Yesterday’s Old Testament reading took us to the end of the story of Abraham (Genesis 23:1-4; 19; 24:1-8; 62-67). As the reading opens, we learn that Abraham’s wife Sarah has died at Hebron. She was 127 years old. Abraham is plunged into mourning for his wife. Leaving her bedside, he goes to the Hittites who inhabited the area where he was living. As an outsider, he was not allowed to own any land, so he asked for a small plot where his wife could be buried. The Hittite leader was happy to give Abraham a burial place as a gift, but Abraham insisted on buying it so that he had full rights over it. His wife was then buried in a cave adjacent to the field of Machpelah, facing the terebinth of Mamre where God had visited him so many years before.
Abraham himself was well advanced in years and the time had come for him to provide a wife for his son, Isaac. He directed his steward to return to Mesopotamia so a suitable wife could be selected from Abraham’s own people. At this point, the story begins to sound a little strange to us. Abraham makes the steward swear, “Put your hand under my thigh, and swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, the God of earth, that you will not procure a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live.” The descendants of Abraham must come from his own people, the people of Mesopotamia. Putting the hand under the thigh signifies swearing near the genital organs to signify the solemnity of the oath that follows. A man taking such an oath would bring the curse of sterility upon himself if he did not fulfil his promise. As we will see later, Jacob will make Joseph take an oath in the same manner (Genesis 47:29).
We now move to the end of chapter 24. In between, there is the long account of how the steward went to Mesopotamia and came across the beautiful Rebekah coming to a well to draw water. Jacob – later called ‘Israel’ – also will meet his future wife, Rachel, at a well; and recall Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at a well. Rebekah turns out to be a niece of Abraham, the daughter of his brother Nahar, one of Abraham’s people, and she is a virgin. She fulfils all the requirements that Abraham had made. The steward meets her family, showers them with gifts from his master, and then takes Rebekah back to Canaan (see Genesis 24:10-61).
Meanwhile, Isaac is living in the Negeb and during his wanderings in the wilderness has arrived at the well of Lahai Roi. This is the same well that God provided Hagar when she and her son, Ishmael, Isaac’s half-brother, were in desperate need for water. As he walked in the evening light, Isaac saw a caravan of camels approaching. With it was Rebekah. She looked up and saw Isaac, her future husband, for the first time. Getting down from her camel, she asked who the man was she saw walking towards them. Abraham’s steward replied, “That is my master.” Rebekah immediately veiled her face. The steward then told Isaac all that had happened in his search for a bride. Isaac, without more ado, led Rebekah into his tent and made her his wife. “
Today’s Old Testament reading skips ahead a couple chapters before resuming our story (Genesis 27:1-5; 15-29). We know very little about Isaac from the Genesis story; he is seen mainly in relationship to his father Abraham and his two sons, Esau and Jacob. Today’s passage begins with Isaac already in his old age and blind. Before he dies, he wants to give his final solemn blessing to his eldest son, Esau, who he wants to be his heir. He calls Esau into his presence. Isaac tells his son that he is now old and does not know when he is going to die. He gives instructions to Esau to get his hunting gear together and bring back some game. Then he is to take it and prepare a savory dish that Esau knows his father likes. After the meal, Isaac will give Esau, his son and heir, a blessing before he dies.
Rebekah, the mother, overhears this conversation. She is not happy because she wants the blessing to go to Jacob, her favorite son. She makes a plan to deceive her husband and reveals it to Jacob. We hear that Jacob has a serious problem with his mother’s plan. He was a smooth-skinned while Esau was very hairy. Should Isaac touch Jacob, he would immediately know that he was being deceived. Rebekah says that she will take care of that problem.
After Esau had gone out into the countryside to hunt some game, Rebekah dresses Jacob in Esau’s best clothes. She also covers Jacob’s hairless arms and body with the “fur of the kids” that had been killed to make the savory dish. She then gives Jacob the savory dish and some bread to take to his father. Jacob announces, “I am here.” Suspicious because the voice seems not right, Isaac asks, “Who are you, my son?” Jacob lies and replies that he is Esau, his father’s first-born. Jacob tells his father to get up and enjoy the dish that has been prepared and then give him his final blessing.
When Isaac expresses surprise that the hunting has taken such a short time, Jacob smoothly replies that it was God who put the animals in his path. Perhaps still a little skeptical, Isaac asks his son to come near so that he can feel him and make sure whether it is Esau or not. After touching him, Isaac comments that the son before him has the voice of Jacob, but the arms are the arms of Esau. And then Isaac gives his blessing to Jacob, a blessing that was intended for Esau. Even then, the father seems to have his doubts. He asks once more: “Are you really my son Esau?”, to which Jacob brazenly answers, “I am”.
The father then asks his son to come closer and to give him a kiss. As Jacob does so, the father recognizes the smell of the clothes, the clothes of Esau, and the deception is complete. We might note that in his attempt to obtain the covenant blessing, Jacob, the father of Israel, betrays his father with a kiss. Later, it will be Jesus, the great Son of Israel, who will ultimately obtain the blessing for the new Israel, who also will be betrayed with a kiss. There then follows the beautiful blessing that Isaac gives to Jacob, the blessing intended for Esau.
This is not an altogether edifying story. What Jacob did in deceiving his father, and thereby cheating Esau out of Isaac’s deathbed blessing, is condemned as blameworthy, by both Hosea (Hosea 12:4) and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 9:3). So, too, does the author of Genesis (Moses), who sympathizes with Esau as the innocent victim of a cruel plot. The story likely is told to remind us of the mystery of God’s ways in salvation history: his use of weak, sinful people to achieve his ultimate purpose.
In an earlier scene, not included in today’s reading, we learn that Esau, simply because he was very hungry, had exchanged his birthright with his brother Jacob in exchange for a bowl of soup. The author of Genesis makes the laconic comment: “That was all Esau cared for his birthright.” He is seen, therefore, as having forfeited his birthright in a very trivial and irresponsible way (see Genesis 25:29-34). Jacob, then, was technically entitled to what his brother had yielded to him, and he did that in the way we have seen.
Even so, we cannot give our full approval for his behaving in this way, but it is an example where a less than good action produces, in the long term, a righteous result. We can all probably think of similar examples from our own lives. We may have felt unjustly deprived of something that we thought was due to us, but as a result something far better came into our lives. As people like to say, “God can write straight with crooked lines.” Subsequent events clearly proved that Jacob was going to be a much better patriarch than Esau would have been.
Today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 9: 14-17) follows on yesterday’s challenge of Jesus by some Pharisees. On that occasion they asked why Jesus was eating with sinners and outcasts. Now they go one step further and ask why he is eating at all. They put forward the example of John the Baptist and his disciples who used to fast regularly. Jews were only required to fast one day in the year, on the feast of Atonement. However, like the Pharisees, it seems that John’s disciples used to observe frequent fasts that were not prescribed by the Law. They did so in the hope that their extra devotion would bring about an early coming of the Kingdom.
Jesus answers the Pharisees in two ways. First, he tells them that people do not fast while in the company of the bridegroom. As long as he is around, it would be inappropriate for his disciples to fast. However, the time will come, he tells them, when the groom is no longer with them that there will be reasons to fast. His second answer is more profound and takes the form of two examples. It does not make sense to repair an old piece of clothing with a patch of new cloth. The new cloth, being much tougher, will, under stress, cause the older cloth to tear. Similarly, he says that it is not wise to put new wine into old wineskins. In those times, wine was kept in containers made of leather. Because new wine was still fermenting and expanding, it needed to be put in new leather bags that were resilient and could expand with the wine. The old bags would already be stretched, and new wine would only cause them to burst. Both the wine and the bags would be ruined.
He was giving a clear message to his critics. Jesus’ ideas were like new wine or new cloth. They could not be fitted into old containers. The Pharisees were trying to fit Jesus’ new teaching and his new ideas into their old ways of thinking. The results would be disastrous.
The new cloth and the new wine are the spirit of the Kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus. The ex gratia devotions of the Pharisees and John’s disciples were like patches on old cloth or new wine in old wineskins, trying to put life into something that was giving way to a totally new order. The “new wine” that Jesus brought involved a paradigm shift, a radically new understanding of how God was to be loved and served. Over the millennia, the Church has evolved its position when it reaches a deeper understanding of the faith and how it is to be lived in a changing world. The most recent movement took place with the Second Vatican Council. The Council promoted much more than external changes (like having the Mass in the vernacular instead of Latin). It involved a whole new way of seeing our faith and our place as Christians in the world.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!