Four come to witness

The texts today from the Roman Catholic Lectionary bring us four figures who are familiar to us as people in the Bible who responded in special ways to their encounter with God. Friar Jude Winkler comments that the story of Sarah and Hagar presented by Paul to the Galatians is an example of the rabbinic technique of midrash which is not based on modern Western logic. Paul connects the free woman Sarah, wife of Abraham, mother of Isaac, to the Spirit and the Promise. He associates the slave wife, Hagar, mother of Ishmael, with the law and the condemnation of people for sin. The message that we are justified by faith is the Good News that the Love of God is unconditional. It is not offered because we have or are something or someone prescribed by Law or tradition. Faith is the step of Abraham to trust God beyond what his senses told him was logical. Our logic is insufficient to grasp the Transcendent and Immanent One. The Gospel of Luke gives us an episode where Jesus uses two other personalities from the Tradition to compare the faith of Gentiles in Nineveh and the acceptance of the pagan Queen of Sheba with the stubborn intransigence of the people of Israel to whom He speaks. We are called to deeper relationship with the Divine. This movement requires faith which is shown to us in the actions of the ‘cloud of witnesses’ who are and have been transformed by faith. They stand in our midst and in our history. We call out in praise to God like the psalmist when we see how we, the needy, have been raised from the dust and lifted from the ash heap of our self satisfaction.