Swear to God: The Promise and Power of the Sacraments by Scott Hahn

Author:Scott Hahn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Catholicism, Worship, Christianity
ISBN: 9780385509312
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2004-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

Grace Is the Word

What does all this have to do with sacraments?

Here’s the hard truth: We cannot be trusted. Without divine help, we cannot live even part of a single day as we should. We need God’s assistance. We need His grace. So we need to be placed under oath, for the sake of our pledged obedience and His promise of help.

Think about humanity’s track record. Again and again, God extended His covenants, but His mediators consistently failed to keep them. God gave Adam dominion over the earth; but Adam, fearing for his earthly life, sinned by disobeying God. God saved Noah from the devastating flood; but Noah got drunk and shamed himself. God promised Abraham countless descendants, but still the man gave in to temptation and slept with an Egyptian mistress. God worked great wonders through Moses; yet Moses still doubted, and he offended God so grievously that he was not permitted to enter the Promised Land. God gave David a kingdom, and David showed his gratitude by committing adultery and murder.

We can read salvation history as humanity’s consistent failure to keep the covenant. These biblical failures should make us tremble. Moses was the meekest man on earth. Noah was righteous. Abraham was a just man. David was a man after God’s own heart. Yet they all failed.

The Old Testament reads like a dismal record of human weakness and failure. Even the best of intentions could not make our ancestors trustworthy men and women.

But then the Word became flesh! God became a man, in Jesus Christ, so that He Himself could take up the covenant oath for us. Christ assumed human nature with all its debts, obligations, and weaknesses. Then He perfected that human nature in Himself, with His divine life and power as He lived it out—as an infant, as a child, as a preadolescent, as a teenager, as a young adult, and as a mature adult. As a son and as a man, He perfected all human life and all human relations. Finally, He established a New Covenant by becoming a cosigner to the Old Covenant. He accepted the burden of the Old Covenant curse upon Himself. In so doing, He instituted in His own body and blood the sacrament by which the New Covenant is constituted.

Christianity is the only religion in all the world and in all of history in which God swears an oath on the part of mankind. Christ himself is the one, true dependable sacrament. His life thus became the source of all of our sacraments.

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