PROMISE OF LAND

Promise of Land

Fr. Mervyn Carapiet

“Look towards heaven and number the stars, if you are able to number them...So shall your descendants be” (Gen 15, 5). That was God’s promise to Abraham. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen12, 1 -2). With the divine guarantee, Abraham went forth in faith. Now it must be noted that God did not intend to bless just one nation through Abraham but a multitude of nations. God’s original promise to Abraham was at the foundation of the message Moses took to Pharaoh. “Thus says the Lord, ‘Israel is my first born son’” (Ex 4, 22). Israel was to be the first born of many nations. But Pharaoh was too distracted to get it. And neither was ancient Israel. The Israelites repeatedly succumbed to narrow nationalism and ethnic pride, preferring a strict separation from the rest of the world. In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul would note that the promise came to Abraham, not because of circumcision but due to faith, thereby making him the father to both Jews and Gentiles (Christian and Muslim). Thus the source was not the ritual act of circumcision but the inner reality of faith. On the World Youth Day in Madrid in August, Pope Benedict said, “Faith starts with God, who opens his heart to us and invites us to share in his own divine life.”

All the families of nations, Jews as well as Gentiles, will come together in Jesus Christ. Thus the very first line of the New Testament identifies Jesus as the “son of Abraham” (Mt 1, 1). God made good on his promise. Abraham became the father of a multitude, his offspring as numberless as the stars, and blessed through him. This is surely what Jesus meant to evoke when he called his first disciples to leave everything behind, as Abraham left everything, to follow him: “And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or land, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life (Mt 12, 29).

There is no reference in the entire New Testament that God’s promise to Abraham would be honoured in the form of landed property. The New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old. On the day of Pentecost, Peter was addressing a mixed multitude when he said, “You are the heirs of the prophets, the heirs of the Covenant God made with your ancestors when he told Abraham, “All the nations of the earth will be blessed in your descendants” (Act 3, 25).

Jesus Christ is the personalised venue of the fulfilling of the promises and prophetic pronouncements. The Body of Christ is the real and ultimate convergence of all reality, human and subhuman. All human history and its socio-political institutions are definitively gathered up to Christ, the Alpha and Omega. “Fear not, little flock, it has pleased the Father to give you the Kingdom”, said Jesus.

Hope for the land is part of the original content of the promise to Abraham. This promise of the land is clearly about something far greater than the mere idea of possessing a piece of ground or a national territory in the sense that every people is entitled to. The land was given as a space for obedience and openness to God. This is an essential component of the concept of land, and, as such, is realised perfectly in Jesus Christ. (Cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. I, pp. 82 – 83). In the same book, Benedict XVI mentions how the meek of the earth, personified in the toilers of the soil, have possessed the land, despite the ravages of war. It is precisely their meekness and openness to God that prepare the earth as gift in Christ to the Father.