Not many things in life are guaranteed. Of course, even the most casual of Christians know that the Father’s love lasts throughout the ages, and I cannot overstate the truth and power of this taken-for-granted constant in our lives. Practically, however, we often find ourselves chasing the elusive concept of stability in the midst of our lives’ chaos and uncertainty. Stable routines like the rising and setting of the sun even themselves seem not to suffice, as such stability is out of our control. I have often fallen victim to attempting to organize my own life timeline in accordance with some idealized version of stability which I get to commandeer. In this day and age, our quest for stability is made all the more possible—here I sit, at seven o’clock in the evening on a plane headed home, quite literally chasing the sun back into the sky as I travel towards the west.

In today’s first reading (Jer 31:31-34), we catch a glimpse of context for one of the most incredible examples of stability and consistency in history. The Lord speaks of His master plan to establish a new covenant with the houses of Israel and Judah, a plan to write His law upon our hearts and a plan to “remember their sin no more.” Written between 630-580 B.C., Jeremiah prophesies of a plan he didn’t even come close to living to see through. I am always taken aback by how deliberately the Resurrection and the establishment of this new age fit into God’s plan through the words of the Old Testament, with writers foreshadowing the redemption of our souls centuries before the person of Jesus walked on earth.

As we get to the second reading (Heb 5:7-9), we understand that Christ Jesus’s time on earth was marked with reverence and obedience, through even His suffering and death on a cross. This perfect obedience fulfilled the prophecy of the new covenant, saving each and every one of our souls and cleansing us of our sin. The Gospel reading highlights an instance of Jesus’s complete trust in God, as we read Him taking Himself through a reality check when recognizing the imminence of His impending death: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.”

Let’s tie this all together. The Lord had a plan for His Son so determined and so steadfast that He revealed it to writers hundreds of years before Jesus’s presence on the planet. This plan involved establishing a new covenant of God-fearing people with law written within them and sin forgiven, and lo and behold, through the unceasing and resolute obedience of the Son of God, such a covenant was indeed established. Why then, knowing a God with a track record of consistency and having true documented proof of following through on His perfect plans, would we try to take matters into our own imperfect human hands? When we fail to see the overarching stable plan, the plan Christ Jesus Himself followed even though it destined Him for death, going after our own individualized versions of stability seems ridiculous, as we cannot beat God in the arena of constancy. Rather than striving for stability, we should strive to imitate Jesus’s obedience, accept that which is truly constant, and come to realize ourselves that God has a purpose for each of us being in the very hour of our lives we are in right now.