Readings: Gen 15:5-12, 17-18; Phil 3:17-4:1; Lk 9:28b-36
In the first reading today, the Lord promises to Abram that the number of his descendants would be greater than the number of stars in the sky. Moreover, God also promised Abram that He would give Abram the land in which he was camping to be his possession. Regarding the first promise, Abram simply believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. In the second situation, Abram asks God how he would know he was to possess the land.
Perhaps the first promise appeared easier to believe because Abram was married and naturally assumed he would have children. The second, however, is more difficult because the land was already occupied. This became the opportunity for Abram’s faith to be tested again. He brought the various animals as God had requested, then sacrificed them and cut them in half, then he waited. In our humanness, we might assume that if we did something like this, God would respond quickly, if not immediately.
Instead, God made Abram wait until darkness set in. One might wonder what kinds of thoughts were going through Abram’s mind as he sat there with the carcasses of the animals he had sacrificed. Was this just his imagination? Was he being tricked? Did God really speak to him? Was it the evil one who was attempting to dupe Abram? Almost certainly, there would have been temptations to doubt, perhaps even to leave. Yet Abram was able to face these temptations and overcome them, remaining resolute and staying with his sacrifices until the Lord established a covenant with him, thus rewarding Abram’s fidelity.
God has made promises to you that are even greater than those made to Abram. While not saying anything about our offspring, God has promised us an eternal homeland. St. Paul speaks of this in the second reading, showing why we should have confidence in God’s promise. Because of the Covenant we entered at baptism, becoming on that day members of Jesus Christ and children of our Heavenly Father, we can also now claim Heaven as our homeland. St. Paul tells us that our citizenship is in Heaven.
Unlike Abram, God has not spoken to us directly, but He has spoken to us through the Scriptures. In the Gospel, we are told about the events of the Transfiguration and the voice of God saying that Jesus is His chosen Son and to listen to Him. So, we have the voice of God and we have a covenant with its promises, but we might still ask, “How do I know?”
On one hand, the answer to this question is easier to accept than what God asked of Abram. But on the other hand, it can be more difficult as well. The answer is that we must have faith in what God has promised. This is easier than Abram’s test because it is more objective for us. This is also what might seem to make it more difficult: the subjective experience was someone else’s experience and not our own.
St. Peter, who was on Mount Tabor and experienced the Transfiguration firsthand and heard the voice of God while enveloped in the cloud, tells us, while speaking of this experience, that we have something more reliable than his subjective experience. He points us to the Prophets and, by extension, the Scriptures. Pointing to the Prophets is interesting because it relies on the subjective experiences of the Prophets.
However, it is more than that. The Prophets, and the rest of the Scriptures, had received the approval of the people who had been given authority in Israel. The belief that the Scriptures are the Word of God was not just Peter’s personal opinion; he was basing his belief on the collective belief of the People of God. When St. Peter wrote his letters, there was no New Testament, nor did he think he was writing something that was divinely inspired and would, one day, be included in the New Testament.
We can believe what St. Peter wrote because the Church, founded by Jesus Christ and given authority by Him, has approved it. We might think it would be easier to believe if God spoke directly to us, but what certainty would we have that it was actually the Lord and that we were not being duped by the devil or even by our own imagination? We would still need someone outside of ourselves to determine that our experience was truly of God.
So, we can have absolutely surety about the Word of God and the promises He has made. For us, we need to believe, without doubt. This faith needs to result in action: to live as people of the promise, standing firm in the Lord, and conducting ourselves as citizens of Heaven, members of the Covenant established on the Cross.
Fr. Altier’s column appears regularly in The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, Minn. For information about subscribing to The Wanderer, please visit www.thewandererpress.com.
