Patient Zero

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Bible speaks of sin as though it were a disease, a brokenness that spreads from one person to another, rather like a virus or the plague.

And this is not merely imagery. We know all too well how mental imbalances can affect not just our inner life but all those around us. Hurt people hurt people, as they say. Our world is like an intricate symphony, a series of harmonies interlocking in delicate balance, and when just one aspect of life is thrown off—mental, emotional, spiritual or social—the whole system starts to spiral out of whack.

No matter what the sin—pride, avarice, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, gluttony—it starts a cascading chain reaction, ripples reaching out to affect the farthest shore. That’s what makes sin so overwhelming, so hard to defeat. It’s like standing on the roof of your house and tearing open pillows to scatter their contents to the wind—and then trying to gather all those feathers back up again. It’s hard to get that genie back in the bottle. Once there’s even a little bit of injustice in the system, the whole world can never quite run the same way again.

A human being might be tempted to trash the whole thing and start over. If the patient is terminal, we might as well move on to the next. But that’s not how God works. It would be easy enough, I think, for Him to snap His fingers and delete the world. Wipe it out, like it never happened, and start all over again, with a new heaven and earth, a new Adam and Eve, a new Lucifer who might not prove so prone to fall.

But God is not like us. His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. God never gives up on His Creation, never abandons His children. It’s simply not His nature. Instead, God seems determined to fight fire with fire—or in this case, to fight a bad infection with a good infection.

He starts out small, you see. He looks at this fallen, broken world, so deeply defiled by sin, and picks out a single man. Just one man: God likes tiny beginnings. And this man God picks, he isn’t a king or a hero or some young buck with his whole life ahead of him. No, God picks an old man “as good as dead,” a man with no family, no future, no great destiny to call his own. And God says to this wizened old soul:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Wow. What utter madness. Abraham’s already pushing 80, and this is in the Middle East of more than 4000 years ago. “As good as dead” indeed. But as St Paul writes while recounting Abraham’s story, ours is the God who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist. He’d rather have to be for this.

Abraham, for his part, reacts to this crazy promise in an even crazier way: “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now who could believe such a promise? “Get up from your deathbed; it’s time for life to begin”? Yet Abraham does. Perhaps he was getting a bit senile. Perhaps he figured he had nothing left to lose. Or perhaps he was simply a far stronger and wiser man than we have any right to suppose. Regardless, a little faith is all it takes to begin the world anew.

Abraham is the seed, the tiny, dried-up kernel from which an entire harvest may sprout. And he’s chosen not because he’s young and strong, not because he’s rich and mighty, but precisely because he is small and old and forgotten. He does not earn the grace and love and promise of God. It is freely given to one who has nothing to offer in return. Abraham is patient zero, if you will. He is the first man to receive this outlandish promise in the midst of a sin-sick world. And from him the promise will grow and spread and infect all those around him.

It spreads to his sons and to his sons’ sons. It spreads to his nephew and his servants and his neighbors. It spreads as Abraham and Sarah become a family, and their family becomes a people, and that people becomes a nation, and that nation is destined by the promise of God to become a blessing to “all the families of the earth.” In Abraham, God marks a new creation, a new beginning. He is in many ways a new Adam, and his wife the new Eve. But this is not a new creation in the sense that it is utterly new, having no connection with what went before. Rather, this is the old creation made new, given a second birth, a second chance at life.

This promise of grace and mercy spreads from soul to soul, from people to people, infecting sin the same way that sin infected the world. The promise is God’s bacteriophage, the virus that fights disease. And it comes to fruition when Abraham’s children, the people of the promise, produce one perfect Man: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, who is Himself immune to sin. Jesus will forgive and heal, bringing new hope and new life, until we in the death throes of our terminal disease nail Him to a Cross to murder Him.

But even this won’t stop Him. Why, it barely slows Him down. From that Cross, Jesus pours out the very life of God for the world: the water of Baptism, the Blood of the New Covenant. The promise given to Abraham is now lavished not simply on those who share Abraham’s blood but upon all those who share Abraham’s faith. And just as the blood of one who is immune holds the cure for all, so we, when we share in the Word and Spirit, in the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, are inoculated against sin and death and hell, made one in the Risen Christ who cannot die again.

And like Nicodemus in the Gospel we are amazed at what we see, and we ask our Lord, “How can these things be?” And Jesus replies with His undying Word:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that all who believe in Him may not perish, but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.