A Father Who Does Not Withhold His Son
Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent (Year B)
“[God] did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all” (Rom 8:32).
Last week a group of my college students embarked on an impromptu pilgrimage to Greenville, South Carolina, where major relics of St. Jude the Apostle were being displayed for veneration at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary. St. Jude’s relics are currently making a special tour of the US, and this was the closest they were coming to our neck of the woods.
My students had an amazing experience. One of them took her boyfriend with her, who is not a practicing Christian. And that was a very different experience for him, as you might imagine. They told me that on the car ride home, he was full of questions about the Church and what we believe about Jesus. My students told me that they found themselves, in answering his questions to the best of their ability, saying things like, “Well, to understand this thing about Jesus, you really first have to understand this other thing about Moses.” Or, “To understand this about Jesus, you have to first know this about Abraham.” They found themselves constantly referring to Old Testament figures and events in order to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I was very proud of them when they told me that, because firstly, they were evangelizing, sharing their faith in response to a curious seeker’s questions. But also because I knew that they understood; this is how the gospel works. It’s not an isolated event in human history that stands alone from everything else. It is an integrated part of a larger story; one that God’s been writing from the first moment of creation. And we all have a part in that story. Jesus himself, after the resurrection on the road to Emmaus, explained to the disciples from the Old Testament scriptures how it was that the Messiah had to suffer and die, and rise from the dead. In the Acts of the Apostles, we see the deacon Philip explaining to the Ethiopian eunuch about the gospel of Christ from the prophecies of Isaiah. I believe it was St. Jerome who said that the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and that the Old Testament is revealed in the New. There is a continuity between them such that you cannot fully understand the meaning of one without the other.
For example, you cannot really understand what happens at the Last Supper without knowledge of the Passover. The Last Supper that Jesus celebrated with the Apostles on the night he was arrested was a ritual Passover meal. It had a very important religious, cultural and historical context. And since the Last Supper was when Jesus instituted the Eucharist, that means you cannot really understand the Eucharist without understanding the Passover. The Eucharist is the Passover meal of the new and eternal covenant. So the Passover is still relevant to us. This is why, as we prepare for Easter during the season of Lent, the Church recounts for us the story of the Exodus. If you pray the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours, you know that from the first day of Lent we start reading from Exodus. And at the Holy Thursday Mass, which we will celebrate a few weeks from now, the account of the institution of the Passover is read from Exodus, together with the account of the institution of the Eucharist from the gospels.
I bring this up today because when we read about the Apostles seeing Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop conversing with Moses and Elijah, we need to understand what this meant for them. Moses is the one through whom God gave His law to Israel. So he represents the Law. And Elijah represents the prophets. By standing together with them, Jesus is positioning himself in continuity with them as their successor and the fulfillment of all that they prefigured. Everything in both the Law and the Prophets, which is to say the entire Hebrew scriptures, was pointing to Jesus who is proclaimed in this moment by the Father Himself to be His beloved Son.
When the Apostles saw Jesus standing with Moses and Elijah, they understood the significance because they knew who Moses and Elijah were. But that doesn’t mean that the Apostles understood everything about the gospel at this time. Jesus tells them not to tell anyone what they have seen until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead, and they questioned what “rising from the dead” meant. They didn’t know that the Messiah had to suffer and die, and rise from the dead. But they would later come to understand what St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, that God “did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all” (Rom 8:32).
This calls to mind another event in salvation history where a father did not spare his own son; the sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac. Isaac has been seen as a prefigurement of Christ in the way that he willingly carries the wood for his own sacrifice up to the top of the mountain, just as Christ carries the wood of the cross to Calvary. Isaac, like Jesus, is obedient to his father, even to the point of death. He willingly takes the heavy weight of the wood upon his shoulders as the two of them ascend Mount Moriah. Isaac knew what was happening. He saw the knife. He saw the fire. He knew what the wood was for. So he asks his father, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering” (Gen 22:7). Abraham answers, “God himself will provide the lamb” (Gen 22:8), as we see that He did in today’s first reading.
An interesting thing about Mount Moriah: you will not find it on any map. Historians are not entirely sure where it is. But there is a tradition that says “Moriah” is another name for Zion. So there is a good chance that it was at this very same place that, centuries later, Jesus gathered his Apostles to celebrate the Last Supper with them in the Upper Room. It was, as we said, a Passover meal, and one of the things we know from Exodus is that the Passover meal required certain things, such as unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and above all a lamb. And this lamb had to not only be sacrificed, but consumed, for the sacrifice to be consummated.
Imagine that you are at that Passover meal with Jesus in the Upper Room on Zion. Imagine that you are St. Peter, or St. Andrew, or St. Jude. You see the bread. You see the herbs. But there is one thing conspicuously absent. And so you can’t help but wonder, “Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” And perhaps those prophetic words that Abraham spoke, maybe at that same location, enter your mind: “God himself will provide the lamb.” And just at that moment, Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it, and says, “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.” Like our father Abraham, God does not withhold his Son from us, but offers him as a willing victim for our salvation. God himself provides the lamb, as He planned from all eternity and as He continues to do at each and every Mass, which is our new covenant Passover.
To truly understand the Mass, to understand everything that God does for us in Christ, it is so important for us to know the story of salvation history, because this is our story. It’s a story told for us and about us — about God’s eternal love for us. As St. Jerome said, “Ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” This is why the Church continues to offer us an Old Testament reading in addition to the gospel at Mass, to underscore the connection between the two. But just listening to the readings passively once a week is not sufficient. We need to study the text, to make the story our own, for it truly is the story of God’s undying love for us, a story written in history. It is the greatest, most beautiful, and the truest story ever told.
