A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 4, n. 16)
2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B – March 12, 2006
“He Did Not Withhold His Beloved Son”
BIBLE READINGS
Gn 22:1-2, 9a, 10-12, 15-18 // Rom 8:31b-34 // Mk 9:2-10
N.B. This new series of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY presents a biblico-liturgical study of the Old Testament reading of each Sunday Mass to serve as background for a better understanding of the Gospel proclaimed in the liturgy. For a biblico-liturgical study of the Gospel for each Sunday, please go to the PDDM Web Archives: WWW.PDDM.US.
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
I no longer remember the author of the story, “Mateo Falcone” that we read in our high school course in literature. It is about a macho protagonist in a bandit land governed strictly by a code of honor. One day, a wounded thief who was being pursued by a band of police accosted Mateo’s only begotten son for help. In exchange for some coins, Mateo’s son agreed to hide him in a haystack. The police chief, however, was able to induce the boy to betray the thief by tempting him with a beautiful golden-chained watch as a prize. When Mateo and his wife arrived, the thief was being carted away. The expletives of the thief against the boy and his insinuations against a family of traitors left Mateo grim and speechless. The watch clutched by his son testified to the betrayal. Mateo solemnly led his son to a mountain and ordered the trembling boy to dig a shallow grave. After allowing him to recite all the prayers he had learned from childhood, he pointed his rifle at his beloved son - the only child borne by his wife in their later years - and shot him to death.
Mateo Falcone’s sacrifice of his only son in order to preserve his personal integrity and the code of honor reigning in the land gives us a glimpse of the enormous implication of the offering made by patriarch Abraham of his beloved Isaac – the son in whom rested the divine promise of posterity. In the Old Testament passage proclaimed to the liturgical assembly in this second Sunday of Lent (Gn 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18), we hear the intriguing story of God involving Abraham in a test of faith. God commanded him to take his beloved son Isaac to the land of Moriah to offer him as a holocaust.
The biblical scholar, Richard Clifford comments: “The story is a masterpiece, presenting God as the Lord whose demands are absolute, whose will is inscrutable and whose final word is grace. Abraham shows the moral grandeur of the founder of Israel, facing God, willing to obey God’s word in all its mysterious harshness. Absent here are Abraham’s voluble evasions. He is silently trusting and obedient … The father’s very life is bound up with that of his child and heir. Abraham entrusts his life and his future unconditionally to God who calls him … Abraham truly fears God, for he has not withheld his favored son. He has finally learned to give up control over his own life that he might receive it as grace.”
Having looked kindly on Abraham’s obedient faith and having acknowledged the genuineness of his devotion to the divine ineffable will, the Lord God prevented Abraham from inflicting death on his beloved son, Isaac. God himself provided the alternative holocaust. A sacrificial ram was found in the thicket. Abraham took the ram, slaughtered it and offered it in place of his son. Infant sacrifice was widely practiced in Canaan and in the Phoenician colonies of North Africa. It was even practiced in Israel in critical times as a means of averting divine wrath. However, the story of the rescue of Isaac by God challenged the pagan notion that child sacrifice is acceptable to the divine. The redemption of Abraham’s son as holocaust manifested God’s abhorrence of such brutal practices and his condemnation of bloody, human sacrifice. Hence, guided by a divine directive that rejects the criminal sacrifice of human lives, the Israelites – who recognized deeply that every firstborn son belongs to Yahweh – then sought to “redeem” their firstborn by using animal sacrifice as a substitute.
The story of the spiritual sacrifice of Abraham is a paradigm. The sacrificial character of Abraham’s faith response foreshadows the magnanimous love oblation of God who gave up his own Son on the mountain of Calvary. Abraham’s offering of his beloved son on a mountain in the land of Moriah is a paradigm for God the Father’s sacrifice of his Son Jesus Christ on the cross. The offering made by the Father of his Son, totally consumed in sacrifice, absolutely surpassed the sacrifice of Abraham’s beloved son, Isaac, which was not brought to completion. Indeed, while God rescued Isaac from the bloody sacrifice, he did not spare his own Son, Jesus Christ, but gave him over for us all (cf. Rom 8:31b-34 – this Sunday’s second reading).
Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, n. 34, underlines the sacrificial nature of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ – the incarnate love of God: “So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love … The death of Jesus Christ on the cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form.”
The Gospel account of the Lord’s Transfiguration (Mk 9:2-10) underlines the reality that the love sacrifice of the Father and his beloved Son is not futile. The sacrifice on the cross leads to paschal glory and results in abundant blessings for all the redeemed. The ultimate word is not death and destruction, but salvation - the radical victory of love and of life through the paschal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the beloved Son-Servant of Yahweh.
The Church Father, St. Ephrem concludes with a beautiful reflection on the Transfiguration event: “On the mountain Jesus revealed to his apostles that he was the Son of God, that he was in fact God himself … He therefore took them up onto the mountain so that they could hear his Father’s voice calling him Son, and he could show them that he was truly the Son of God and was himself divine. He took them up onto the mountain in order to show them his kingship before they witnessed his passion, to let them see his mighty power before they watched his death, to reveal his glory to them before they beheld his humiliation. Then when the Jews took him captive and condemned him on the cross, the apostles would understand that it was not for any lack of power on his part that Jesus allowed himself to be crucified by his enemies, but because he had freely chosen to suffer in that way for the world’s salvation.”
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
A. How does the sacrifice of Abraham, our father in faith, affect us, engage us, and involve us? In what way we are like Abraham in our response to God? In what way we are not like the obedient, faithful patriarch?
B. How does the sacrificial love of God the Father, consumed in the death of his Son Jesus Christ on the cross, lead us to a spirit of praise and thanksgiving and transform our lives into “Eucharist” – into perfect oblation? Does the saving mystery of God, who did not withhold his own beloved Son, overwhelm us with reverence and gratitude? Are we capable of true self-giving and sacrificial love?
C. Do we allow ourselves to be drawn intimately into the mystery of Christ’s transfiguration? Do we believe and experience that the glory of the resurrection, the glory of Christian life, cannot be found through anything but suffering? Recognizing that our lives are filled with many kinds of death, do we look forward daily to the Easter glory?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
(Prayer text adapted from J. Servel, Chantes notes (Paris 1989), p. 289-290.)
Assembly: Today, let us go up the mountain
on which Jesus will shine forth.
Leader: Who can withstand, O Lord, your light?
Who will face the cross?
Assembly: Today, let us go up the mountain
on which Jesus will shine forth.
(Silent Prayer)
Assembly: Today, let us remain in the light.
Jesus Christ will keep us.
Leader: Heal us, Lord, by your wounds.
Create in us a new heart.
Assembly: Today, let us remain in the light.
Jesus Christ will keep us.
(Silent Prayer)
Assembly: Today, let us walk in the light.
Jesus will rise.
Leader: Open to us the doors of life.
Open to us the new times.
Assembly: Today, let us walk in the light.
Jesus will rise.
(Silent Prayer)
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“I know how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.” (Gn 22:12)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
A. ACTION PLAN: Pray for those who are undergoing an intense test of faith that, like Abraham and Jesus Christ – transfigured on the mountain and crucified on the cross, they may continue to believe in the wisdom, goodness and loving kindness of God, our Father. Allow yourself to be instruments of God the Father’s rescuing hand in today’s situations that cry for redemption. As part of your Lenten practice, be attentive to the signs and pledge of Easter glory that God, through his Son, Jesus Christ, irradiates in our daily lives.
B. ACTION PLAN: To contemplate more intensely the loving design of God for us and to experience more deeply the pledge of glory given to us by Jesus in his transfiguration, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR (Vol. 2, n. 16): A Weekly Pastoral Tool.
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
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Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US