Second Sunday of Lent

God calls to Abraham, and how do you think Abraham answers? Of course! "Here I am."

It's also interesting to me how God himself calls Abraham and tests him, telling him to sacrifice Isaac. But then it's the Lord's messenger who calls from heaven to stop Abraham and make him the father of great nations and so on. Why not God both times or the messenger both times?

I imagine maybe that there's something in the original Hebrew text, something denoting how or in what form or way that God usually calls someone. Like maybe it's always by messenger. I for some reason have the notion that, somehow way back when, one was not supposed to even call God by name. Or just saying God (or "Yahweh") was in some way sacreligious, or at least a very powerful and rare thing to do. So maybe the original Hebrew text referred to a messenger as calling Abraham in the first place. Or at least the original references were equivalent, when Abraham receives the first message about sacrificing Isaac and then the second message about saving him.

Otherwise, if we should just take the text as it's written now, I have to wonder: why would God bother to give the first message personally, then delegate the second?

The Gospel reading is the transfiguration, which is always a good time. I love how God says from heaven, "This is my beloved son," same as he does at Christ's baptism.

But, now that I thik about it, at the Lord's baptism, after God says, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased," he sends the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. See how once again it's God speaking first and then sending a messenger?

Although in this case the "messenger" is the Holy Spirit, which is God himself in Catholic dogma. But I'm meaning messenger in the sense of how Christ himself refers to the Holy Spirit as the advocate, the "paraclete," in the Gospel of St. John.

Goodness. Now I have a lot to look up and re-read.