Sons of Abraham

"If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did” (John 8:39) is from the texts in the Roman Catholic Lectionary for today. The evangelist presents a dialogue between the religious authorities and Jesus. There is disagreement over the nature of being sons of Abraham. The aspect of the faith of Abraham in which he responds to the call of God to action which requires trust beyond what his senses or traditional knowledge could comprehend is distant from these questioners. The “sons of Abraham” to whom Jesus speaks seem to be holding fast to safe human patterns of living. The degree to which we are bound by our direction and to which we follow our own “inner voice” in actions which protect our security, our comfort and our habits is the degree of our enslavement to sin. We deny the Presence like the opponents of Jesus in today’s Gospel. The life giving approach comes from the model of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed'nego in the Book of Daniel. These ‘sons of Abraham’ maintained their intimacy with the Divine even though this choice threatened their very physical existence. The canticle from the Book of Daniel provides a sample of the spontaneous praise which is resonant in the being of those ‘sons of Abraham’ through the intimacy of the indwelling Spirit with the Divine.