Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Today in the weekday lectionary we begin reading selections from the story of Israel and its forebears, a journey that we will follow as a Church for nine weeks. We begin, appropriately, with the call of Abraham, whom we appropriately call our father in faith, since from him and Sarah is descended Jesus Christ, through whom we are grafted onto the olive tree of Israel (Rom 11:17–24).
In today’s reading, the faith of Abraham is demonstrated not in words and propositions but in obedience to the Lord’s command: Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father's house to a land that I will show you. Abraham and Sarah—then still named Abram and Sarai—must leave behind all they know, everything with which they are familiar (both figuratively and literally, in terms of family) to go to an unknown place where the Lord God promises to bless them. Their journey of faithful obedience to God is archetypal, prefiguring the faithful obedience of Mary at the annunciation—who had little to know idea of what would happen to her and to her Son to be born—and ultimately prefiguring the faithful obedience of Jesus Christ himself, who journeyed through the Cross to the realm of the dead in faithful obedience to the Father in order to redeem us. As Christians, we are called to the same faithful obedience, both in the little decisions of every day (do I really believe that God’s ways are life-giving?) and in the larger narratives of our lives. God is faithful to us; will we respond to faith with faith?
Today, let us ask for God’s gift of faithfulness, exemplified in Abraham’s response, to be poured out into us through the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ.