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| The 21 Egyptian Christians just before they were beheaded |
Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent
(Scriptures for today's Mass)
Audio for Homily
What do you make of that
story about Abraham, Isaac and God?
Which is more difficult
for us to understand:
that God would ask Abraham
to sacrifice his son?
or that Abraham would
accede to God’s request?
Neither is something we
can easily comprehend, let alone accept.
We can’t imagine a loving
God asking such sacrifice of a father
and we can’t imagine a
loving father saying yes to such a request.
But let’s be careful to
make no judgment on God or Abraham.
We can be confident that
the Lord is a loving God
(in the happy ending, Isaac is spared)
and we can be equally
confident that Abraham was a loving father
whose heart was breaking
as he prepared to do
what God had asked of him.
Our problem with the story
may come
if we can’t imagine a love
for God
greater than our love of anything
else,
if we can’t imagine a love
for God
greater than our love for
any-one else.
Let’s fast-forward some
3,000 years to February 15, 2015.
On that day, two weeks
ago, in Libya,
21 Egyptian men were
gruesomely slain –
for being Christian and
for refusing to renounce their faith.
In photos, these men
appear to be young , in their 20’s and 30’s.
Their last words were, “Ya
Rabbi Yasou!” - “Jesus, my Lord!”
Just as knowing young
Isaac’s name in today’s scripture
makes it more personal for
us,
I believe that knowing the
names of these 21 men might do the same.
They were sons, brothers,
husbands, fathers and friends to others.
And they were:
Milad
Abanub
Maged
Yusuf
Kirollos
Bishoy
Somaily
Malak
Tawardros
Girgis
Mina
Hany
Bishoy
Samuel
Ezat
Loqa
Gaber
Esam
Malak
Sameh
and one identified only as
“a worker from Awr village.”
I think of this last one
as we think of the soldier buried
in the Tomb of the Unknown
at Arlington National Cemetery.
The “worker from Awr
village”
stands for all the unnamed
who were martyred before him
and all the unnamed who
will be martyred after him
because, for sure, the
bloodshed is not yet over.
Reporters
interviewed Beshir Kamel, brother of two of the 21 martyrs.
Beshir
said how grateful he was that the video of the gory execution
had not
edited out the men’s calling on the name of Jesus,
just
before they died:
“Ya Rabbi Yasou!”
- “Jesus, my Lord!”
He was grateful, he said,
because hearing that cry
strengthened his faith.
He said
his mother, who lost two sons,
had been
asked what she would do
if she
encountered one of these murderous militants on the street.
She
said,
“I would
ask him into my home and ask God to open his eyes
to see
that he was the reason my sons are in heaven.”
Here is
faith that may be as difficult for us to understand
as it is
for us to understand Abraham’s faith in God.
And let
us be careful to make no judgment on Beshir and his mother.
We can
be absolutely confident that they deeply grieve
the loss
of two beloved sons, brothers.
You and
I cannot even begin to imagine
what
such a loss might mean,
how it
might feel, what it might do to us.
But neither,
perhaps, can you and I begin to imagine
their faith
and their love for God,
so deep
and consuming that it comes before all else
and
embraces their deepest loss and suffering,
enlarging
the human heart and reaching depths in their souls
you and
I have yet come to know or even begun to search for.
Lent is
a time for us to stop and consider our faith,
and our
love for God.
It’s a
time to weigh how our love for God
balances
in the scales with our love for so many things,
even
with our love for those closest to us.
Lent is
a time to look at Abraham, Isaac
and the
21 martyrs in Libya
and to
remember that their faith and love of God above all else
is the
very faith and love to which each of us is called.
When
asked what is the greatest commandment,
what did
Jesus answer?
You
shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with
all your soul and with all your mind.
(Mt 22:37)
Simple
things like fasting, and abstaining from meat on Fridays,
and “giving
up” whatever we’re giving up this Lent
(things
we sometimes groan about as if we were martyrs…)
these
practices are designed, in very small ways,
to help
us begin to measure, help us “take the temperature”
of our
faith in God, our love for God.
Such
Lenten exercises can help us remember
that the
comforts and pleasures of this life
(even
the most loving relationships we have in this life)
will one
day come to an end.
And
then, we will stand alone, before God, with nothing in hand
save the
contents of our hearts,
and we
will hope to be welcomed into the company of God’s beloved,
into the
company of those 21 men who prayed with their last breath:
“Ya Rabbi Yasou!”
- “Jesus, my Lord!”
Lent is a time to ponder,
“What’s the most difficult thing God is asking of me?
And how, in my faith and
my love for God,
am I responding to what
God’s asking?”
Of course, and as always,
there’s another Father and
another beloved Son
for us to remember here.
The story of Abraham and
Isaac
prefigures the story of
Jesus and his Father.
As Abraham did not
withhold his beloved son, Isaac, from God,
neither did God withhold
his beloved son, Jesus, from us.
But - no messenger swooped
down on the Cross to rescue Christ.
Jesus suffered and offered
his life for us - withholding nothing –
that we might have life
and have it to the full.
The sacrifice of martyrs
strengthens our faith and our love of God.
As Abraham built an altar
on which to sacrifice his son,
so we gather at this altar
to share in the sacrifice of Jesus
who nourishes us now in
the Bread and Cup of the Eucharist.
May Lent, this Lent 2015 be
a time for us to ponder
who is God and where is
God and how is God in our lives.
May it be a season to grow
in faith and in our love for the Lord
whose love for us knows no
bounds.
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| An icon of the 21 Coptic Martyrs by Tony Rezk |
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