Saturday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 27:1-5,15-29

We jump a couple of chapters in our story today. There is relatively little about Isaac in the Genesis story; he is seen mainly in relationship to his father Abraham and his two sons, Esau and Jacob. Today’s passage begins with Isaac already in his old age and blind. As we will see, he is blind in more ways than one. Before he dies he wants to give his final, solemn blessing to his heir—and whoever gets that blessing will be the heir.

He calls his elder son, Esau, into his presence. Isaac tells his son that he is now old and does not know when he is going to die. He gives instructions to Esau to get his hunting gear together and bring back some game. Then he is to take it and prepare the kind of savoury dish which Esau knows his father likes. Then Isaac will give Esau, his son and heir, a blessing before he dies. The language suggests a special blessing which was legally binding and, as a solemn deathbed blessing, especially efficacious.

Rebekah, the mother, happens to overhear this conversation. She is not happy because she wants the blessing to go to Jacob, her favourite son. She makes a plan to deceive her husband and reveals it to Jacob. It is not included in our reading, but Jacob had a serious problem with his mother’s plan. He was a smooth-skinned man, but Esau was very hairy. If Isaac touched Jacob he would immediately know that it was not Esau he was blessing. Rebekah says she will take care of that problem.

After Esau had gone out into the countryside to hunt some game, Rebekah dressed Jacob in Esau’s best clothes, which were in the house. She also covered Jacob’s arms and the smooth back of his neck with the “fur of the kids” which had been killed to make the savoury dish. She then gave the savoury dish which she had prepared, and some bread for Jacob to bring in to his father. In the presence of his father, Jacob announces, “Here I am.” “Who are you, my son?” asks Isaac. Isaac replies that he is Esau, his father’s first-born. Dressed in Esau’s best clothes, Jacob tells his father to get up and enjoy the dish he has prepared and then to give his son his final blessing.

When Isaac expresses surprise that the hunting has taken such a short time, Jacob smoothly replies that it was God who put the animals in his path. To bring God into the lie might seem blasphemous to us, but the mentality of the time would see no wrong in it, as every event was ascribed to God, ignoring ‘secondary’ (i.e. human) causes.

Perhaps still a little sceptical, Isaac asks his son to come near so that he can feel him and make sure whether it is Esau or not. After touching him, Isaac comments that the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the arms are the arms of Esau. And then Isaac gives his blessing to Jacob, a blessing that was intended for Esau. Even then, the father still seems to have his doubts. He asks once more: “Are you really my son Esau?”, to which Jacob brazenly answers, “I am”.

Isaac then asks for the dish to be brought so that he could eat and give his blessing. The favourite dish is brought as well as some wine. The dish had been prepared by Rebekah who would know exactly the tastes of her husband. The father then asks his son to come closer and to give him a kiss. As Jacob does so, the father recognises the smell of the clothes, the clothes of Esau, and he deception is complete. We might note that in his attempt to obtain the covenant blessing, Jacob, the father of Israel, betrays with a kiss. Later, it will be Jesus, the great Son of Israel, who will ultimately obtain the blessing for the new Israel, who will be betrayed with a kiss (Matt 26:48-49; Luke 22:48).

There then follows the beautiful blessing of Isaac given to Jacob, but intended for Esau. In saying “Be lord over your brothers”, Isaac unwittingly blesses Jacob and his descendants, thus fulfilling God’s promise made earlier to Rebekah. In chapter 25, Rebekah becomes pregnant with twins who jostle with each other within her womb. When she asks the Lord what is happening, he tells her:

Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples born of you shall be divided;
the one shall be stronger than the other;
the elder shall serve the younger. (Gen 25:21-23)

This is not an altogether edifying story. One evaluation from the New American Bible goes like this:

“What Jacob did in deceiving his father and thereby cheating Esau out of Isaac’s deathbed blessing is condemned as blameworthy, not only by Hosea (12:3) and Jeremiah (9:3*), but also, indirectly, by the Yahwist narrator of the present story, who makes the reader sympathise with Esau as the innocent victim of a cruel plot, and shows that Jacob and his mother, the instigator of the plot, paid for it by a lifelong separation from each other. The story was told because it was part of the mystery of God’s ways in salvation history—his use of weak, sinful people to achieve his own ultimate purpose.

*Put no trust in any brother. Every brother imitates Jacob, the supplanter, every neighbor is guilty of slander. (Jer 9:3—citation from New American Bible Revised Edition)

And the Jerusalem Bible comments:

“The morality is immature, but the lie reported here mysteriously serves God’s purpose; the free divine choice preferred Jacob to Esau.”

We need to remember, too, in an earlier scene not read during the liturgy at this time, that Esau, simply because he was very hungry, had exchanged his birthright with his brother Jacob in exchange for a bowl of red soup (see Gen 25:29-34). The author of Genesis makes the laconic comment:

So Esau treated his right as firstborn with disdain.
(Gen 25:34)

Esau is seen therefore as having forfeited his birthright in a very trivial and irresponsible way. Jacob, then, was technically entitled to what his brother had yielded to him, and he did that in the way we have seen.

Even so, we probably still cannot give our full approval for Jacob’s behaving in this way, but it is an example where a less than good action produces, in the long-term, desirable results. We can all probably think of similar examples from our own lives. We may have felt unjustly deprived of something which we thought was due to us, but as a result something far better came into our lives. As people like to say, “God can write straight with crooked lines.”

Jacob and his mother definitely deceived Isaac and were dishonest with him, but subsequent events clearly proved that Jacob was going to be a much better patriarch than Esau. We have no right to act unjustly or falsely, yet we do need to realise that good things can come from the immoral or mistaken actions or decisions of others.

Read more

Tuesday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 19:15-29

In today’s reading we move to the destruction of the two cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a punishment for their terrible immorality. Omitted is the scene when the two men, who are now being called ‘angels’ (Greek, angelos, meaning ‘messenger’) and who represent God’s own presence, are offered hospitality in Lot’s house. It is while they are there that that all the men of Sodom, both young and old, come demanding to “know” (in a sexual sense) the visitors. Rather than abuse his solemn obligations of hospitality, Lot offers his two virgin daughters instead. To our way of thinking today, it was an abhorrent and horrifying offer, but it shows that, at that time and in that culture, the demands of hospitality even outweighed other very personal considerations. Sadly, a more terrible example of this is in the Book of Judges (19:22-28).

In the end, the men of Sodom are dazzled by a blinding light so that they cannot find their way into the house. The men/angels warn Lot of the coming catastrophe and urge the family to flee at once. But when he makes the announcement to his family, Lot’s sons-in-law refuse to take him seriously. Their scepticism will seal their doom (perhaps this is also a device to exclude non-relatives of Abraham being saved?).

At dawn the following morning, the angels again urge Lot to leave with his household unless he wants to share the fate of the two cities. But Lot is still hesitant. Is he reluctant to leave behind all his wealth and prosperity? But the men take Lot by the hand together with his wife and two daughters and forcibly bring them to a place outside Sodom. This is seen as an act of God’s mercy, and it might be noticed that only the direct relatives of Abraham are so rescued—the in-laws are left to their own devices.

Once outside the city, Lot is told to flee the Plain where the cities are and take to the hills. Again, Lot is reluctant to do what he is told:

Oh, no, my lords; your servant has found favor with you, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life, but I cannot flee to the hills, for fear the disaster will overtake me and I die.

He is also afraid of being attacked and robbed in uninhabited places. He suggests being allowed to take refuge in another smaller city which is not far away and where he would be safer.

We are told “He replied” (presumably the Lord) and grants this concession and promises that this city will not be destroyed. But again, he urges Lot to get there as quickly as possible “for I can do nothing until you arrive there”. This city, we are told, was called Zoar, a word related to the Hebrew misear, meaning ‘a trifling thing’. The town lay to the southeast of the Dead Sea. Later, during the Roman period, an earthquake occurred and the town was flooded; it was rebuilt higher up the shore and inhabited until the Middle Ages.

By now the sun is already up. And at that moment fire and sulphur rained down from heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah. The two cities were destroyed and all the Plain with them, including all the inhabitants and all plant life.

According to historians, it is usually understood that the cause was volcanic, and there was a huge earthquake. This would naturally be accompanied by a disastrous fire, especially in a region containing bitumen and its accompanying gases. The text enables us to locate the catastrophe in the southern part of the Dead Sea. The subsidence of the southern half of the Dead Sea bed is known to be recent as geologists reckon, and the whole district is still geologically unstable. The doomed towns were, besides Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zebolim. Of course, it was understood by the sacred authors as punishment for the terrible immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah, and bears resemblance to the story of the Flood, where just one family, loyal to Yahweh, survived.

As Lot and his family fled, his wife, who disobeyed the order not to look back, was turned into a pillar of salt. Now only three people have survived—Lot and his two daughters (who had a double escape). The southern end of the Dead Sea features colossal salt pillars and perhaps one of them suggested the appearance of a woman and hence the legend.

Meanwhile, Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had spoken with the Lord and:

…he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.

From the heights east of Hebron, Abraham could easily see the region at the southern end of the Dead Sea, where the Cities of the Plain were probably located. The passage from Genesis concludes:

So it was that, when God destroyed the cities of the plain, God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in which Lot had settled.

The reading ends with the suggestion that Lot’s being saved was less for his own sake than for the sake of his uncle, Abraham. Earlier, when they were dividing the land between them, it had been suggested that Lot had made a less wise and more selfish choice in picking that area. He has now lost it all.

As we saw in the First Reading commentary for Monday of Week 13 in Ordinary Time, there is much discussion now about the nature of the real sin of the people of Sodom. Traditionally it has been seen as a condemnation of homosexual acts (Lev 20:13). Such acts were considered an abomination by the Jews and were regarded as typical of the surrounding gentile peoples (Lev 20:23).

Others however would see the sin of Sodom as the violation of the respect due to visitors, a sin against hospitality. Hospitality towards strangers has almost a sacred character among the people of the Middle East. This is seen in Lot’s anguished thought to even offer his daughters to address the lust of the townspeople, rather than dishonour his visitors.

The Church today (see The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2357-2359) distinguishes between homosexual acts (teaching that these are objectively sinful) and homosexual inclination (attraction to members of the same sex that is not subject to one’s own free will). The Church now recognizes that a minority of men and women are so constituted that they are sexually attracted primarily to people of their own gender. We are called to treat all people with compassion and to support and encourage all persons to live out Jesus’ call to holiness. We do this by obeying the Commandments, following the teaching of the Church as it evolves over time, and acting in accord with our informed conscience.

Read more