Commentaries

Commentary – 2nd Sunday of Lent Year B

March 1, 2015
First Reading – Genesis 22.1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15
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.”
Commentary
TO BE READ THROUGH THE EYES OF FAITH
 There are unfortunately two ways to read this text:  it can be read as if God is asking Abraham to commit some appalling act just to see if Abraham is capable of obeying God... and only then comes the command: "Do not lay your hand on the boy" ... To which we want to say: It was about time! And from this line of thought comes the terrible conclusion that because Abraham behaved well, because he obeyed the command ("here I am" he says twice) God promises him the moon. But that is a purely pagan reading of this text! It imagines a God who is waiting to trap us, and then rewards or punishes us with impunity, and not God as God really is.

Through the lens of faith the text paints a different picture - just as we look at someone we love through the "eyes of love", there are also "eyes of faith". Incidentally, if we read this entire story in the Bible (here we unfortunately have but a short excerpt), we would note how important is the theme of sight; the very name Moriah (“go to the land of Moriah”) is a play on the verb “to see”, which is repeated in verse 8 (“God will provide” - literally, “God will see”)” and in verse 14 (“On the mountain the Lord will provide/see”): Moriah means both "The LORD sees" and "The LORD is seen"; it is a way of saying that faith is like a pair of glasses through which we see God and the world.

It is a reading through the eyes of faith that I now propose: First, this text was written at least a thousand years after everyone knew how the story ended - that Isaac did not die at the hands of Abraham, but lived to a ripe old age. Therefore, it is clear that the author is not trying to write a suspense narrative.

Secondly, when this text was written (around 700 BC, whereas Abraham lived around 1850 BC) everyone knew perfectly well that from time immemorial God abhorred human sacrifice; but they also knew that because Israel’s neighbors practiced human sacrifice it had been difficult for them not to engage in it as well.  A different understanding of God was required if the people were to reject human sacrifice. And so Abraham’s descendants are reading this text as the story of Abraham’s conversion in how he sees God; as if God was asking Abraham, "When I ask you for a sacrifice what do you imagine: a God who wants the death of your child? Well, you are mistaken! Yet, I reminded you many times that I have not forgotten my promise to give you offspring precisely through this son.”

We know of this famous promise from the previous chapters of the book of Genesis: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you. I make your name great ... all the families of the earth will find blessing in you ... I will make your descendants like the dust of the earth…. Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so… will your descendants be  ... It is through Isaac that descendants will bear your name... "(all these promises are found in chapters 12-21 of Genesis).

GOD DID NOT FORGET THIS PROMISE
When testing Abraham, God reminds him of this promise that God has not forgotten: God calls out his name, "Abraham,” which is not his birth name (Abram), but the name he received when God made covenant with him; "Abraham" means "father of multitudes".

"Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love..." A pagan reading of this text would say that not only is God demanding a horrible thing, but that God also likes to rub salt in the wound. The other reading is that if God insists that Isaac is "your son… your only one, whom you love" it is God’s way of saying: “I have not forgotten my promise, I have not forgotten that it was on him, Isaac, that all our hopes rest..”. “Your only one” is a reminder that it is through him and him alone that the promise will be realized, from whom the multitude of descendants will be born - descendants that will be as numerous as the dust of the earth (Gen 13), as numerous as the stars in the sky (Gen 15).

The name Isaac means "child of laughter": a reminder to Abraham that both he and Sarah had laughed in disbelief when God promised them this son (considering their advanced age) but the child was born to them because God had promised it.

You may have noticed the unusual phrase that I used above when I imagined that God said to Abraham, "I have not forgotten that it was on him, Isaac, that all our hopes rest.” This is the difference between the pagan reading and the lens of faith: the pagan suspects God of having no use for him; the believer has discovered that our hope can also be God's hope, that God and humanity can have the same interests since God has made covenant with us, thus embarking on a joint venture. As I often say, faith is to believe, in spite of all that can happen, that God has a benevolent plan for us!

This was the kind of faith that Abraham had: he believed that in a way that eluded him God would somehow fulfill God’s promise to give him descendants through Isaac and not by another; that is why Abraham is given as a model of faith to his descendants; and that is also why God could test his faith to this point.

Thanks to Abraham’s invincible faith a decisive step was taken in the history of Revelation – a turning point: Abraham discovered that when God says "sacrifice" God does not say "kill", as if the sight of blood gave God pleasure! When God asks him to offer up his son, Abraham discovers that it means "make him live, never forgetting that it was God who gave him to you." Israel will know from then on that God never desires the death of a human being, no matter what.

Abraham did not abandon his trust in God and therefore he is able to hear once again the promise that he never doubted: "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." These are the same promises that we heard in chapters 12-21 of Genesis.

Today, this promise of God is far from being fulfilled: there are indeed innumerable descendants but we can question if they are a source of blessing for all humanity beginning with themselves. That is yet to come! Especially when we see the harsh battles between the descendants themselves!

Those who deserve to be called “children of Abraham” are those who believe that God’s promise will be fulfilled, no matter what happens, simply because God has promised it and God is faithful. Or rather, the true “children of Abraham” are those who today both believe in God’s promise and work with all their strength towards its fulfillment!

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Note
On the prohibition of human sacrifice: read Deuteronomy 18.10; Jeremiah 7.31; Jeremiah 19.5. It may well be that the story about the offering of Isaac (what Jews call "the Binding of Isaac") was created to reinforce in believers the ban on human sacrifice at a time when the temptation to imitate the practice in use in neighboring nations was again making inroads. Abraham is held up as an example: he, their model of faith, had understood that God has never desired such sacrifices.

Responsorial Psalm – 116.10, 15, 16-17, 18-19
R/I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
I believed, even when I said,
“I am greatly afflicted.”
Precious in the eyes of the LORD
is the death of his faithful ones.
R/ I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
O LORD, I am your servant;
I am your servant, the son of your handmaid;
you have loosed my bonds.
To you will I offer sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and I will call upon the name of the LORD.
R/ I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.
My vows to the LORD I will pay
in the presence of all his people,
In the courts of the house of the LORD,
in your midst, O Jerusalem.
R/ I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.

Second Reading – Romans 8.31b-34
Brothers and sisters:
If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son
but handed him over for us all,
how will he not also give us everything else along with him?

Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones?
It is God who acquits us, who will condemn?
Christ Jesus it is who died—or, rather, was raised—
who also is at the right hand of God,
who indeed intercedes for us.
Commentary
GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD
These lines are part of Paul’s moving contemplation on God’s great love for humanity: God so loved the world that God did not hesitate to give up his Son who so loved humanity that he delivered himself into its hands; now, his Spirit is in us and nothing can ever separate us from the infinite love of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Paul begins his contemplation with the words "What then are we to say…?” (v. 31a)

But then, in the second part of today’s passage Paul seems to have anticipated the question that many of us may be asking: "You speak only of God’s love, but where is God’s justice in all this?" So he addresses the question of God's justice: he uses juridical terms such as “bring a charge against… acquits… condemn.” Paul imagines humanity appearing in a court of law. Here, as always, Paul draws from the Old Testament, because the theme of God’s judgment runs throughout biblical history; and just like all the other words in the vocabulary of faith, the meaning of the word "judgment" changed over time as believers discovered the true face of God. For human beings justice is usually imagined as weight scales (the scales of justice); but God who is All-Other has a different concept of justice. God’s judgment is never one of condemnation or imprisonment, but always one of salvation and liberation.

One of the most poignant texts illustrating the divine concept of justice is found in the first Servant Song in the Book of Isaiah: "Here is my servant… I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice" (Is 42.1-3). Indeed it is with great gentleness that judgment is passed. And a little further on Isaiah gives the verdict: the Servant will “open the eyes that are blind… bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness"(Is 42.7). In other words, God’s judgment is a release from our personal prisons - inseparable however from the missionary mandate to go and tell the whole world about the depth and breadth of God’s love.

Therefore Paul concludes that, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" Who could afford to be against us? Or take God’s place in judging us? "Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us, who will condemn?" Then Paul adds that we can be sure that “God is for us" for “He…did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all." God did not "take away this cup" as Christ asked at Gethsemane; God did not miraculously lift Jesus out from under the hatred of men.

In the first eight chapters of this letter to the Romans Paul explains that before the coming of Christ all of humanity was in a hopeless situation, locked in a kind of slavery: the Gentiles gave themselves over to idols, false gods which inspired all sorts of aberrant behaviors, fanaticism, hatred, and unrest; and the Jews, although the recipients of Revelation, failed to recognize the Messiah and sacrificed him under a false interpretation of the Law.

GOD WANTS THE SALVATION OF ALL
Faced with this disastrous failure of humanity, God has taken the initiative to give us a Savior; God has accomplished the salvation that human beings were unable to bring about on their own. However, it is in the name of the Law given by God that the Son of God is executed as a public sinner; and God allows this human folly. The cross is as much a manifestation of the Father's love as it is a manifestation of the love of the Son: God allows us to discover the extent of his love for us. In contemplating Christ’s death we are brought face to face with the immensity of God's love.

In his writings Paul insists over and over that Christ died “for us all”; love is, after all, hypothetically free. "With (God) there is no partiality," says the letter to the Ephesians (repeating a phrase from Sirach) (Eph 6.9). The letter to Timothy insists that God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all" (1 Tim 2.4-6). And by now you know that the word ‘ransom’ means liberation; we are liberated from our dreadful misconception, from our difficulty to believe that God is love. Salvation is to have our eyes opened to this truth. In the letter to Timothy quoted above it is quite clear that God our Savior desires everyone to be saved, that is, to come to the knowledge of the truth, the truth that God is Love.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul says, “But now the righteousness of God has been disclosed… For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus " (Rom 3.21-24). And the letter to the Ephesians echoing the prophet Isaiah says: “He came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Eph 2.17). Finally, Paul concludes this chapter by saying that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8.39).

The all-encompassing phrase of Lent is “convert, and believe in the Good News!” And the News is even better than we had dared to believe.

Gospel – Mark 9.2-10
Jesus took Peter, James, and John
and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them,
and his clothes became dazzling white,
such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.
Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses,
and they were conversing with Jesus.
Then Peter said to Jesus in reply,
“Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified.
Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them;
from the cloud came a voice,
“This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”
Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone
but Jesus alone with them.

As they were coming down from the mountain,
he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone,
except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves,
questioning what rising from the dead meant.
Commentary
Each year on the second Sunday of Lent we read one of the three Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration. I will limit my comments to one aspect of Mark’s account of this event, a somewhat surprising aspect: “he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Why this rule of secrecy given by Jesus to his disciples?

First of all, what did they see? On a mountain Jesus appears to them in glory between two of Israel’s greatest figures: Moses the liberator, the one who handed them the Law, and Elijah the prophet of Horeb. We who know the end of the story are aware of what the disciples did not yet know: that some time later, on another mountain, Jesus will be crucified between two thieves.

Jesus knows that the biggest challenge of faith facing the apostles will be to recognize in these two faces of the Messiah the image of the Father: "he who has seen me has seen the Father" Jesus says to Philip the day before his death (John 14.9). This I think is a key phrase for understanding the mystery of Christ, because these two images, of glory and of suffering, are the twin sides of the one love of God for humanity as incarnated in Jesus Christ; as Saint Paul says in his letter to the Romans, God's love is manifested (made visible) in Jesus Christ: "the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8.39). And on several occasions, Jesus himself made the connection between glory and suffering - in speaking of the Son of man, for example; but it is still too early for the disciples to understand and accept this mystery of the suffering Messiah. That is probably why Jesus asks them not to tell anyone what they have seen “except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

“(Jesus) charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”  Mark says that the disciples did as they were told while wondering, “what rising from the dead meant.” The disciples no doubt believed in the resurrection of the dead, like the majority of the Jews of their time; but they believed that it applied only to the end of time, and so they may have wondered why they had to remain silent “until the resurrection of the dead” that is to say “until the end of time”!

Another enigma for them was the title of Son of Man that Jesus attributed to himself. When he mentioned the Son of Man, they would immediately have thought of the prophet Daniel who spoke of the coming Messiah as the ‘son of man’; but this was actually a collective title since the prophet also called the Messiah “the holy ones of the Most High” (Daniel 7.18, 22). At the time of Jesus this idea of ​​a collective Messiah was present in certain circles, where another image, the remnant of Israel, was also current (that Israel and the world would be saved by a faithful core of believers.)

However, Jesus could not be considered a collective being! Again, it was not until the Resurrection and Pentecost that the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth understood that Jesus is the head of the “the holy ones of the Most High” and that all the baptized worldwide are invited to act as one with him to save humanity.

Therefore, there were good reasons to ask the disciples not to speak right away about what they had not yet understood. In the meantime, they are asked to listen - the only way to enter into God’s mysteries: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”

“THIS IS MY BELOVED SON. LISTEN TO HIM.”
The words “Listen to him” were for the apostles an echo of the profession of faith they recited every day as faithful Jews, the “Shema Israel/ Hear O Israel.” This prayer is always a call to trust in God, no matter what. This trust will be severely tested in the coming months: the Transfiguration takes place at a key moment in Jesus' ministry; it marks the end of his ministry in Galilee and the beginning of the journey to Jerusalem and to the cross. The same applies to the words “my beloved”; it was one of the names given by the prophet Isaiah to the one he called the Servant of God: this Messiah would save his people through suffering and persecution.

However, Jesus thinks that all this must still remain secret, precisely because the disciples are not yet ready to understand (and even less the crowds) the mystery of the Person of Christ: the dazzling light of the Transfiguration should not detract those who witnessed it: they are not to interpret it as some earthly mark of success and glory; on the contrary, it is the radiation of love - a far cry from the hope for political triumph and instant power to which the apostles still held on and that inhabited them to the end. By asking for their silence, Jesus opens them to eventually understanding that only the Resurrection will shed light on his mystery.

What is needed now is to come down from the mountain, to resist the temptation to settle in the comfort zone of some tents, but rather to face hostility, persecution and death. The vision of the Transfiguration suddenly fades and “they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them”; this sentence sounds like a reminder of the inevitable reality facing Jesus: his glory, real as it may be, does not relieve him from the demands of his mission. Perhaps he asks his disciples not to speak of the event because he himself does not want to be weakened in his resolve to face his coming trials. 
Translated with permission by Simone Baryliuk, from: Commentaires de Marie Noëlle Thabut, 1er mars, 2015
http://www.eglise.catholique.fr/foi-et-vie-chretienne/commentaires-de-marie-noelle-thabut.html