Last week we spoke about how Moses wanted to emphasize his connection back to his father Abraham, the wandering Aramean. And how we ourselves are connected back to Jesus. Today our first Reading (Gn 15:5-12, 17-18) gives us the central account of that father of Moses, who is our forefather also. We hear how God made an extraordinary and implausible promise to Abraham – so implausible that Abraham himself asked for proof and God provided it.
In the Gospel reading (Lk 9:28b-36) we hear the story of the transfiguration of Jesus in the company of Moses and Elijah. The Transfiguration has many meanings and can be read in many ways, but one of the key points is to emphasize the continuity and connection between Jesus and the prophets and leaders who came before.
It seems odd that there were those in the early life of the Church who argued that Christianity should be completely separated from Judaism. Marcion (c. 140) suggested the Christian Bible should exclude the Hebrew Scriptures. Anything further from the mind of the evangelists is hard to imagine. But there are echos of that idea today. Christians have tended to write the Jewish people out of salvation history, sometimes quite consciously, or at best see them as a primitive precursor of “true” or complete revelation. However we are those descendants promised to Abram (as told in the Book of Genesis) as much as Moses, or Elijah, or Jesus.
Identifying ourselves with the long history of the Jewish people may enable us to withstand better the shock that we feel when our world-order is so horribly disrupted by war and evil. For the descendants of Abram this has always been so. They and therefore we are a people born out of oppression. Our life started with an exodus, an escape from tyranny. That sounds so horribly familiar as we watch millions flee across Europe.
This week one line from Luke’s account of the Transfiguration caught my attention – Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus and discussing “his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem”. Jesus death and resurrection was also an exodus – he was going on to something better and greater, just as the Israelites did when they got to the promised land. As Paul hammered home time and time again, we are also part of that exodus of Jesus, we share in his death and resurrection. We are people born of many promises from our God, and many opportunities for exodus.
None of this means that life will be easy. Sometimes there is milk and honey, but a lot of the time there has been famine, war and pestilence. Life never was and never has been easy for most of our Jewish sisters and brothers. Neither has it been for many Christians, who have been persecuted or enslaved, sometimes even by others who claimed to be Christians themselves. We may find it hard to understand how those people maintained their faith. As we watch refugees flee, the most important weapon we have is hope. The hope that we can express that the exodus is real, and implausibly the hope that those fleeing people share with us – the hope that they can look forward to something better. That together as children of Abraham we have received a promise and God keeps his promises.