Originally published at National Catholic Register
(Reading: Genesis 16:1-17:27; 21:8-20)
This week and next we’ll address what might be called “Abraham and the Child Problem.” We’ll see the human solution … and the divine one.
We saw last week the central point of Abraham’s (still, technically, Abram’s) life: God made a covenant with him. Having led him out of his homeland to an unknown foreign land, God now enters into a relationship with Abraham, promising him descendants outnumbering the sands of the seashore or the stars of heaven (Genesis 15:5-7) in the land God was giving him (vv. 18-21). God makes this covenant with Abraham, who has complained that — despite what God has given him — he has nobody to whom to pass those gifts on: “The one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus” (15:3), his servant.
No, promises God. Abraham’s descendants will outnumber the stars of heaven (imagine what that looked like to a man in the middle of a desert without light pollution). And Abraham believed him (15:6).
But, still, how?
Mary, too, believed Gabriel … but she knew enough to ask, “How can this be, since I do not know man?” (Luke 1:34). And yet she had faith. As
