A reading from the book of Genesis.
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.
And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.
Year B: Second Week of Ordinary Time SUNDAY
First ReadingGenesis 9:1-17
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| Cardinal Jean Danielou S.J. |
Second Reading
Jean Cardinal Daniélou, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament, 78-80.83; Word in Season VII
Jean Cardinal Daniélou, Holy Pagans of the Old Testament, 78-80.83; Word in Season VII
The fidelity of the living God
It is in connection with Noah that the momentous notion of a
covenant appears for the first time in holy Scripture. The covenant is one of
the essential characteristics, the most characteristic quality perhaps, of the
God of the Bible. It signifies that God communicates certain good things to
mankind and that this is in the nature of an irrevocable settlement. Thus it
allows us to depend upon these benefits, not in virtue of any right we have to
them but by reason of God’s fidelity to his word.
The covenant made with Noah is connected with the cosmic
religion and bears essentially upon God's fidelity in the order of the world.
It is first of all a question of a covenant not with a particular people but
with humanity as a whole and even with the whole cosmos. By this covenant God
pledges himself not to destroy life upon the earth, whatever may be the sins
of the human race. God’s fidelity will be expressed particularly in the
regularity of the laws of the cosmos, in the recurrent seasons: All the days
of the earth seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and
day, shall not cease. This text is of prime importance. It
establishes the right to see in the recurrent seasons the revelation of the
fidelity of the living God. And this revelation, says Saint Paul, is given to
all people among whom God has not left himself without testimony, giving them
rain and fruitful seasons. This revelation constitutes the authentic basis of
the pagan religions for which the recurrent seasons are the foundations of
their worship.
By this covenant, God gives, as it were, an official
document which bears witness to his pledge for all the generations to come.
This document is the rainbow: as the paschal lamb is to be the memorial of the
Mosaic covenant, as the holy Eucharist is the sacrament of the new eternal
covenant replacing the ancient, so the rainbow is the memorial and sacred sign
of the cosmic covenant which persists throughout the establishment of new and
more perfect covenants.
The order of the world is no longer at the mercy of human
sin. In the economy now beginning God will give temporal goods to sinners as
well as to saints. The God of the covenant is not a God who will rain upon the
just and will refuse rain to the unjust, but, in line with the very words of
Christ, he makes the sun to rise upon the good and bad, and rains upon the
just and unjust.
By the covenant with Noah a break is made in the connection
between sin and punishment whereby salvation can be brought in. Thus the
covenant is a manifestation of love. It reveals something new about God, for it
is the first manifestation of redemptive love, while the former divine
economy showed only creative love. What now appears is that long-suffering
mercy with which God endures in order to save the sinner.
Jean Cardinal Daniélou, Holy
Pagans of the Old Testament,
78-80.83; Word in Season VII. 1999
http://www.forwardministryonline.com/articlesnews/vigilslectionaryreadings/Bordinarytime021.html
Index
http://www.forwardministryonline.com/articlesnews/vigilslectionaryreadings/
In the Word in Season (1999) there are 16 references of Jean Danielou
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