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Letters Nineteenth Sunday
in Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
August 10, 2001This Sunday begins a short series of four readings from the last part of The Letter to the Hebrews. We had an extended selection from this book of the New Testament in Ordinary Time of year B. Hebrews is a discourse of encouragement addressed to Jewish Christians who were seemingly wavering in their dedication to Christ and were homesick for Jewish religious observances.
In the early parts of the letter from which we read last year, the author writes of the superiority of Christ over the angels and over Moses. He describes the superiority of Jesus’ priesthood, His sacrifice, His ministry in the heavenly tabernacle. In chapter 10, the author begins to draw his conclusions, inviting his readers to have trust in Jesus and not to draw back from their commitment to Him. After all, he says (in 10.39), we are "among those who have faith and will posses life." The rest of the letter concerns itself with examples of faith from the past and with the implications of faith for the present and the future.
The reading for this Sunday is from chapter 11. This chapter is a long review of how faith affected the lives of men and women throughout the history of God’s people of the former covenant ("the ancients"). Over and over again we hear the phrases "by faith," "in faith," "because of faith." This account reaches from Abel through the age of the patriarchs and of Moses all the way to the time of the Maccabees. The long reading assigned for this Sunday, however, includes only the statement of the theme at the beginning of the chapter and the material about Abraham.
First we have a description of faith. It includes the conviction that the future will be as God has promised and a sense of assurance that things that may not be present and visible nonetheless can be real. (Thus described, faith involves loyalty, endurance, hope, confidence, and well-founded expectation. Of course faith is not a purely human achievement. It is also a gift from God.) It is their faith that makes "the ancients" worthy of our admiration.
The reading now turns to the story of Abraham and the role of faith in His relationship with God. First of all, faith gave him the courage to leave his homeland for a land that God would give him but whose identity he did not know. He lived as an outsider as he looked forward to the future dwelling that he was sure God would build for him.
God also promised to make him a father, even though both he and his wife were beyond the age for becoming parents. He trusted in God’s promise and became the father of numerous descendants. All this from a man who was "as good as dead."
Neither Abraham nor his descendants lived to enjoy all that God had promised. But they continued to have faith as they looked forward to the homeland that God had invited them to await. It wasn’t an earthly one. If an earthly homeland was what they wanted, they could have gone back to where they came from! No, they were really seeking a heavenly homeland. And God was proud of them for their trust in Him.
Abraham’s faith led him to agree to sacrifice Isaac, the son who was so wondrously born to parents beyond the age of having children and who was to be the link with Abraham’s descendants. Abraham’s trust in God led him to be convinced that God could bring Isaac back from the dead if that’s what was necessary to fulfill the promises He had made. Isaac’s escape from death served as a symbol of something more that was still to come: Christ’s escape from death many centuries later.
The author of Hebrews offers his readers the example of Abraham’s faith to assure them that their faith will enable them to respond to the demands of Christian life. Abraham had to face living as a stranger in foreign lands, even though he had been promised a new homeland of his own. He had to take God’s word that he would father a son when such a thing was simply unthinkable, humanly speaking. Then he had to be willing to sacrifice that son as a testimony to his confidence in God’s word. His faith enabled him to respond to all this. Our faith will enable us to respond to what God asks of us.
Abraham’s faith is of importance to us because we, too, are a people of promises. The promises that God has made to us, the gifts He offers us are different from what He promised and offered to Abraham. But what He spoke of to Abraham was symbolic of what He offers to us in the context of our life in Christ. Instead of an earthly homeland He promises us a heavenly one. Instead of belonging to a numerous earthly people we belong to a community of saints without number for whom earthly constraints of space and time are irrelevant, saints who enter life in a way different from the ways of human generation. Instead of testing us by asking us to give up what is most dear to us, God offers us a share in the life of Him who has already been sacrificed and raised from the dead. We are called to be strong in our conviction that God means what He says and that what is promised to us is for real.
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Conversation Questions
Have God’s promises ever demanded sacrifices from me?
Who are models of faith for me? Why?
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