Saturday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Chapel at St Xavier University
where we held our Chapter of Mats

Joseph said to his brothers: “I am about to die.
God will surely take care of you and lead you out of this land to the land
that he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Then, putting the sons of Israel under oath, he continued,
“When God thus takes care of you,
you must bring my bones up with you from this place.”
Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten.


If you were surprised this morning to find no entry for this Saturday, so was I. Somehow I missed this day as I wrote my entries last week. 
With today's first reading we come to the end of the story of Jacob, though we have been reading about his son Joseph, and to the end of the Book of Genesis. The story will pick up immediately as we enter the Book of Exodus, with the story of Jacob's descendants in Egypt. 
Genesis has been about God's promise and the fidelity of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Feminists might point to a significant break with the story of Sarah, because she received a blessing/promise from her family as she left, and saw it fulfilled. The list of promised ancestors might even be "Abraham, Sarah and Jacob" since she outshines her husband Isaac, but that would be rather untraditional and probably wouldn't survive the ages to come. (At one time I thought I could  rewrite tradition. I've given up.)
Genesis teaches us that we, the children of Abraham and Sarah, are people of the promise. We have been promised great things, not because we deserve them or earned them, but because God chose us from all the nations to be a people peculiarly his own. 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were not outstanding, or even heroic,  individuals. They did not stand taller than anyone else; they enjoyed some successes and many disappointments. They forgot God's promise on occasion and remembered them on others. Their most  heroic virtue was probably their willingness to be led through a land that was promised to them but belonged to someone else. They managed to be buried in the land of promise, after buying grave sites from the owners. 
In today's reading Jacob made his children swear his bones would be transferred to the Promised Land when they finally returned to it. 
We too are people of the promise. We speak vaguely of heaven though we have never seen the place. We hope for a resurrection of the body though we cannot imagine what it will be like. We look for the kingdom of God though it will bear little resemblance to kingdoms, empires, nations or democracies of this world. God has promised great things. Of that we are sure. And so we travel on, trusting in God to lead us there.