE THE LINKS BETWEEN EACH COVENANT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE NATURE OF THE CHURCH AS FAMILY OF GOD. The work of Scott Hahn is used in this exploration.
GOD’S COVENANT RELATIONSHIP WITH US
HOW DOES THE CHURCH FIT INTO THE SCHEME OF THINGS?
Each Covenant God has made has been His way of fathering His Family.
Covenant with Adam - a marriage
We can first speak of a covenant with Adam. Adam's name is not only the name of an individual, the founding father of the human race, but it's also the Hebrew word for humanity. So Adam is that name of the father and of the entire human family, the covenant, from which all of the others in the Old Testament spring. We can think of the first covenant with Adam as the marriage covenant. "He created man, male and female he created them, and he blessed them and bid them be fruitful."
Covenant with Noah - a household
Now, when a covenant is made with Noah, it's made with Noah who is married, but he also has three sons who are also married. Together they form in Hebrew what would be known as a "bethob" or a household or a family. So our second pact will move from one holy Catholic marriage to one holy Catholic family.
Covenant with Abraham - a tribe
The third covenant, centuries and centuries later, is with the patriarch Abraham or Abram, as he was known then, initially, before God changes his name. There, Abraham was a chieftain over a tribal household that God was willing to identify as his own and administer it through the covenant. The third covenant with Abraham is made with the chieftain who, in a sense, leads and rules over, what you would call in Hebrew, "mishbahah", or a tribe.
(God's family now has moved from a marriage to become a household, to become a tribe made up of many households and many, many marriages)
Covenant with Moses - a national family
This rendered the twelve tribes into a national family (Then Abraham had a son Isaac, and Isaac had a son named Jacob and Jacob had twelve sons, who all in a sense fathered large families which became the twelve tribes of Israel, which under Moses became a national covenant).
At Mt. Sinai after the Exodus and the Passover, God established a covenant with Moses and Israel to make them his people. When the twelve tribes of Israel are covenanted to God at Mt. Sinai under Moses, there you have a national family, one national family of God, made up of twelve tribes, hundreds of households and presumably thousands of marriages.
God, through these covenants is trying to reunify this dis-unified human family we know as the human race
Covenant with David - a national royal family
Israel established as a national kingdom family. The nation of Israel was granted by God a kind of power and prominence that was not just any old nation's possession. When you become a kingdom, that means you rule over other nations. You make them vassals or colonies or what-have-you. That's what God does when he establishes a covenant with David.
Covenant by Christ with the world - Catholic (Universal) Heavenly Royal family to include all nations, Jews and Gentiles
Jesus Christ comes, he doesn't abolish and annihilate the Old Testament but completes it and he perfects it. How? By taking what was in David's time a national kingdom, by taking that national kingdom and making it an international kingdom. The Greek word for international is "catholic" and that catholic kingdom which is not political or military but rather spiritual, ecclesiastical, and sacramental is what we know as the one, holy, Catholic or worldwide Church, the family of God, the Communion of Saints. Humanity has a corporate destiny: to become the one, unified family of God. The Catholic Church is the sacramental organism, the sacramental family by which this will be accomplished supernaturally.
So important because what is it that unites family members? Flesh and blood and a common name. So what is it that unites us in the Catholic family? The name we received when we were baptized and reborn into the Catholic Church. We were baptized "in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." The Trinity is the eternal and original family. We've got a Father and a Son and those aren't our names that we threw onto the inscrutable, unknowable God. Those are the names that God himself has revealed to us so that we might know what God is in himself, a family -- a Father, a Son and Spirit whose name we receive when we are reborn and adopted and brought into God's family in baptism.
hen in the Eucharist that family bond is perfected and strengthened because there we receive the flesh and blood of the founding Father of this new family, this new covenant, Christ, the second Adam. Paul calls him the second Adam because in his own flesh and blood he has formed a new human race, a new human family that he feeds, nurtures and expands through the Eucharist. When we receive Eucharistic Communion, do we look upon that as:
Why is it a royal/priestly family?
At our Baptism we are born again and are made His people, given the opportunity to be PRIEST, (offer Sacrifice and worship) PROPHET, (live Jesus’ teachings) and KING (Containing the spiritual power to overcome all evil within self and the world as you strive for peace and justice).
WHAT DOES THIS WORLDWIDE FAMILY LOOK LIKE?
"It would be like an extended family that covers the whole world, with different father figures at every level appointed by God to administer his love and his law to his children."
The covenant family is the overarching principal or master idea of the Catholic Faith and it can be seen in the human figures and customs of our Church family. It explains Mary as our mother, the Pope (and each individual priest and bishop) as our 'father', the saints as our brothers and sisters and the feast days as anniversaries and birthdays.
Covenant is not a contract but a sacred family bond between God and his people.