The Only Promise that Endures
The Only Promise that Endures
God’s promise and human betrayal lurk in both the Old and New Covenant readings today. And while one might pass all the betrayal off onto Jesus’s fellow Jews — in whom he was clearly disappointed — we Gentiles should, if anything, consider how we have betrayed Jesus’s promise of motherly protection for the two millennia since this Gospel.
To recap the Abraham story: Before he became Abraham, Abram heard this lone unseen God calling him to leave his ancestral home in what is now southern Iraq, and the local gods of that land, for another land that this lone unseen God would show him, which turned out to be Canaan, later to be called Israel. And the promise was that Abram and Sarai (later Sarah) would become a great nation, and that “all nations on Earth will be blessed on you.” But to be a great nation, Abram and Sarai need children, which it is clear from today’s reading, they don’t have. And though Abram trusts the promise of the LORD about descendants as numerous as the stars, to paraphrase the Russian proverb made famous by President Reagan, Abram may trust but he still wants verification.
So we have this ritualized killing and dividing of animals — presumably belonging to Abram, thus a significant loss of value — and then Abram waiting. There are records of this kind of extremely solemn covenant in ancient history, in which the two parties would walk between the halves of those animals, thus agreeing to be treated the same if they betrayed the covenant. So, when the fire pot and torch seem to levitate between the pieces, it would seem that this lone unseen God is carrying them between the divided pieces of animals as verification of an extravagant promise of descendants as numerous as the stars, and of a nation stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Did these promises ever come true? The closest that Israel came to controlling that much territory was in the reigns of King David King Solomon. As for descendants and blessings, I suppose that so many people today worshiping this lone unseen God of Abraham, be they Jew, Christian, or Muslim, is at least a partial fulfillment of that promise. For the most part, the Old Testament is a record of Israel’s failure to keep that bloody covenant, although Abram himself didn’t walk between the pieces, having at least the humility not to make promises that he could hardly keep himself, much less those descendants who would be bound by his action.
But, what Abraham could perhaps not possibly have imagined, nor the descendants of his nation, was that God himself might be willing to pay the cost of all nations’ failure to recognize the authority of that one God who created all peoples, and whose Son became flesh that could be torn by our betrayal of the one and only God who created us, and loved us enough to die for us.
The fox or the hen. Which do we really trust in a fight? The deceiver who turns our enemies into prey, or the hen who puts herself between the predator and her chicks, ready to sacrifice her flesh so that the chicks can escape? And if, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, Christ has no body on Earth but ours, who are the chicks that our crucified and risen Lord is calling us to gather under our wings before the fox? And what can the Church, the body of Christ, expect from Christ after two millennia of betraying its baptismal covenant as often, if not more, than keeping it?
“All through human history,” said Pope John Paul II, “it [the Cross] is the revealing sign of the contradiction with this world that has accompanied Christ since the beginning … at the same time, Christ, through the Cross, has remained in the world and dwells there always. He dwells there forever. Stat crux dum volvitur orbis: the world turns, the Cross remain … Inside the world that rejects him, Christ builds his kingdom that transcends the world.” *
I suspect that is equally true of those who don’t “reject” Christ but betray him by their failure to represent God’s love in Christ for all whom he came to save. Inside his Church, Christ is still training us to be hens. Too often, those who have claimed this lone unseen God, and some also his Son, have assumed a blank check when the fox’s way looked like the easy way out. But the promises of God are not blank checks, except that the only promise we cannot betray is that of the hen who has endured that betrayal.
* “Be Not Afraid,” Andre Frossard with Pope John Paul II, Doubleday Image, 1985, p. 187
2nd Sunday In Lent
The Rev. David Kendrick
March 16, 2025