Week 12 Monday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 12:1-9; Psalm 33(32); Matthew 7:1-5

'History' begins in the Bible with today's first reading. Abram, later Abraham, is called by 'the Lord' to leave his own place and family and go to a new land which this (new?) God will point out to him. In return for his docility, Abram is to become the father of a great nation but his election is one through which all the nations of the earth will be blessed. So from the very beginning God's chosen people carry a mission for all humanity. We call Abram 'our father in faith' and this first obedience he shows, in responding to God's call, is just one of a series of acts of trust and obedience in which he reveals his unshakeable faith in the Lord.

The new land is Canaan in which there are already - surprise, surprise! - Canaanites. Humanity continues to be riven by divisions and conflicts, and almost any point of difference between two groups of people becomes a reason for stoking division - language, ethnicity, age, gender, not to mention more controversial differences such as political inclinations, sexual orientations, religious affiliations.

We will find specks in our brother's eye to justify our thoughts and actions against him while remaining blind to the planks of prejudice in our own eye. The salvation we need is to have our blindness healed so that we might see more clearly, more truthfully. The salvation we need is to have our deafness healed so that we might hear more clearly, more truthfully.

That would make it possible for us to see and hear the presence and voice of the Lord calling us, for we too belong to those 'all the nations' who are to be blessed. But just as we cannot love God whom we do not see or hear if we do not love our neighbour whom we do see and hear, so we keep our ears and eyes open for the presence and the voice of God in the face and voice of our neighbour.

We are not told how Abram heard the voice of God calling him but presumably it was in the circumstances and relationships of his daily life, interpreted in faith. So for ourselves - let us remove what blocks our hearing and confuses our seeing so that we might see and hear the Lord present and calling us to position ourselves in a new way - and doing it in the one who is alongside us, through the face and voice of our neighbour.