The simplest, but truly efficacious way of re-reading the history of Abraham is that of being in the attitude of listening to a Word that challenges us personally. :I am Abraham, you are Abraham. God speaks to me today in this old story. Whenever God speaks to me, He sets me in motion, just as He did with our father Abraham. His journey is before us not as an ideal that we try to realise, at least partly, but as a prophetic word that becomes concrete in the life of him who welcomes it in his heart with faith. Therefore, let us read once again attentively the story of Abraham’s journey, being it the path along which the Lord himself will lead us, taking us by the hand in our religious life.

In the sequela of our earthly father

When the Bible starts speaking of Abraham, we see him as the first of three brothers who live in obedience to their father Terach. They descend from a son of Noah, Sem, in whose family, after the deluge, God’s blessing is spreading. Out of many acts of love sons and daughters descend who, despite fatigue and suffering, obey the everlasting covenant of Genesis 9, 7 “Be fruitful and multiply, teem over the world and subdue it”.

The place where this story begins is Ur in Caldea, where the efficacy of God’s blessing should have shined in its maximum. However, it presents itself as a land of tragic death, rather than as generating one. In fact, the son of Terach, Aran, after generating Lot dies “in the presence of his father who is powerless before the tragedy but, above all, he dies before the death of his father: it is a truly pre-mature death.

Therefore, it seems that the sign of God’s blessing is missing in the kindred. In fact, “Sara was sterile, she did not have children” (Genesis 11,30). It is the matter of an irreversible sterility. The Talmud says that Sara was even without uterus (Yev 64b). However, according to Joshua 24, 2, the deeper cause of sterility in Ur seems to have been the fact that the fathers, beyond the river (Euphrates), served other gods.

It was no longer possible to live in that place and situation. Ur in Caldea had become not only a place of death, but also of sterility. It was a complete failure. Terach understood that he had to get out together with his family, in search of a land suited to life: the land of Canaan. However, he and his family found it difficult to reach this land. On their arrival in the land they settled. We do not read of him, as in other genealogies, that he had sons and daughters. What we know is that he died there at the age of two hundred and five years.

In the sequela of the Lord

Abraham has followed so far the will of his father until then, but from henceforth he will have only the Lord in front of him. When the Lord entered his life, according to the chronology, his father was still alive and died at least sixty years after the departure of his son. This circumstance makes this word actual: a fundamental condition to follow the Lord is the cutting of affective bonds that prevent us from walking freely along the path shown by Him. Francis of Assisi had understood this well when he left his clothes to his father and moved towards Gubbio without looking behind at his city.

Everything starts from listening to a word: it is the very Word of God in the first page of Genesis repeated ten times: «And God said”. God created the whole creation with just ten words. Abraham is the truly new man who listens to the Word of God and soon sets in motion, without asking any explanation. It is with him that the history of salvation starts realising, the history announced by God in Genesis (Genesis 3, 15), when He promised to the woman that a descendent would crush the head of the serpent, which keeps all men paralysed with the fear of death.  

God gives two orders to Abraham, each one signed by three blessings. First of all he must leave his land, he must break what he is : the land, namely his nationality, his kindred, his birthplace, his family. It is the matter of a radical breaking off from a world surely signed by death, but such as to ensure security in case of drought and famine.  It is the matter of risking an unknown future, living like a stateless person, marginalised by society. As for Francis in Spoleto, Abraham receives the invitation to give up his personal dream of life, while welcoming the more beautiful and interesting dream that the Lord proposes.

The dream of Abraham was his own land where he could live with his wife and his son. The dream of the Lord was a wonderful land, where his descendants would be able to live. True, now he can only see this land, which attracts him so much as to let him set on his journey, the same journey from the east to the west made by the first disobedient humanity, which finished by building up for itself the tower of Babel. He starts his journey from the point where men had deviated. This is the beginning of Abraham’s vocation: an invitation to go away, to become free by accepting the challenge of separation.

Life within the kingdom of death

The fruit of listening is the blessing, which will soon become visible in a progeny and a great reputation. The election is not given to us so that we may feel better than others may, but so that we may fulfil a mission.  Abraham and his family will be a blessing for all the peoples spread all over the world. God will love and bless those who will welcome a benevolent relation with Abraham, and will reject those who despise him.  Abraham will be an instrument of blessing for not only the limited circles that will have direct relation with him, but also for all the races on earth, which will benefit of his presence.

I think that it is important for us religious to reflect on this text longer. Today we worry for being always less in number, and imagine a future worse than today’s life. By calling an insignificant family, God answered the pride of men in the city of Babel, men who once again were throwing humankind into the chaos.

The few remnants will be an efficacious sign of salvation for the entire world.

However, the blessing will really reach the entire humanity only with the departure of Abraham, «Then Abraham left according to what the Lord had ordered him”. Abram leaves trusting only in the Word of the God. He is no longer young when he leaves for Canaan; in fact, he is seventy-five years, the years he had lived with his father. He will live twenty-five more years without father and without children of his own, as well as seventy-five more years with Isaac. He leaves a world of slavery and death, just as the Israelites will do later, but above all the exiled in Babylon.   

Abraham responds with facts to the call of the Lord.. With Sara, Lot, the herds and flocks, he starts his exodus again from Ur, which he had interrupted in Canaan, and reaches the land that his father wished to go to, Canaan, a cursed land (See Genesis 9, 25). Now he will have to know the new God who has spoken to him while walking with him. With Sara he begins to take the blessing into the cursed territory, within death itself, mixing up among the children of Canaan, the cursed. With his family, he moves among a society, which has set its life in a quite different way than his own. This is the mission of the little religious community today: moving against the current and keeping heaven open for a society that has forsaken God.

The three phases

We remember three phases of this journey. The first is in Sichem, a locality of pagan cult. Yet it is just there that the Lord makes Himself visible and infuses courage to Abraham with a promise, “I shall give this country to your progeny”. It is his progeny, not he, that will possess this land, but this is enough for Abraham. He knows how to entrust himself to the times of God, without presuming that everything be realised during his existence. The second phase of the journey is at Betel and Ai, where he builds up an altar and invokes the name of the Lord. The Lord, and He alone, is his secure point of reference. “Do not prefer anything to the love of God”, St. Benedict, father of a numerous progeny, will say many centuries later. Abraham has not yet seen the entire Promised Land and sets again on his journey towards the desert of Negheb: the third phase. In his constant lifting and pitching his tents, he seems to be moved by the single desire of reaching as soon as possible the place given to him by the Lord.

The religious know that their full life is to stay always with the Lord.

 (1 Ts 4, 17), for which they do not want to root their life in the world. They pitch in it only the stakes of a tent, which they keep on shifting, during their itinerary from place to place, as St. Francis of Assisi wanted his friars to do. Like Abraham, they learn to know God by walking in history among the people of their time.

Tiziano Lorenzin, ofmconv
Faculty of Theology in Triveneto
Via S. Massimo, 25 – 25129 Padova