There is a voice that suddenly resonates in Abraham’s life. A voice that invites him to undertake a journey that he knows is absurd: a voice that spurs him to uproot himself from his homeland, from his family roots, in order to move toward a new, different future. And it is all based on a promise, in which he needs only to have trust. And to have trust in a promise is not easy. It takes courage. And Abraham had trust.
Abraham sets out. He listens to the voice of God and trusts in His word. This is important: he trusts the Word of God. And with this departure of his, a new way of understanding the relationship with God arose. It is for this reason that the patriarch Abraham is present in the great Jewish, Christian and Islamic spiritual traditions as the perfect man of God, capable of being submissive to Him even when His will proves arduous, if not completely incomprehensible.
Abraham is thus the man of the Word. When God speaks, man becomes the receptor of that Word and his life the place in which it seeks to become flesh. This is a great novelty in man’s religious journey: the life of a believer begins to be understood as a vocation, thus as a calling, as the place where a promise is fulfilled; and he moves in the world not so much under the weight of an enigma, but with the power of that promise, which one day will be fulfilled. And Abraham believed God’s promise. He believed and he set out without knowing where he was going — thus says the Letter to the Hebrews (Hebrews 11:8). But he had trust.
In reading the Book of Genesis, we discover that Abraham experienced prayer in constant faithfulness to that Word, which periodically appeared along his path. In short, we could say that in Abraham’s life, faith becomes history. Indeed Abraham, with his life, with his example teaches us this path, this path in which faith becomes history. God is no longer seen only in cosmic phenomena, as a distant God, who can instill fear. The God of Abraham becomes my God, the God of my personal history, who guides my steps, who does not abandon me; the God of my days, companion in my adventures; the God Providence. I ask myself and I ask you: do we have this experience with God? My God, the God who accompanies me, the God of my personal history, the God who guides my steps, who does not abandon me, the God of my days? Do we have this experience?
--Pope Francis, Papal Audience, June 3, 2020
Image source: Scenes from the Story of Abraham, embroidered textile (linen worked with silk thread), mid-17th century, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/229007 Complete text
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