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NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: GENESIS 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18
SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT [B] USCCB link to all three readings God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, "Abraham!" "Here I am!" he replied. Then God said: "Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you." When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Then he reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the LORD's messenger called to him from heaven, "Abraham, Abraham!" "Here I am!" he answered. "Do not lay your hand on the boy," said the messenger. "Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son." As Abraham looked about, he spied a ram caught by its horns in the thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it up as a holocaust in place of his son. Again the LORD's messenger called to Abraham from heaven and said: "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you acted as you did in not withholding from me your beloved son, I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing-- all this because you obeyed my command." The ancient days of Israel were not a time of mysticism or metaphysics; the human experiences of God were blunt and direct. In Sunday’s first reading the faith of Abraham is challenged in a stunning fashion: the sacrifice of his son, Isaac. To be honest, I had not seriously considered all the implications of this story, nor the remarkable overlap with Sunday’s Gospel from St. Mark, in which Jesus takes Peter, James, and John to the top of a mountain and reveals his full glory. Our Hebrew text here is a good example of the difference between “carrying a story line in our heads” and examining the revealed text word for word. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990) points out that the intention of the passage is stated clearly in the first line: “God put Abraham to the test.” This is the only instance in the Pentateuch where an individual is tested by God; the common format is God’s testing of the entire people of Israel. The very purpose of Genesis 22 is the establishment of Abraham’s unshakeable personal faith in God, his fitness to be the father of Israel. After this test, God will address and test the descendants of Abraham as a corporate entity, his chosen people. The crux of Abraham’s obedience will center around his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. God’s command to Abraham describes Isaac as “your only one, whom you love.” This passage overlooks [deliberately] Genesis 16, a mini-redemption story in its own rite, in which an aging Sarah gives her Egyptian handmaid Hagar to her husband to produce a male heir and begin the line of the promised people. Hagar bears Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, though it is clear in Genesis 16 that Ishmael is not loved. Sent away by Abraham, Ishmael and Hagar are rescued by an angel and great things are predicted for Ishmael, though the Bible does not elaborate. Middle Eastern thought identifies Ishmael as the father of the Arabic peoples. Sarah and Abraham had forgotten that God’s promise of a son was made to them; in Genesis 18 Sarah laughs at the idea of mothering at her age, as does Abraham. Father Boadt, in his commentary, identifies several “tests” of faith faced by Abraham, culminating in the sacrifice of Isaac, and both Abraham and Sarah question God’s wisdom or plan from time to time. When Abraham begs God to make the healthy Ishmael the child of the promise, God refuses and repeats his statement that the heir of the kingdom would be the child of the couple, Abraham and Sarah, hard as that was for the couple to believe. Wait out the promise. The order from God to Abraham that he sacrifice his own son is stunning in any age, but particularly so in the age of the patriarchs. In the primitive societal structure, the measure of a man was his progeny and his amassed fortune. When God made his initial promise to Abraham, it consisted of fruitfulness and an abundant offspring, as well as a great nation and descendants who would become kings. There is no mention here (or elsewhere in the Old Testament) of heaven or reward after the grave. To sacrifice Isaac would, for all practical purposes, make the fulfillment of God’s promise impossible. Had Abraham carried out the execution without God’s intervention, he would have had to face the idea that the God of a future Israel was nothing more than the numerous petty divinities so common to his experience. It is interesting, too, that when Abraham attempted to put his obedience into action, he is halted by an angel or divine messenger, who delivers the blessings from God: “I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.” The JBC summarizes Abraham’s religious experience on the mount: “[Abraham] had finally learned to give up control over his own life that he might receive it as a grace.” (p. 25) Genesis does not describe Abraham’s obedience as perfect throughout his lifetime, but as exemplary enough to build a people who would be the Lord’s own. Jesus, a devout Jew, was certainly aware of his Scripture and the theological meanings that generations of Hebrew thinkers had brought to interpreting the Biblical text. The theme of obedience and trust that permeates the Old Testament was the very theme around Jesus’ mission to bring the Law and the Prophets to fulfillment. One of the most riveting examples of Jesus’ ministry to obedience to the Father is Sunday’s Gospel, where Jesus takes his three most intimate followers to the mountaintop, where he is “transfigured;” even the evangelists do not have a detailed vocabulary to describe the image of Jesus in his full divine nature. There, on the mountain, the disciples are joined by Moses (father of the Law) and Elijah (the voice of all the classical prophets.) There is a perfect storm here of past, present, and future. For our purposes it is enough to reflect upon the voice of God from inside the cloud, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." In Genesis God had spoken of Isaac as Abraham’s beloved son; in Mark God uses the same word “beloved.” The parallel drawn by Mark is loving obedience; what Abraham had begun, Jesus will complete. To advance the point, God held back Abraham from killing his son in obedience. In the New Testament, God will hold back nothing, allowing his beloved son to “give everything” in his passion to the last drop of his blood. The love of Christ fulfills the entire range of generous possibility. Isaac was the silent potential victim, his fates dependent on others. Jesus embraced his death totally and unconditionally, which is why his Father calls him his “beloved.” With each Sunday of Lent taking us closer to Good Friday, the Scripture of the Lectionary explains why the day of Christ’s unjust and painful death has carried the name for centuries, Good Friday.
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NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: GENESIS 9: 8-15
FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT [B] USCCB link to all three readings God said to Noah and to his sons with him: "See, I am now establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you: all the birds, and the various tame and wild animals that were with you and came out of the ark. I will establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood; there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth." God added: "This is the sign that I am giving for all ages to come, of the covenant between me and you and every living creature with you: I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will recall the covenant I have made between me and you and all living beings, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all mortal beings." The choice of the Noah narrative with Sunday’s Gospel, the temptation of Jesus in the desert, is intriguing. Some of the intrigue rests in the Genesis text itself. The first eleven chapters of Genesis compose a “prehistory” so to speak, a philosophical/mythical setting of a real world in which God would embrace a specific tribal entity and formulate a covenant of exclusivity. Genesis 12 marks the beginning of the “chosen people” and the designation of Abraham as the father of Israel. But prior to Chapter 12, the inspired editors of Genesis sought not only to establish the reality of God and a world of real people, but also to address issues of the human condition that troubled later Israel and continue to haunt us in the present day. Thus the pre-Abraham texts explore the pride of humanity (the forbidden fruit of Eden and the Tower of Babel, for example), the hard lot of survival (Adam’s curse of tilling the earth in sweat), the power of human desire (Eve’s desire for her husband despite the pain and risk of child birth), the alienation of man from nature (the infamous talking serpent) and the psychology of envy and anger (Cain’s killing of his brother.) The account of Noah and the great flood falls into this category of myth/philosophy. In this early Genesis narrative, it seems that even God is surprised at the many ways his human creations can go bad, and he is determined to scrap the project and start over with the one good man he can identify, Noah, and his (presumably) good family. Genesis borrows freely from the Gilgamesh Flood Myth in describing details. There are, incidentally, about 34 versions of flood myths around the globe, from Native American lands to the Philippines. The human form as we know it dates back as far as 200,000 years. Niagara Falls, created by the melting of the last ice age, is only 12,000 years old (and at the time of Christ was located at the spot of the Rainbow Bridge). Massive water events—geological and meteorological--were understandably etched into human experience. The great flood is one of the first Bible stories I learned, both from home and Catholic school, and why not? Its most basic lessons meld with a second grader’s First Penance catechetic: God is angry at sinners, God protects those who do good, and as a sidebar, God will never send another great flood. Given that we kids grew up with hydrogen bombs tested in the atmosphere as a regular occurrence, the flood promise was perhaps less impressive to us than it was to the ancients. Here is where the trouble comes in. Adult Catholics do not generally engage in the level of catechetics comparable to what their college and graduate studies in other fields demand. I wish I had a dollar for all my adult students—highly competent professionals in the “real world” –who were shocked to hear that Adam and Eve are not specific human beings, not is their blood pulsing genetically through our veins. Bringing at best an elementary school handle on the Bible and other aspects of the Faith into adult life, I would bet that most hearers of next Sunday’s First Reading believe this text to be the conclusion of the Ark narrative, for it does cast a rosy view of the future after the long and nerve-wracking experience of the Ark and the Flood. Unfortunately, the narrative continues (Genesis 9: 18-29) and Noah and his three sons, back on solid ground as the waters dried, set to planting a vineyard. The wine produced in the subsequent season was strong, if nothing else, and Noah becomes very intoxicated and passes out naked in his tent. His son Ham “saw his father’s nakedness, and he told his two brothers outside.” The USCCB commentary primly observes that there is more to Ham’s offense than just laughing at his father; “Ham’s conduct is meant to prefigure the later shameful sexual practices of the Canaanites, which are alleged in numerous biblical passages.” The two other brothers walk into the tent backward with a blanket, so as not to see their father’s nakedness. Later Noah would curse his son Ham, calling him “Canaan” while extending blessings to the pair of other sons. Taking in the bigger picture here, God had done all he could do to eliminate evil from the earth and its peoples, and he has been unsuccessful. His last and most powerful act, the sending of the deluge, had evidently not changed the course of human nature as the post-flood conduct of Genesis 9 clearly shows. A clear message that emerges from early Genesis is the pervasiveness of evil, summarized in Genesis 3, “Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the creatures God had made.” Evil in its various forms is constitutive of human history. The election of Abraham’s tribe in Genesis 12 is the first chapter of a new beginning built upon election and a new, intimate relationship aimed at creating a holy people, a holy nation. What is noticeable in Genesis is the absence of “devils.” Ancient Israel did not know devils, which is why the problem of evil was an intense matter. Devils would have made convenient scapegoats for the evil of the world. Israelite thinkers did not look outside the human condition for causes of evil, though it would have been very tempting [no pun intended] to do so. Toward the end of the Old Testament era, in an age marked by apocalyptic and fascination with the end of time, devils come into common language, and the devil as an agent of evil appears in some New Testament books. Although the Temptation of Jesus [this Sunday’s Gospel] is included in three Gospels, it is not attested in St. John. This Sunday’s Gospel account of the Temptation from St. Mark, the first Evangelist, is very brief: “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.” The choice of the desert setting is no accident: the desert was the apocalyptic site of the final showdown between good and evil, between the angels of God and the minions of the Evil One. And indeed, Mark notes the presence of angels in Jesus’ struggle with the Evil One. Mark will go on to describe numerous conflicts between Jesus and demons; Jesus will perform exorcisms to announce to the people of his time and place that the power of evil is beginning its decline with the coming of the Kingdom of God. What we have in the pairing of Genesis and Mark this weekend is a conclusive demonstration by Jesus that the power of evil, which so perplexed the authors of the Hebrew Scripture has been broken in the desert and on through the Resurrection of Jesus, who has come to establish the victorious kingdom of God on earth. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: LEVITICUS 13: 1-2, 44-46
SIXTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [B] USCCB link to all three readings The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "If someone has on his skin a scab or pustule or blotch which appears to be the sore of leprosy, he shall be brought to Aaron, the priest, or to one of the priests among his descendants. If the man is leprous and unclean, the priest shall declare him unclean by reason of the sore on his head. "The one who bears the sore of leprosy shall keep his garments rent and his head bare, and shall muffle his beard; he shall cry out, 'Unclean, unclean!' As long as the sore is on him he shall declare himself unclean, since he is in fact unclean. He shall dwell apart, making his abode outside the camp." Last Saturday, during my presentation on the Fourteenth Century at my diocese’s ministerial day, I discussed the Black Plague and the panic it released throughout Europe. I focused on three specific impacts upon the Church: the religious embrace of radical acts of excessive piety, such as the flagellants who whipped themselves constantly; the increasing need for reassurance of grace and an acceleration of the insurance of indulgences and good works to render one’s chances for salvation optimal; and three, the need for scapegoats for the wholesale sufferings of Christians led to intensification of persecution of Jews, a sad moral blot upon the Medieval Church. At that juncture a student added an interesting insight. Judaism, almost from its beginning, was enlightened on matters of hygiene. I will return to this point in a moment, but the student went on to explain that Jewish life in medieval times, with its practices of washings, avoidance of unnecessary contact with bodily fluids, sewerage disposal, and its burial customs were a deterrent to the fast spread of infectious disease, and Jewish communities—in some places restricted to ghettoes as in the city of Venice (c. 1140 A.D.)—tended to suffer considerable less illness than did Christians, a point that was not lost upon Christians. Anti-Semitic rage was only fueled by the relatively good fortune of their Jewish populations, though intelligence, vigilance, and hard work were the actual reasons for resistance to disease. The terms “clean and unclean” in the Hebrew Scripture are probably familiar to most readers, but the genesis of the term and the practice of cleanliness is more complicated. In yesterday’s [Monday’s] stream I addressed God’s passionate personal love of the Israelites and his protection of them when they trusted his ways. The Israelites understood at some level that whatever God had commanded them to do—as in this Sunday’s first reading above—was commanded not just as a loyalty test but as a directive for self-preservation given out of love. All the Ten Commandments have a self-preservation element based upon common sense and, in the case of health, what was understood at the time. Israel was a small tribe, later a small nation. Fertility was a matter of survival, which is why God commanded Israel to avoid idol worship—usually riddled with pagan fertility rites with no power to produce the desired effects. The sixth commandment, likewise, is another way for God to insure the continuing population of his chosen people. It is true that, from the distance of almost three millennia, portions of the Law appear harsh. The successful novel and film, The Red Tent, describes how the burden of uncleanness fell importunately upon women, with periodic blood flows and child birthing. [Attitudes toward blood, particularly human blood, are quite complex in the ancient world, and Israel was not exempt from outside influences.] In the story of the Good Samaritan, neither the priest nor the Levite stops to bind the wounds of the man beaten by robbers. The instruction of Leviticus in next Sunday’s Mass may strike us as harsh; the poor man with a scab or pustule is hustled out of the camp, a word indicative of the modest population of the time. It is worth noting that per Sunday’s reading a suspicious case is brought to Aaron the priest or one of his successors. The pronouncement of unclean status is a religious act, though the state of uncleanness can be brought about by sin, carelessness, or just plain bad luck. In its place in Sunday’s liturgy, the text from Leviticus is paired with the end of the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, where an unclean leper pleads with Jesus to heal him. Jesus, moved with pity, heals him on the spot. The work of Jesus here is considerably simplified; there is no examination, no removal from the site, and no follow-up exam and reinstatement. Jesus cures the disease and the uncleanness. It would be wrong, however, to assume that Jesus is sidetracking the Israelite tradition or the Law itself. He commands the healed man to present himself to the [Temple] priest and make the obligatory healing offering. “That will be proof for them.” Proof of what? Later in the Gospels Jesus will explain that “I have not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I have come to bring them to fulfillment.” Jesus has come to combine the best of the Law and the Prophets in his ministry. What he is “proving” is that the long-awaited Kingdom of God or Reign of God is affecting the gift of the Law in ways never dreamed possible. The leper in Mark’s Gospel is cured, not simply because of procedural rectitude, but because he fell to the knees of Jesus and begged for healing with faith. Jesus has come to do the works of his Father and destroy the curse of uncleanness—be it caused by sin, carelessness, or bad luck. This is the final Sunday of Ordinary Time until the end of May. The observances of Lent, the Triduum, and the Easter Season will begin next Wednesday. We will continue to reflect upon the First Readings of the Sunday liturgies throughout that time. |
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