Jacob’s “Awesome” Life

José de Ribera “Jacob’s Dream at Bethel”

As we read at Holy Mass today, young Jacob made his way northeast to find a wife from among his own kin. On the way, he dreamt of the ladder or staircase between heaven and earth. The Lord promised Jacob many descendants. He promised the land to Jacob’s descendants. And He promised to accompany Jacob always.

Sounds pretty awesome. Then Jacob went on to live his awesome life, in which…

He worked seven years indentured servitude for the privilege of marrying the woman with whom he had fallen in love, only to have his father-in-law pull a fast one on him. Jacob then had to work a second seven-year term. After that, and six more years hard labor for good measure, Jacob’s father-in-law tried to cheat Jacob out of any profit for his twenty years of work.

Then Jacob returned to the land of his brother Esau, who Jacob rightly feared would try to kill him.

Then a neighbor raped one of Jacob’s daughters. Jacob’s sons took revenge by slaughtering all the men among the rapists’ kin. So Jacob, fearing a reprisal, once again had flee for his life.

Jacob had a favorite son. Right. Joseph. Joseph’s brothers hated him and sold him into slavery. Jacob never laid eyes on his most-beloved son again, until shortly before his own death.

Pretty awesome life. If by ‘awesome,’ we mean: fearful, toilsome, painful, and relentlessly difficult.

Jacob’s dream of the stairway to heaven foreshadowed Jesus’ revelation about Himself. That angels would ascend and descend on the Son of Man.

We could make no sense whatsoever out of Jacob’s endless travails as God’s “blessing,” if we didn’t know about the Passion of the Christ. But, like Jacob His ancestor, Jesus’ suffered bitterly in this world. The most innocent and pure human pilgrim ever to walk the earth suffered the most.

So Scripture teaches us, so that we can learn early, what life will teach us in the end anyway: Our hope for lasting happiness lies not in this world, but in the next.

Sacred Tradition from the Beginning

The conclusion of Genesis narrates how the descendants of Abraham came to leave the Holy Land. In other words, it narrates how our people came to leave the land of Canaan after living there for three generations. One thing makes this particular people unique: we worship the God in Whom Abraham believed. And the conclusion of Genesis recounts this part of our history.

It all began with God revealing Himself to Abraham. Abraham learned something of God’s plans. Much mystery remained. But Abraham learned that the whole world would be blessed through his descendant. This divine revelation established an alliance between God and Abraham’s people.

And we can see in today’s reading at Holy Mass how this alliance continued as a sacred tradition. In other words, from the very beginning, our holy religion has been a matter of handing down divine revelation from one generation to the next.

Abraham’s grandson Jacob was himself the patriarch of a very large family. Jacob would not leave the Promised Land without sacrificing to the God of his father Isaac, Who is the God of Abraham.

We see from what happened that the alliance—the covenant between Abraham’s people and God—this does not preclude new things from happening. God spoke to Jacob at the southern boundary of the Holy Land. God told Jacob to go without fear into Egypt. Your going into Egypt will not break the alliance. In fact, doing so will strengthen it. Your going into Egypt is part of my plan for your people, for the people of Abraham. Thus the Lord directed Jacob at this fateful moment.

So a living sacred tradition does not atrophy a people. Rather, it allows us to move forward through history without losing ourselves in the great ebb and flow of time. Because we have inherited the holy tradition which God inaugurated by speaking to Abraham, we can greet everything that the present sends our way. But we will fall out of alliance with God, and lose ourselves in the process, if we do not always act in accord with the sacred tradition we have inherited.

As the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council put it:

In His gracious goodness, God has seen to it that what He had revealed for the salvation of all nations would abide perpetually in its full integrity and be handed on to all generations. (Dei Verbum 7)

So we rejoice to receive from our fathers the mystery of salvation that belongs to the Church. And because we keep faith with it, we have nothing to fear from whatever comes our way today. We do not face the present alone; we face the events of today as members of the ancient People of God.

Quick Sacred History Quiz

Your ways, O Lord, make known to me.

We sing this prayer in the Psalm at Mass.

Why do we keep the season of Lent? The Spirit drove the Lord Jesus out into the desert. He fasted and prayed for forty days.

The prophet Elijah walked through the desert for forty days to reach God’s mountain. Jonah gave the Ninevites a forty-day warning of God’s wrath. Moses dwelt in the cloud on Mount Sinai and conversed with the Lord for forty days. When the Lord flooded the earth, it rained for forty days.

Six weeks. Can we learn the ways of God in six weeks? Let’s get started.

In six days, God made the heavens and the earth. On the seventh, He rested. (Maybe if we study His ways hard for six weeks, then on the seventh, we will find rest.)

In the beginning, God made the land and the seas and all they contain. Then what happened? Sin. Disobedience. Estrangement from the Creator. It got ugly. Brother killed brother.

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil. The Lord regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved (Genesis 6:5).

The innocent blood that had been shed cried out from the ground. The good world that God had made needed to be cleansed.

Heroic Wisdom

The concluding chapters of the book of Genesis provide as moving and as edifying a tale as anything a person could ever read.

Joseph possessed divine wisdom. When he was seventeen years old, he had dreamed that he would reign supreme. But he did not bear arms for his accoutrements. Rather, he wore a coat of many colors.

Joseph’s brothers despised him in their jealousy and conspired to sell the ‘dreamer’ into slavery in Egypt. Joseph, unarmed, but wiser than his brothers, offered no resistance.

Joseph became an attentive, prudent, and provident servant in Egypt. After Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams for him, the king of Egypt declared, “Can we find such a man as this, in whom is the Spirit of God?” Joseph came to enjoy Pharaoh’s highest favor and ruled Egypt in Pharaoh’s place.

Joseph anticipated a coming famine of seven years. He lad aside stores during the years of prosperity so that Egypt could feed the world from its granaries when the hard times came.

God had a plan to re-unite the sons of Jacob, the progenitors of the chosen people. Joseph proved to be the hero of this plan. Not because Joseph foresaw it all, or because he accomplished astounding feats of strength or guile or will. Joseph emerged as the hero because he knew how to co-operate with the strongest person in the story, namely Almighty God.

After Joseph revealed himself and was re-united with his father, his brothers begged his forgiveness for the evil they had done him years before. Joseph did not hesitate to forgive. In fact, he had long since forgotten all about it, because he was too busy co-operating with the plan of God. He told his brothers not to blame themselves: “God sent me here ahead of you for the sake of saving lives.”

Moral of the story: The strongest, wisest hero—the one who truly reigns supreme—accepts that God is in charge, and co-operates.

Samaritan Well

Perhaps you will find this brief essay for Saturday of the Second Week of Lent interesting, or even edifying–even though it was written by the most annoying person in the world…

Jacob's Well

…A little groggy today, since it took the mighty Rams until nearly 1:00 a.m. to send the ‘Noles home to Florida. Robby Robinson took a page from Rich Chvotkin and yelled, “He blocked the shot! He blocked the shot! He blocked the shot!” about seven times, and then “Rams win! Rams win! Rams win!” about twenty times. It was awesome.

…Here’s a homily for the Third Sunday of Lent:

Last week we talked about what salvation is. If you missed last week, I’m sorry. We talked about our father Abraham, Dairy Queen ice-cream treats, Mount Tabor in the Holy Land, and Sophia Loren movies.

Anyway, we do not know yet what heaven is like, but we know that it involves being personally united with God forever.

If we hope to have communion with God in the end, then we probably need to have some kind of communion with Him now, right? Some kind of practice or spring training for the Big Show, so to speak.

Here is an easy question: How do we develop a friendship with the Lord now while we are still here on earth? Easy… You got it: By praying.

Has anyone ever heard of the Catechism of the Catholic Church? Everybody know that the Catechism is divided into four parts, for the four pillars of the Catholic faith?

Part IV of the Catechism concerns prayer. This part of the Catechism begins with the gospel reading about the Samaritan woman at the well.

To pray is like going to a well. Someone who prays opens up his soul to God like a thirsty throat opening up for cool, refreshing water.

When we open up like this, when we go to the well of prayer, we find Christ waiting for us there, like the Samaritan woman did. Upon meeting Him, we discover three amazing things, like the Samaritan woman discovered.

Instructions for Lent

Pretty cool cover of a lovely song:

One Mary J. Blige and U2

Here is a homily for the First Sunday of Lent:

In the original Lent, the Lord Jesus spent forty days praying and fasting in solitude. The devil came to tempt Him. Christ rebuffed the devil by quoting Scripture three times.

1. “Man does not live by bread alone.”

2. “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him alone will you serve.”

3. “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Let’s see who is really on-the-ball. When the Lord quoted these words of Scripture, which book of the Bible was He quoting? All three verses come from the same book.