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Father Abraham, who are you? "My covenant with you is this: you are to become the father of a host of nations. No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, for I am making you the father of a host of nations. I will render you exceedingly fertile; I will make nations of you; kings shall stem from you. I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. (Gen 17, 3-8).

The change of name, from Abram to Abraham, is very rich in meaning. The text above already defines its richness for us: father of a host of nations. On the other hand, there is a Hebrew word that means fertility and richness (raham). So Abraham could also mean “father of abundance, of exceeding fertility”. Still, there is another word, which sounds like raham – racham – which means compassion, love, tenderness. Thus Abraham could also be “father of compassion, of love, of tenderness”.

Is Abraham the father of the faith too? The letters to the Romans (ch. 4) and to the Hebrews (ch. 11) seem to point this out: the inheritance of the faith comes from Abraham. It started in his confident obedience to heed the call to leave his homeland and go to another land. It culminated in his obedience to the call to sacrifice his son Isaac. By not sparing the son he was searching for and which he was gifted with in his old age, Abraham became a father blessed with the fertility of countless descendants, abundant productivity, land and, most significantly, as source of blessings for all the nations of the earth (Gen 22)!

A careful reading of Gen 22 shows the context of Abrahamic times: child-sacrifice to appease the gods and to titillate them to respond to human needs. Abraham was tempted to do the same. Here lies the ambiguity of human goodness: in Abraham’s innocence, he thought in conscience it was good to offer his son Isaac. But God grabbed the initiative: where gods tempted humankind to sacrifice their children, the ONLY GOD commanded the stop to this evil practice. Where humankind was tempted to do an ambiguous good, the ONLY GOD revealed HIMSELF and HIS WILL as the ONLY GOOD: LIFE and radical commitment to life! No, our God is not ambiguous. It is our human conscience that is ambivalent! The authentic God is truly the God of love, mercy and justice. But our immature conscience is ambivalent towards love and mercy and justice. Indeed, we need to cultivate an adult and mature faith-ful conscience that is radically committed to life and radically against all threats to life. But while Old Testament infantile faith showed a father willing to sacrifice his son for God, mature New Testament faith shows the Son willingly give Himself to the will of His own Father and His own God! – Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC

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The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God’s Self-revelation to humankind was done in stages. Following the biblical trajectory of the history of salvation, it speaks of God revealing Himself to our first parents, then to Noah through a covenant, and then to Abraham, again, through a covenant. And it goes on to teach us, thus: (CCC, 60) “The people descended from Abraham would be the trustee of the promise made to the patriarchs, the chosen people, called to prepare for that day when God would gather all his children into the unity of the Church. They would be the root on to which the Gentiles would be grafted, once they came to believe.”

We take note of the careful wording of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. No. 60 talks of the “trustee of the promise made to the patriarchs”, thus avoiding the technical word “covenant”. But the biblical account, as we have seen earlier, cites God as making a covenant with Abraham, a covenant which would be valid through all his descendants. The covenant with Noah, however, is a newer covenant than the Abrahamic covenant which comes from a much older tradition. So, the Catechism teaches, thus: (58) The covenant with Noah remains in force during the times of the Gentiles, until the universal proclamation of the Gospel. The Bible venerates several great figures among the Gentiles: Abel the just, the king-priest Melchisedek - a figure of Christ - and the upright "Noah, Daniel, and Job". Scripture thus expresses the heights of sanctity that can be reached by those who live according to the covenant of Noah, waiting for Christ to "gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad". This conclusion of the section on the Noahic covenant is densely instructive when set side by side with the conclusion of the section on the Abrahmic covenant that says: (61) “The patriarchs, prophets and certain other Old Testament figures have been and always will be honored as saints in all the Church's liturgical traditions.”

So, who were the patriarchs? What roles did they play in the biblical account of salvation history? A patriarch (Gr. patriarches; Latin patriarcha) simply means the father or chief of a race (patria, a clan or family, or, in an extended way, nation). If we go by the generations from Adam to Noah in the genesis account of primordial history, we find names related to one another, along a descending patriarchal line. A problem arises though with regard to the origin of the wives of Cain, Abel and, later, of Seth. That again tells us that we should not take the text of the bible literally. We are dealing with traditions about the significant people who play great roles in the history of Israel. Thus, we have a list of generations from Noah to Abram, and from Abraham to Joseph. But what about the women in the history of Israel? Shall we also talk of the mothers and fathers of Israel, and their role in the history of salvation? - Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC

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Before we go more deeply into the theological import of the “mothers of Israel” and their roles in God’s Self-revelation, let us, for now, highlight the patriarchal cycles at this stage of God’s Self-revelation. The biblical texts present to us four patriarchal cycles, namely: (1) the Patriarchal Cycle Concerning Abraham (Gen 12,1-24,18); (2) the Patriarchal Cycle Concerning Isaac (Gen 24,19-27,46; (3) the Patriarchal Cycle Concerning Jacob (Gen 28,1-36,43); and, finally, (4) the Patriarchal Cycle Concerning Joseph (Gen 37,1-50,26).

Why do we talk of “patriarchal cycles”? We are dealing here with collections of stories, sagas and legends woven around significant leading persons in the early history of Israel. Analysis of the texts would show that perhaps, these stories, sagas and legends were not socio-historically related to one another in their origins. But these literary materials were told and retold in Israel’s public assemblies and religious feasts in order to preserve the history and traditions of the roots of Israel and the single thread that has made them a people. Thus, it is possible that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph were not socio-historically related by blood. Each of them was perhaps a towering figure of leadership and heroism in the different epochs of early Israelite history, each with his own array of heroic tales and successful adventures, stories of weaknesses, challenges and struggles. The biblical author(s) put them together in one single bloodline, making one the father of the other, from one generation to another, in order to prepare the setting for a sense of family, social life, nationhood, multicultural diversity and international solidarity rooted in one parent: Abraham. More profoundly, these Patriarchal Cycles are devises that present the divine intervention into human history: God’s Loving Plan for Creation, Promise and Fulfillment, Blessings and the Criteria of Judgment: the Justice of God!

We already saw the significance of Abraham in the theological interpretation of Israel’s biblical history. Now, let us look at the Patriarchal Cycle Concerning Isaac.

Isaac’s role in the life of Abraham was a passive one: he fulfilled the promise of a son. Most of the stories around him duplicated the stories of his father Abraham: the father is remembered through his son/child! Isaac’s marriage is so arranged as to link him to the family tree in Mesopotamia and the Abrahamic roots recounted in Gen 12. There is of course the central role of Rebekah in chapter 24. But that is for a later commentary.

Isaac’s transitional role between Abraham and Jacob provides another moment of grace in the unfolding history of biblical Israel: through him, God renews His blessings of a promised land and generations which God gave earlier to Abraham! By Isaac we too are all blessed, in our time! – Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC


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In view of the celebration of the 30th Anniversary of my ordination to the Priesthood, let us pause today from our biblical commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Let us reflect a bit on the significance of this ordination anniversary celebration.

I was ordained to the Holy Order of the Priesthood on October 17, 1979 in Gen. Luna, Surigao del Norte, a little town facing the Pacific Ocean, in an island off the Northeastern part of Mindanao, Southern Philippines. I entered the seminary when I was 12 years old, in June 1965. I was then in my first year high school, learning among other things Latin and English, dabbling into sports like European soccer and basketball (I played guard/center and thought of myself as the best heady defensive player in our undefeated midget team), music (I was an alto in our choir, learned to play the organ, guitar, violin and the flute, began with the French horn, then the baritone and finally the alto saxophone in our seminary brass band, which in my fourth year I helped conduct), and into hobbies such as stamp and coin collection, (The rarest coin in my numismatic collection was a 17th century peseta.), painting (I won first prize in the seminary painting contest in the first-second year high school category) and writing poems and short stories (my first short story was published by a national magazine for young people, The Youngster). At that time, I was so fascinated with mathematics and the sciences that I wanted to be a missionary priest and scientist at the same time.

But now, let us talk of one of the beneficiaries of my 30th sacerdotal anniversary: the indigenous children and youth studying in the San Luis Lumad Community High School. (lumad, in a Philippine dialect, means native or indigenous).

My last missionary outpost prior to my coming to the US in 2004 was in the hinterlands of Northeastern Mindanao, in San Luis, Agusan del Sur. It was a municipality of about 19,000 people, from 5 tribal extractions. I traveled on foot for miles and miles, sleeping in the barrios, preaching the Word of God, celebrating the sacraments, affirming their sacred rights to their ancestral lands and promoting their indigenous cultural identity. In 1996, I founded an alternative secondary school for these native/indigenous young people coming from 4 tribal communities. This school, the San Luis Lumad Community High School, built with native architectural design, offers every year free board and lodging, educational facilities and books to some 90 poor but deserving indigenous high school students. I designed an alternative curriculum whose core discipline is history and the social sciences, where mathematics, the natural sciences and the language, arts and humanities are learned in the service of the people’s struggle for cultural identity and for their ancestral land and domain. For them, let us dedicate this joyful celebration of the Year of the Priests, occasioned by my 30th year as priest. –Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC