Homily, 2-25-24; Sunday of the 2nd Week in Lent, Cycle B:
“Today if you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts.” This is one of the antiphons we use during Lent to start our Liturgy of the Hours, our daily Christian prayer. It’s taken from the psalms and I think it sums up today’s message, a call to obedience.
Listen to what we heard in the gospel reading today: “Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; from the cloud came a voice. ‘This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.’” God the Father is speaking to us. And He instructs us to listen to His Son with hearts that are not hardened. And, as we see in our first reading, obedience will often require us to be willing to make great sacrifices.
The story of the test of Abraham is one of the most dramatic in the Old Testament. It is chock full of symbolism and history that makes the story even more interesting and instructive for us. We lose a little bit because the story is abridged to make it more manageable for Mass. So I encourage to read the entire story from your Bible when you get home to get the full impact.
Abraham is told by God to travel to the lands of Moriah to offer his son as a sacrifice. It was a three-day journey which makes the emotional agony of Abraham’s obedience even more excruciating. How did he face his son on the journey? Was he able to sleep at all?
Now Moriah is a place of great historical significance. The second book of Chronicles in the Old Testament tells us that Solomon built the Temple on Mt. Moriah, the height in the land of Moriah which by then was called Jerusalem. Jewish legend also tells us that after Noah’s took Adam’s bones with him on the ark. When the ark settled onto dry land, Noah gave his son Shem the skull of Adam when the ark came to rest. Shem gave the skull to Melchizedek, the King of Salem. Melchizedek buried Adam’s skull in the city of Salem, or the city of peace, which translates to Jerusalem. And this location became known as the place of the skull; we will refer to the place as Golgotha when we read the story of the passion next month.
And this leads us to consider parallels between God the Father and Abraham, and between Jesus and Isaac at Moriah. Like the Father, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only beloved son there. Isaac travels to Jerusalem with a donkey, sound familiar, and then he carries wood on his back as he goes up Mt. Moriah to be sacrificed. And we assume that he, like Jesus, was willing to be sacrificed because he was a strong young man while Abraham was over 100 years old. Abraham couldn’t have tied Isaac up without his cooperation. Abraham was willing to offer his only beloved son for God, and his son was willing to obediently participate. But God provided a male sheep, an adult lamb, to be offered in the place of Isaac. It was caught in a thicket, almost like it had a crown of thorns around its head. About two thousand years later, in the exact same place, God the Father was willing to offer his only beloved Son, the Lamb of God, in our place. The new Adam, gave up His life to put an end to death at the same location that the first Adam, who brought death to the world, was buried.
And so another 2000 years have passed, and we find ourselves in another Lenten Season; a time when we can reflect on our obedience and our willingness to offer sacrifices. We may sometimes have trouble relating to God the Father, and even Jesus, but we can instead try to put ourselves in Abraham’s place, or in Isaac’s place, as we reflect on the strength of their faith. We can use them as examples. Abraham was holy and heard God speaking to him clearly. He listened and obeyed. The Father spoke from a cloud and told us, as well, to listen to Jesus.
“This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”
So Lent can be a time to grow in holiness so that we improve our relationship with God. In our prayers we will be able to listen better and hear God speaking to us better. We fast and make sacrifices to practice our ability to be obedient so that when we hear God speak to us, we can have the strength to carry out His will; to not only hear, but to listen to Him. We give alms to practice charity and to remind us that we are just stewards of God’s gifts; we should do with them what God wants, not what we want.
Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. We are only here on earth for a short time. Make your time count. Be willing to make sacrifices; they are very temporary. The afterlife is eternal. In faith, we know that there is not anything that we shouldn’t be willing to sacrifice? But still we hold back, because our faith is weak. Pray that it be strengthened like that of Abraham and Isaac.
In faith, do what the Father said from the cloud; listen to His Son, Jesus. And then, in faith, do what Mary said to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana; and that is “do whatever He tells you.”
“Today if you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts.”