Abraham's adventure.

Abraham and his faith - last time I mentioned the parallel with Mary who hears the announcement of the call and on the basis of it is immediately confident in moving to assist Elizabeth - which makes him set off towards the unknown: he trusts and enough...Like Moses then, like all the prophets, like Mary, precisely, like the Apostles, as it should be for all the baptized, aware of the gift received and moving towards the brothers to whom they communicate it...
I will not stop here to recall the vicissitudes of Abraham, the frustrated desire for a son, finally fulfilled in Isaac, the so-called "proof" of chapter 22 of Genesis, which seems to be the confirmation of an old and atrocious religious cult - the sacrifice of the firstfruits, including children, to pagan divinities - and instead in the Judeo-Christian faith it is the irruption of something new: God no longer asks for human sacrifices, as all the idols of this world, religious and non-religious, will continue to do for millennia, but he only wants to listen and have faith... Here then is the wonderful reading of the passage by the Fathers of the Church, and in particular by St. Augustine: "what God did not ask of Abraham (i.e. the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, on the wood raised on the top of the mountain, Ed.) He did it for us, offering his Son, on the mountain and on the Wood of the Cross, for the salvation of the world...
Abraham is the beginning of God's response to man's sin: he is the father of all believers, and his lineage, gradually, continues the path narrated in the books of the Pentateuch, the first 5 of the First (or Old) Testament , up to Moses, to whom the new Pact of salvation is revealed and given.

A God different from those invented in myths and rites by human need

The revelation of God, therefore. No longer a God who needs our "rituals", with whom we should ingratiate ourselves to protect ourselves from events in the struggle with events and with the forces of nature and other men seen as enemies to be eliminated... No longer a God we use creating "myths" useful to explain the phenomena of lack of knowledge of nature...
Myths and rites: it would be a long discussion, but in essence I want to say that all the religions invented by the human need to know and dominate the world have been, over the centuries, a complex of "myths" and "rites": the former served to explain natural phenomena – lightning, wind, storm, man-woman attraction, etc. – and the latter served to dominate the forces of nature that threatened to destroy men and their civilizations little by little, and with difficulty, built over the generations…
Myth and ritual as the essence of all so-called natural religions, that is, created by the human need to explain the world and bend its energies to our utility...
It would be a long discussion, but this is not the place. The only God, creator of heaven and earth, that is, of everything, after the negative use of man's freedom who wanted to cut off the fruit of the tree of good and evil to take possession of it and take God's place - " you will be like God!” it is the promise of the enemy, “the serpent”, in the story of Genesis 3 – he promised redemption and salvation through a Woman and her generation, and after other events that describe the negativity of man's separation from Him – chapters 4 to 10 of Genesis, from Cain and Abel to the flood etc. – reveals itself in history to Abraham (Genesis 11) and calls him to a journey of faith and fidelity to the continuously renewed promise despite hesitations and infidelities.
In the new revealed faith - from Abraham to Moses, to the Prophets, to John the Baptist and finally to Jesus of Nazareth, and up to us - there will be no place for "myths" and "rites" in the aforementioned sense: it does not explain to man how the created world goes in its natural events - the myths - and therefore it is not and will never be an alternative to science, which is built with man's rational research on nature, nor does it ensure the dominion of the natural forces themselves, for obtain which man will have the instrument of technology. Natural religions, invented by the human need to explain and fold the world, have "myths" and "rites": the new faith, first Jewish and then Jewish Christian, gradually purifying itself from the residues of natural religiosity, will have no "myths" and “rites”, in the aforementioned rival sense of science and technique… From Abraham who begins the journey towards the unknown listening to the voice that calls to leave, to Moses who also listens and takes the first steps of the new revealed faith…

The new revelation (still veiled) to Moses: I am there, I am with you

Moses, therefore. To him first the beginning of the definitive revelation in chapter 3 of Exodus. He is the object of divine surprise: on the mountain he sees the bush that burns without being consumed and listens to "the voice", that voice that orders him to free his people. But when he asks to know the "Name", in order to be able to refer it to future interlocutors, the powerful who hold the people to be saved prisoner, the answer is both negative and positive. Negative in a first sense: God does not reveal his name to him. “I am what I am” (in Hebrew “anoki hehjeh asher hehjeh” is in some way a refusal. If someone asks me “where are you going?” and I answer “I'm going where I'm going” I didn't answer him, but I told him that where I go does not concern him, at least for the moment. And so that answer, "I am what I am" does not satisfy as regards the revelation of the "name", but is only the first part of the divine answer, because it continues: "I am with you!"
It is true that over the centuries, above all due to the influence of Greek and then also Christian philosophy, it was thought that that answer indicated the infinite Being in a metaphysical sense, the divine Absolute in contrast to the finitude of creatures and their relative fragility , but in a strictly biblical sense that revelation is not the registry solution of the divine identity, but the assurance of a presence, of a company, of protection in the salvific adventure that is beginning, and that after the Egyptian events on the path towards The Promised Land will reveal itself in a new way in the Sinai Covenant. God, the God creator of heaven and earth, the God who was not resigned to the sin of man - created in his image, that is, in the mysterious plurality of male and female - who still wanted to call to salvation, and designed the I walk through the call of Abraham and now with the mission of Moses reveals His will in the Covenant…

Thought of stopping and rereading: to move forward

At the time: I know that I have put a lot of irons on the plate of my readers on this magazine. I know these are difficult things and what's more summarized in a few lines. I know that many questions come to mind for those who read and try to understand, but I ask for patience. We are at the decisive point in which we will begin to draw - or attempt to do so - the face of the God revealed in the Word which for us is the entire Scripture, with its history of texts and interpretations over the centuries, with the progress of understanding that the Council has splendidly represented in the n. 8 of the “Dei Verbum”, the dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, together with that on the Church and with Gaudium et Spes the true precious novelty of the precious legacy of Vatican II, defined by John Paul II as “the greatest grace of the Holy Spirit to the Church of the 11th century", and the lodestar of the path that Benedict XVI declared from the beginning of his pontificate that he wanted to continue...With confidence, I invite the readers of this attempt at explanation, which will engage the writer and the reader for a long time to come, to looking for and rereading the texts of the Council, starting from the luminous inauguration speech of John XXIII on 1962 October XNUMX (“Gaudet Mater Ecclesia”) and gradually thinking back and enjoying… See you next time.