Generosity Sunday: Learning Self-Donation from Jesus’ Free Gift of Salvation
Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; Romans 8:31b-34; Mark 9:2-10
If you are angry at the needless poverty in the world, the good news is that God too is super angry and outraged at you for allowing that to happen. The human person is God’s agent for the eradication of spiritual and material poverty in the world. Today is Action or Generosity Sunday, God’s call to all and sundry to eliminate poverty through generosity and self-sacrifice! Instead of an attempted infanticide by Abraham, in our first reading, God teaches us a lesson on charity and generosity: what is the best gift to give to God and how does one go about giving it?
Let us look at our first reading from an economic survival angle. Isaac, as far as Abraham was concerned, stood for three things: 1) a guarantee of future descendants, 2) a guarantee of old age pension, and 3) a sign of God’s blessing. For God to invite Abraham to destroy his own future and go bankrupt is to request for a personal suicide and self-extermination. Only a fool, on earthly standards, will accept such a suggestion. After all, popular wisdom has it that “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush”. Yet, this economic suicide was the resolve of Abraham, before God’s gift of a ram changed the course of his resolve. Interestingly, Abraham’s resolve to make a gift of his Son, Isaac, to God changes the meaning and conditions of a gift: a gift must be something given at a very great cost and risk to oneself! This is the nature of generosity and charity in the world: it is to mortgage one’s present joys and opportunities, in order to invest in God and eternity.
Abraham’s ready gift of his Son, Isaac, as a sacrifice, in our first reading, teaches us about God’s compensation of every human gesture of charity and generosity. God substitutes a ram to spare the life of Isaac. This is the role of faith in charitable actions—the fact that God is never outdone in charity. It is also a lesson: Abraham stands for all those who take the risk to invest in God, while believing that there will be a reward in store for them in heaven. It is very easy to offer a gift from other people’s resources, but that is not a gift, it is a theft. But when one gives up one’s entire livelihood and earthly guarantees for security, like Abraham was ready to do, then God compensates that person.
Beyond the desire to give of what we have to God as gifts, Jesus, in today’s gospel, teaches us that the highest gift anyone can give to God is the gift of one’s life—self-donation to God. The Transfiguration of Jesus exemplifies Jesus’ self-donation and sacrifice for the salvation of the world. The reality and importance of that self-sacrifice is clear from the appearances of Moses and Elijah in Jesus’ Transfiguration. Moses stands for the laws of God that none of us is able to keep perfectly. The presence of Elijah reminds us of the condemnation hanging around our necks for breaking God’s commandments (symbolism of Moses), since Elijah meted out justice of old through the consuming fire (2 Kings 1:1-10) and slaughter of the 450 prophets of Ba’al and the 400 prophets of Asherah (1 Kings 18:19) for failing to keep God’s commandments.
The greatest personage of our transfiguration scene is Jesus Christ, through whose self-sacrifice our defaults on the law (Moses) and our merit of condemnation (Elijah) are overturned and substituted for with grace, love and compassion. Jesus’ Transfiguration is a theology of hope, hope that the gift of forgiveness and grace of multiple second chances for sinners is always available in Jesus Christ. The immediate joy of Peter to build three tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah are reminders to us of our eternal tents and repose in God, with all the angels and saints of God in heaven, after our earthly sojourn.
Our second reading makes an eloquent defense of the power of salvation as a gift that comes to us through Jesus’ death as a self-sacrifice. Moreover, Paul invites us to self-immolation like Jesus Christ’s, in this rhetorical question, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:35-37). As a matter of fact, it is through our self-sacrifices as generosity and charitable deeds that the greed and rapaciousness that causes needless poverty in the world will be eradicated.
There is no salvation except through generosity and self-sacrifice. Generosity and Action Sunday, this Second Sunday of Lent, underscores the power of charitable deeds as means of both making the earth a better place and a guarantee of salvation as God’s gift to all and sundry. It now makes sense that our greed and selfishness immiserate others and ourselves: they are double edged swords—material poverty for our brothers and sisters, then spiritual poverty and condemnation for us who perpetuate material poverty by our refusal to be generous to our brothers and sisters. If Warren Buffet, one of the richest men alive, could give up his wealth to charity, you too can do the same. Jesus gave his life for your salvation, what is your gift to him as your sign of gratitude?
It was intentional that the Transfiguration took place on a mountain, to teach us the stamina required to climb a mountain—the virtue of charity and generosity. It was good that Peter, James and John were there on the mountain, to teach them and us the power of sacrifice—that the Son of God willingly accepted to die for others, the supreme gift anyone could offer to and for another. It was nice that Moses and Elijah were there, to teach us about immortality—that those who died are still alive, though their physical nature is no longer visible. It was important that there was the “Speaking Cloud”, to teach us about the God who was, who is, and continues to be—“I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14); after all, he was there as Pillar-of-Cloud by day to journey with the liberated Israelites on their way to the Promised Land, and he continues to journey with humanity even today. Your charitable actions and generosity to eradicate needless poverty will definitely be rewarded by this ever-living God as spiritual gifts!