Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
July 8, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/070823.cfm
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Genesis presents us with a story that may make us pick sides.
Jacob Deceives Isaac (Rebekah in back). James Jacques Joseph Tissot. c. 1896-1902.
(All I can say is that Esau must have been one hairy dude!)
Old, blind Isaac, sensing death on the horizon, dramatically prepares to hand over the promise to Esau. But his wife Rebekah has other ideas:
Rebekah then took the best clothes of her older son Esau
Genesis 27:15-17
that she had in the house,
and gave them to her younger son Jacob to wear;
and with the skins of the kids she covered up his hands
and the hairless parts of his neck.
Then she handed her son Jacob the appetizing dish
and the bread she had prepared.
It’s a fascinating and powerful narrative. I can see the movie trailer in my mind’s eye:
Watch as “The Promise” is passed to the wrong son
by means of his mother’s deception.
So is that what the story is about? Well, only on the surface.
The real story stars an Actor who is never mentioned in the script:
God, the Promise Keeper
This Bible passage teaches that God does not deviate from the Promise, no matter how the other players manipulate its unfolding. God performs the Promise despite human fiddling.
Friends, aren’t we just a little bit like Rebekah and Jacob? When our life’s dramas swirl around us, don’t we make every effort possible to salvage our own designs? It’s human nature, and it’s all good.
But all the same, God must smile at us and our sometimes frenzied efforts to control our lives. I think God smiled like that at Rebekah, covering her favorite son with smelly sheepskins so as to deceive her hungry husband.
Rebekah thought she had a better plan, but it was God’s plan all the time!
It takes some of us so long to realize that we can’t control much of our life. We can only engage our days, trusting that, as they unfold for us, they carry the promise and will of God for our hallowing.
By grace, we can learn to receive our lives as an infinite river of blessing, with all its natural turns. We can pray to trust that blessing when it is hidden in the curve of life’s shadows.
In our Gospel, the Baptist’s disciples are confused by Jesus’ behavior because it contradicts the old Law which offered them a controllable path to holiness.
Jesus tells them that the Law of Requirements is no longer sufficient. It is an old wineskin.
With the new wine of the Gospel, He is calling them to trust and enfold themselves in the Law of Love.
No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth,
Matthew 9:16-17
for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.
People do not put new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.
Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.
Poetry: Late Ripeness – Czeslaw Milosz
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
Like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget -- I kept saying -- that we are all children of
the King.
For where we come from there is no division
Into Yes and No, into is, was, and it will be.
We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago --
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef -- they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.
Music: Piano and Flute Meditation – by Laura Sullivan
Lavish Mercy 