Friday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on Genesis 23:1-4,19; 24:1-8,62-67

We come to the end of the story of Abraham. The reading consists of selected paragraphs from chapters 23 and 24. As the reading opens we learn that Abraham’s wife Sarah has died at Hebron, a place also known as Kiriath-arba (Hebron). She was 127 years old. Abraham is plunged into mourning with grief for his wife and the mother of his only son.

Leaving her bedside he went to the “Hittites” (“sons of Heth” in some translations), the pre-Israelite and non-Semitic inhabitants of Palestine. As he was an outsider and a settler in the land of Canaan, he asked for a burial plot where his wife could be laid. He still “lived in tents” (see Heb 11:9), the most temporary of dwellings, but he looked forward to the more permanent home promised to him. About this, the author of Hebrews says:

…he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. (Heb 11:10)

Ownership of burial land was a crucial step in establishing legal residence. In the culture, people had a strong desire to be buried ‘with their fathers’ in their native land. By purchasing a burial place in Canaan, Abraham indicated his unswerving commitment to the Lord’s promise—Canaan was his new homeland.

The New American Bible states:

“A resident alien would normally not have the right to own property. The importance of Abraham’s purchase of the field, which is worded in technical legal terms, lies in the fact that it gave his descendants their first, though small, land rights in the country that God had promised the patriarch they would one day inherit as their own. Abraham therefore insists on purchasing the field and not receiving it as a gift.”

The Hittite leader was happy to give Abraham a burial place as a gift, but Abraham insisted on buying it so that he had full rights over it. It gave him a legal standing in Canaan which he did not have before. He then buried his wife in the cave within “the field of Ephron in Machpela” which he had bought and which was opposite to Mamre, in Canaan.

Abraham himself was also well advanced in years and had been blessed by God in many ways. He knows that death cannot be far away. His main concern is for his son and his future descendants. The elaborate story of acquiring a wife for Isaac marks the last, decisive step toward fulfilment of the promise of progeny through Isaac.

First, Abraham calls his senior servant, the steward of all his vast possessions (perhaps the Eliezer we met previously), and makes him take an oath:

Put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth, that you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live…

The descendants of Abraham must come from his own people. Putting the hand under the thigh means placing them near the genital organs to signify the solemnity of the oath which follows. The symbolism of this act was apparently connected with the Hebrew concept of children issuing from their father’s ‘thigh’ or ‘loin’ (see New American Bible Revised Edition note for Exod 1:5). Perhaps the man who took such an oath was thought to bring the curse of sterility on himself if he did not fulfil his sworn promise. Jacob made Joseph swear in the same way (Gen 47:29). In both these instances, the oath was taken to carry out the last request of a man upon his deathbed.

The servant is to go to Abraham’s land, Mesopotamia, and to choose a wife for Isaac from among his kinsfolk. The steward has one problem. What if the future wife does not want to leave her country and go to Canaan? Is Isaac to go back and live there with her? Abraham rules out that suggestion altogether:

The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my birth and who spoke to me and swore to me, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’…

So Abraham is torn between loyalty to his own people, the ‘purity’ of his family line and his mandate to take possession of his adopted home.

Abraham promises his steward that God will send an angel ahead of him to choose a suitable wife for his son. However, if the woman chosen is not willing to come back to Canaan, the steward will be released from the oath he is now being asked to make. The steward then put his hand under Abraham’s thigh and made the oath.

We now move to the end of chapter 24 for the last part of the reading. In between, there is the long account of how the steward went to Mesopotamia and came across the beautiful Rebekah coming to a well to draw water (Jacob—later called ‘Israel’—will meet his future wife, Rachel, at a well also). Is there an echo of these scenes in John’s Gospel where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at a well—symbolic of the Old Testament—and takes her as his ‘spiritual’ bride into the New Covenant? (see John 4).

Rebekah turns out to be a niece of Abraham, the daughter of his brother Nahor, and is a virgin. She fulfils all the requirements. The steward meets her family, showers them with gifts from his master and then takes Rebekah back to Canaan (see Gen 24:10-61).

We are then told that Isaac, who lived in the Negeb, had come into the wilderness to the well of Beer-lahai-roi (there are lots of wells!). This was the site of the annunciation of Ishmael’s birth to Hagar. Isaac’s emergence from there has a symbolic resonance—henceforth he will have his own posterity. As he walked in the evening light, Isaac saw a caravan of camels approaching. With it was Rebekah. She looked up and saw Isaac, her future husband, for the first time. Getting down from her camel she asked who was the man she saw walking towards them. Abraham’s servant replied:

It is my master.

Rebekah immediately veiled her face, perhaps indicating that she was unmarried. Up to now the steward’s master had been Abraham; from now on it is Isaac, the new patriarch of the family. The servant then told Isaac all that had happened in his search for a bride. Isaac, without more ado:

…took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.

Isaac is now head of the family, but we will not spend too much time with him. In fact, there will be just one more reading about him.

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Friday of Week 13 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 9:9-13

The cure of the paralytic is immediately followed by the call of Matthew, named Levi by Mark and Luke in their versions of the story. Matthew/Levi was an unlikely disciple; he was a tax collector. Tax collectors were among the most despised group of people in Jewish society of the time. Tax collectors never can be particularly popular, given their distasteful job, but in Jesus’ time they were collecting taxes for the hated and pagan colonial ruler. As such they were seen as collaborators and traitors to their own people and to their religion. The Romans had the custom of farming out the collecting of taxes to volunteer agents. These individuals paid up-front the amount that the Romans demanded, and then had to get the money back from the people. In doing so they often collected more than they had paid the Romans. This was their ‘commission’, but there was often an element of extortion and corruption in the whole practice.

Now Jesus invites one of these despised people to be his follower. It is an example of Jesus’ looking beyond the exterior and the stereotype to the potential of the real person inside. Immediately after this, Jesus is seen sitting “in the house” having dinner with his disciples when they are joined by a number of tax collectors and other public sinners. It is not clear whether the ‘the’ refers to the house where Jesus was staying or Matthew’s house. In either event, it was bound to attract the notice of Jesus’ critics.

And indeed some Pharisees, seeing this, are shocked. They ask the disciples (not Jesus):

Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?

For the Pharisees, if Jesus is a man of God and a teacher, how can he be seen in the company of people who are religiously unclean? To be in their company is to become contaminated and unclean also.

Overhearing them, Jesus replies:

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.

Jesus turns the tables on the Pharisees by looking at the situation from a completely different perspective.

The problem is not of Jesus’ becoming contaminated by the sinful and the unclean, but rather their becoming healed by his presence and influence. The legally-minded (the ritualists) are only interested in themselves; those governed by love (the merciful) think primarily of the needs of their brothers and sisters. There is no need for Jesus to spend time with the virtuous, i.e. with the already converted; it is those in spiritual and moral deprivation with whom he needs to spend his time.

The lesson of today’s reading is extremely relevant for our own day. When looking for potential followers of Christ, where do we tend to look? How many times have we heard people wonder why God picked them as Christian leaders—as priests, religious or lay people? When we look at the Twelve Apostles, they were indeed a strange bunch: full of faults, fragile in their faith, but in the end they started something extraordinary.

Is it not true that a great deal of our pastoral energies in our churches are directed at those already converted? Is it also not true that those most in need of experiencing Christ’s love and healing may be found in places where we are hesitant to go? Perhaps we should have courage and look for people in such places; Christ will be with us when we go there.

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