Today's chapter shows wonderfully that the faith of ancient Israel was not merely the religion of a people, but had to become personal for every individual. The prayers that an Israelite had to say before God and the ritual dialogue with the priest placed that person at the centre of salvation history, at the heart of the fulfilment of the Lord's promises. Through this, everyone was called to a personal knowledge of God (and not merely knowledge about God).

Every believer must one day (or more than once) face the question: do I know God, or have I only read about Him? Perhaps the description of personal participation in the Covenant that we read today can help us answer it.

What is the meaning of the covenant-union that God made with His people? First of all, a covenant, like any other union, is an agreement, and an agreement that binds both sides. This can seem strange: it means that God binds Himself by certain obligations before human beings.

A bound God does indeed seem strange. But He does this entirely voluntarily. He knows that otherwise, without taking on any obligations, no relationship can be built with anyone. He agrees to limit Himself within a framework understandable to human beings, so that human beings will also agree to limit themselves within a framework acceptable to Him. The Torah, whose history begins at Sinai on the day the covenant was made, is precisely this framework. In making a covenant-union with His people, God also takes upon Himself, in accordance with the Torah He gave, very definite obligations. But there is also a difference: in this case the Lawgiver turns out to be one of the parties to a union made in accordance with the law He Himself gave. If this involved human beings, at least fallen human beings, such a situation would be fraught with all kinds of abuses: one of the parties to the agreement would be acting as its guarantor. But God can be relied on in this respect, as in every other respect: no more reliable guarantor can be found.

What obligations does God take upon Himself? He promises to set His people above all other peoples and make them a sacred, sanctified ("holy") people. This can seem like a whim or caprice: God decided to have a favorite on earth who would live by rules invented especially for him, and God would grant him special privileges in return.

But of course the point is not that God needs favorites. The point is that He has a special plan for humanity, one that involves solving special tasks, the chief of which is the coming of the Messiah and the bringing into our untransformed world of the Kingdom that will transform it. This cannot be done without a special, sanctified people; and special rules are given to them not at random, but so that they can preserve that state of sanctification as long as possible. Chosenness, then, means not special rights but special responsibility: for the covenant made, for the Torah given, and afterward for the Messiah and for the Kingdom that will enter the world with Him.

When it comes to Yahwistic feasts, one can never be certain whether the subject is something purely agricultural or something much deeper. So it is in today's passage: here, quite clearly, the feast of firstfruits is mentioned, called Shavuot in Hebrew and usually called Pentecost by us. In this case, however, something is connected with it that plainly goes beyond the simple consecration of firstfruits. Here the issue is the consecration not only of the fruits, but also of the whole land, of the people living on it, and of the road by which God led His people into the land He had appointed for them.

It follows that this road must be consecrated again and again every year, as if renewing it: not only the land that was gained at the end of the road, but the road itself as well. Some biblical scholars think that the text of this chapter, in whole or in part, was originally ritual, connected with the feast of Shavuot. Whether this is so cannot be said with certainty, but in any case it is clear that before us is a reflection on the feast, one that appeared, perhaps, quite early, perhaps even in the time of the first kings.

There is nothing strange about its appearance. After all, God creates everything He creates in the fullness of His great world, where there is nothing transient and temporary in our sense of the word. Of course, even God's great world is only creation, and it exists in time, not outside it as the Creator does. But here existence in time presupposes relation to that fullness of times where nothing vanishes without a trace and nothing passes into a past that no longer exists, as happens in our little world, cut off from God's great world. For us the past is no longer actual if we do not use its achievements in the present; for God, in His great world, it is always actual. For Him, that movement is always actual which for us is actual only once: at the time when certain events happen before our eyes and with our participation. The consecration of the road reminds us of God's great world, that for God it is an eternal present, even when it appears to us that the road is already in the past. God calls us to life in the present of His great world, for this is precisely the life on His land that He promised His people.