February 25, 2026

Fr. John Riccardo

The LORD said to Abram: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.

“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.”

Abram went as the LORD directed him (Genesis 12:1-4a).

Last Sunday we heard proclaimed the account of what is commonly called “the fall.” Personally, that description fails to catch the truly catastrophic primeval event recorded in “figurative language” (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church n. 390). “The fall” can easily imply that the choice of our first parents in the garden more or less came out of nowhere and was unprovoked. That’s not true. The Catechism again teaches us, “Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy” (n. 391). This voice belongs to the one and only common enemy of the human race, the devil. His envy is of you and me, and so at the beginning of our history, he goes to war against the creature God most loves, the one made in His image and likeness. As we have often spoken about here, the result of our first parents listening to this “seductive voice,” a voice that tempted the man and the woman to doubt God’s goodness and to think they could be happier apart from Him, was that they sold themselves and their posterity into slavery to the powers of Death and Sin – two powers that we are unable to defeat. It was precisely for the purpose of defeating these powers that God became a man, went to the cross, and triumphantly rose from the dead. This is what we are going to celebrate in Holy Week.

I find myself repeatedly overwhelmed by the love, mercy, and patience of God. It’s not as though the Lord didn’t know what was going to happen in the garden. A line in a song I heard on Ash Wednesday pointed to how God “has long endured us.” My goodness is that true! God has long endured my many wanderings, rebellions, disobedient choices, and more. Yours too. And He saw all of those wanderings, rebellions and disobedient choices before He brought us into existence. He still thought we were worth creating. And rescuing. Who is like God?!

In our First Reading this Sunday, we see the magnificent plan of God to rescue us from these powers slowly starting to unfold. The chapters between our first parents’ catastrophic choice and the call of Abraham have detailed the first murder, Noah and the flood, the tower of Babel, and more. God created us to be His family, in communion with Him, with each other, and with all of His beautiful and good creation. That family not only was shattered and captured by the enemy, but then scattered at Babel, with our race no longer even able to communicate with each other in the same language. But in the chapter immediately after the tower of Babel, the chapter we hear from this week, we hear of God’s plan to gather together again the children whom He loves. All of them. This is Abraham’s mission. Or, rather, it is the mission of one of Abraham’s descendants; for Abraham is unable to do what is necessary, since he himself is enslaved to the same powers of Sin and Death by which the rest of humanity has been captured. It will be Abraham’s descendant, many, many, many centuries later, who will, by His life, death, and gloriously resurrection from the dead, rescue us from the tyrannical powers and “gather together again all the scattered children of God” (John 11:52). This is, of course, what we will celebrate in a few weeks in the week we call “Holy.”

Family. That one word is perhaps the simplest way to get our heads around why God created us. He created us to be His family, His sons and daughters, brothers and sisters all. Given that, in these initial weeks of Lent, perhaps it might especially be worth asking the Father to help us better see both ourselves and all those we encounter as He does. There are no unimportant people to God. There is no one our Father doesn’t want to know His reckless love. There is no one who is not supposed to be here. There is no one for whom God did not become a man, go to the cross, and do battle against our ancient foe. There is no one I will meet today who is not my brother or sister and His son or daughter. No one. I, for one, can easily forget that.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warn us, “You have heard it said that you shall not murder…But I say to you…whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire” (Mt 5:21-22). That seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it? Perhaps. Until we understand that it’s not so much the word “fool” that matters but the intent behind it. As one great spiritual author writes, “The great offense involved in these words directed at a brother, and the corresponding guilt their usage incurs, does not so much have to do with their content, because their literal meaning is not of the worst kind. …[T]hey imply a total contemptuous dismissal and cutting off of a brother, as if someone were saying to another: ‘Drop dead! The world would be a better place without you!’ It is this attitude of deliberate break with another, which puts the speaker into despotic control of the situation, that seems to incur the Lord’s condemnation. Who am I to dismiss another as worthless? Who am I to speak words of absolute contempt and thereby imply that I am a reliable judge of ultimates? Who am I to raise myself exaltedly above another and confine that child of God and brother of mine to the category of human debris?” (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 221).

When God called Abraham, He saw me and you. And each person we’ll meet today. Let’s pray for the grace to see ourselves and each other as He does.

The Restoration Begins

Test Me O God