In today’s reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he takes us back to the Book of Genesis and the birth of the two sons of Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael was born of the slave girl Hagar; Isaac was born to Sarah, Abraham’s wife.
To review the story, God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of many generations, of people too numerous to count. However, as time passed and both Abraham and Sarah grew older, no children were born of their union. Sarah decided to give Hagar, her slave, to Abraham as a concubine. She immediately bore him a son. However, God’s promise was not to be fulfilled by this son of a slave girl. Even though she was far past the age of child-bearing, she eventually gave birth to Isaac.
Paul equates the son born of a slave girl as a representative of the Sinai Covenant – the Law. Jews came to believe that through observance of the Law, they would be saved. It was enough for them to be counted as the children of Abraham as they were convinced that all the children of Israel would be part of God’s kingdom.
Paul, however, counters this notion by declaring that being a descendant of Abraham was nothing more than an accident of birth. Those who were to inherit the realm of God would be representatives of the heavenly Jerusalem rather than Sinai. In other words, those who had accepted Jesus as the Messiah would be reborn as children free of the constraints of the Law and heirs of God’s realm through baptism and faith.
As the year 2016 draws to a close, we will be reminded to be grateful. Today, October 10, is Canadian Thanksgiving Day. Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. will be celebrated on November 24. When we start to count our blessings and express our gratitude for them, it might be helpful to remember that many of those blessings are accidents of birth. Just the fact that we were born in a country where people are free is a blessing indeed when we consider the millions of people who are enslaved by abject poverty. Even if we grew up with little by way of material gifts, we would be hard pressed to compare our lot in life to those of people born in the Third World. This past week we witnessed yet another unprecedented natural disaster as Hurricane Matthew destroyed the nation of Haiti and left over 600 people dead in its wake. Indeed we are fortunate to have been born in this land of plenty.
However, we are doubly blessed to be able to say that we have been born into the freedom of the children of God because of our baptism and our faith. Those of us who are cradle Catholics were raised in the faith. Those who have come to faith in Jesus later in life were fortunate to have heard the Gospel preached. We are politically free as well as spiritually free, to a great extent, because of accidents of birth.
Our response to these accidents can be nothing less than overflowing gratitude for the blessings of our birth.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator