BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS, I AM

A REFLECTION FOR PASSION SUNDAY

When our blessed Lord spoke of knowing Abraham, an Old Testament patriarch who had been dead for thousands of years already, the Jews mocked him.  How could he possibly know someone who lived so many years before he, Christ, was born?  And when our Lord answered, they were scandalized by what he said: “Before Abraham was, I am.”

In terms of being good English, it doesn’t really make sense.  It flouts the grammatical rule of the sequence of tenses, and worse yet, it displaces nature by making something in the present tense, “I am,” occur before what had already happened in the past, “Before Abraham was.”  But the Jews understood exactly what our Lord meant by this statement.  He was claiming that his own existence belonged outside the dimension of time, that it was eternal.  While we can refer to Christ the man in the past tense, for example, “Christ was born, he died, he rose again from the dead,” and so on, we cannot properly refer to Christ as God other than in the eternal present.  God “is”, period.  He “is,” and this is how it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.  He is eternal, as only God can be eternal.

So when our Lord told the Jews that he “is” before Abraham “was,” they were in doubt as to what Christ was telling them.  He was saying “I am God.”  This was such a dire blasphemy to them that they took up stones immediately to cast at him.  Their hardened hearts could not take into account that this man before them was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies, the one who would redeem the people of Israel from all their iniquities.

What lesson is to be learned from today’s Gospel?  It is perhaps the simplest and most important lesson of all, namely, that Jesus Christ is God.  From this most essential truth of our faith, everything else flows.  Just as from the spilling of his Most Precious Blood, all graces flow.  The graces of repentance, of conversion, of a life spent loving and serving God.  The grace of our redemption.  Nothing else matters.  In these times when life seems so fragile, we find our only real comfort in the knowledge that Christ is God and that by his life, death and resurrection he has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life.