by Fr. Tommy Lane
We are accustomed during Ordinary Time as we call it, when the priest wears green vestments, to a link or connection between the first reading and the Gospel. The first reading anticipates the Gospel, or the Gospel gives an answer to the first reading, and the Psalm after the first reading is a prayerful response to the first reading. The second reading follows a cycle of its own. Now during Lent, that all changes. The first reading is not directly linked with the Gospel. During the five Sundays of Lent before Passion (Palm) Sunday during our three-year cycle of readings, we listen to fifteen important events or Scripture passages from the Old Testament. The Psalm continues to be a prayerful response to the first reading and now the second reading is linked with the first reading.
The first reading today (Gen 22) is troubling, we might say, with God deliberately testing Abraham and seeming to ask for the sacrifice of Isaac. One thing we can say about it is that God showed he did not want child sacrifice. Nations around Israel at that time used to practice child sacrifice (e.g. the Phoenicians). The evidence we have for it is too graphic to relate here. However, in the incident in our first reading, God showed Abraham he did not want that. What God wanted was for Abraham to sacrifice his will to God, not to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham had learned through painful experiences in the past (e.g. Gen 12:10-20; Gen 16; Gen 20) that it is better to trust in God and his word instead of taking matters into our own hands and doing it our way. God desires that we give ourselves to him but not by harming another. A number of times throughout the Old Testament, child sacrifice is forbidden so that Israel might learn, no matter what the surrounding cultures do, God does not want to harm humans.
We might be inclined to think that happened millennia ago but alas it continued nearer to our own time. The Aztecs in Mexico used to sacrifice humans to their gods, and it is thought up to 50,000 a year were sacrificed to their gods including one in five children. However when Our Lady appeared to St. Juan Diego in Guadalupe, millions converted to Christianity, twenty million within a decade, and that brought an end to their human sacrifices. Because of the secular world in which we live, some say we would be better off if St. Patrick had not brought the faith here. But human sacrifice appears to have been performed here by the Celts, for example on the body (Old Croghan Man) found in a bog in Offaly in 2003. (The Cashel Man found in 2011 is also believed to have been ritually sacrificed, and ritual sacrifice may also be the cause of death of the Clonycavan Man discovered in 2003). So St. Patrick, like Our Lady in Guadalupe, and God in the first reading, rescued us from harming others.
There is, if you will pardon me for saying so, a form of child sacrifice performed now, taking the life of babies while in the womb. It’s called “health care.” No one is kidding us. We know it’s not “health care.” We know what’s going on. In his Wednesday Audience, October 10, 2018, Pope Francis equated it with hiring a hit man. He made other strong statements also. Earlier that year, when talking about deciding which babies can live or must die, he said, “In the last century the entire world was scandalized over what the Nazis were doing to maintain the purity of the race. Today we do the same thing, but with white gloves.” (June 16, 2018.) In 2013, he said, every child whose life is taken “bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who even before he was born, and then just after birth, experienced the world’s rejection.” (September 20, 2013) We also need to remember that no matter what happened in anyone’s past, God is always merciful and ready to forgive in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. God desires that we give ourselves to him but not by harming another.
After God promised Abraham and Sarah a child, they were still waiting twenty-five years, according to Genesis, for the birth of their son Isaac (Gen 12:4; 21:5). Their faith in God wavered sometimes during this long wait (Gen 12:10-20; Gen 16; Gen 20). But what seemed impossible happened. It seemed so impossible that Abraham and Sarah laughed when they were told they would have a child (Gen 17:17; 18:12, and the interesting thing is, the name Isaac which God said he wanted the child called, in the Hebrew language of that time, means “he laughed.”) But in the birth of Isaac, Abraham learned his lesson: trust in God and his word even when it seems impossible or ridiculous. God knows better. The Psalm responds prayerfully in the first stanza that we heard today, “I trusted even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted.”” (Ps 116:10) As we read this text about Abraham during Lent, it also calls us to trust in God, and to give ourselves to God but not by harming another. That is also what Jesus said on a number of occasions: “he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matt 10:37)
We often read texts in the Old Testament as anticipating something in the New Testament or waiting to be fulfilled in the New Testament. Isaac carried the wood for his sacrifice up Mount Moriah and Jesus carried his cross up to Calvary. But the cross is not the last word. Jesus’ resurrection is the last word and Jesus’ transfiguration in our Gospel today anticipates his resurrection. As we will hear soon in the preface to the Eucharistic prayer, “the Passion leads to the glory of the Resurrection.” Peter, James, and John witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration but only John remained completely faithful during Jesus’ passion. John was present when Jesus was being tried before the Sanhedrin while Peter was outside and denied he knew Jesus, and only John went to the cross with the women (John 18:15-18, 25-27; 19:25-26). John is a model of fidelity in following Jesus. Despite Peter and James seeing Jesus transfigured, when the crunch came, they wavered like Abraham earlier in his life, and indeed more than wavered. When we are waiting what seems like twenty-five years like Abraham and Sarah, can we remain faithful like John and continue to trust and pray in the words of the Psalm today, “I trusted, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted”” knowing Jesus’ Passion led to his resurrection and hoping the same for us?
© Fr. Tommy Lane 2024
This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.
More Homilies for the Second Sunday of Lent Year B
Listen to Jesus 2021
Related Homilies: Prayer: entering the love of Jesus 2023
Jesus always ready to forgive 2023
Jesus’ transfiguration: a lesson in prayer 2016
Listen to Jesus even as he predicts his passion and death! 2006
Jesus’ transfiguration reminds us who we are and not to be negative
Second Reading: Jesus pleading for us at God’s right hand
stories about light of Jesus and light in Guadalupe