Saturday of Week 12 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 18:1-15

Another stage in the fulfilling of God’s promise to Abraham. The reading begins by our being told that the Lord visited Abraham by the terebinth (turpentine tree) of Mamre, which was the site of his home, as he sat at the entrance to his tent. For all his wealth and prosperity, Abraham still lives a nomadic life, as does Lot.

In fact, he sees three men standing before him. And the text seems uncertain in its use of singular or plural for the visitors. A more primitive tradition seems to speak of only three men and leaves their identity mysterious. Abraham in speaking uses the singular, but it is not clear whether he is speaking to all three in the singular, or to one of them. Many of the Fathers saw a foreshadowing here of the doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine that was revealed only in the New Testament. As later on, two of the men are described as ‘angels’, the third is taken by some to be Yahweh himself. Whatever interpretation is chosen, they clearly represent a special presence of God himself.

Abraham ran forward to greet them and bowed profoundly before them. Speaking in the singular (“My Lord”), he immediately asks them to accept the hospitality of his tent. At this stage his bowing to the ground is not religious adoration, but simply a mark of respect to guests. At first, Abraham sees his guests as mere human beings and welcomes them warmly; their superhuman character is only gradually revealed.

He offers them water to wash their hot and dusty feet and suggests they take some rest under the shade of a tree. He also invites them to have some food and refresh themselves before continuing their journey. They accept his invitation.

The picture is one of typical Near Eastern hospitality which includes:

Abraham immediately tells his wife Sarah to bake bread, and he orders that a steer be prepared for eating. When all was ready, he offered his guests the meat of the steer with curds and milk, and waited on them as they ate under the tree. The curds were a type of soft cheese or yogurt.

The men then asked for Sarah. On being told that she was in the tent (women did not appear in the presence of men as they ate), one of them said that he would return in about one year’s time when Sarah would have a child. ‘One of them’ would indicate the speaker as being Yahweh himself, something Abraham begins to realise when he hears the prediction of a miraculous birth. “About this time next year” is literally “when the time becomes alive”, i.e. at the time when birth is due after the period of gestation; the conception is understood as taking place soon after the prediction.

Sarah, who was inside at the entrance to the tent, heard all this being said. She and Abraham were very old, and Sarah had long before had her menopause. She “laughed to herself” at the thought of being a mother:

After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I be fruitful?

We will subsequently see her future son named “Isaac”, a name that means ‘God has smiled’.

But the Lord (in the person of the three men) asked Abraham why Sarah had laughed at the idea of becoming pregnant:

Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

Mary will hear similar words from Gabriel at the Annunciation. Again the Lord promises to return in a year’s time when Sarah will bear a son. Sarah then became afraid (she has begun to realise who the speaker is) and denies having laughed. But the Lord chides:

Yes, you did laugh.

That is the end of our reading. Immediately after this, the three men left and continued their journey to Sodom. Abraham, with true courtesy, accompanied them part of the way. This coming Monday will find us in Sodom. The reading is a lesson in courtesy and hospitality to the stranger, and one to be taken aboard by every Christian. One never knows when God is present in a caller to the door. In fact, one can take it that he is present, one way or another, in every caller and should be treated as such.

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Saturday of Week 12 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 8:5-17

Today we read about the second of the ten miracles of Jesus described by Matthew after the Sermon on the Mount. It is a story also found in Luke and John, but strangely enough, not in Mark.

The significant element in this story is the fact that the person asking for help is a centurion, a soldier and presumably not a Jew. Yet he has this great faith in Jesus. It is a sign of the future role of Gentiles in the originally all-Jewish Christian community.

The centurion asks Jesus to cure a servant who has become paralysed. Jesus immediately responds that he will go and cure him. The centurion replies:

Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.

These words should be very familiar to us from the paraphrase used in the prayers before sharing in Communion. And the centurion goes on to say that as an army officer, he just has to give commands and they are carried out on the spot. When it comes to healing, he knows that Jesus can do the same.

Jesus is astonished at the faith of this pagan:

Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.

And he foretells that this is a sign of what is going to happen in the future when Gentiles from all over the world will enter the Kingdom while many of Jesus’ own people will be left outside. What is more, they will become God’s people sharing glory with the Jewish ancestors: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is a sad theme running through the whole of this Gospel: the rejection of Jesus by so many of his own people and their self-chosen exclusion from the Kingdom.

The faith that Jesus expects is not an acceptance of religious doctrines. It is rather an act of total trust and surrender by which people commit themselves to the power of God—in this case, the power of God in Jesus.

Paraphrasing from the Jerusalem Bible:

Christ asks for this faith especially when he works his miracles, which are not so much acts of mercy as signs attesting his mission and witnessing to the kingdom; hence he cannot work miracles unless he finds the faith without which the miracles lose their true significance. (edited)

For this reason this faith was not easy to give, especially for many of Jesus’ hearers who could not see the presence of God in Jesus and hence could not commit themselves to him. Even the disciples were slow to believe. We see this especially in Mark’s Gospel. But once present, such a faith can bring about the transformation of a person’s life, as many converts to Christianity can attest.

Turning to the centurion, Jesus says,

Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.

And we are told:

…the servant was healed in that hour.

What is clear from this story and from many other healings by Jesus is the crucial element of faith in the one approaching Jesus. It is the only condition necessary—all other characteristics are irrelevant. Luke will tell us that Jesus was restricted in the help he could give to the people in his home town of Nazareth because they simply did not have faith in him.

Let us pray that we may never lose that gift of faith which has, in the mysterious ways of divine Providence, been given to us. And let us remember that, without that faith, God will be hampered in reaching out his healing love to us.

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