Name: Ellen Boegel, J.D.
Title: Faculty
Department/College: The Lesley H. and William L. Collins College of Professional Studies
Scripture of the Day: GN 17: 3-9; JN 8: 51-59
“When Abram prostrated himself, God spoke to him.”
We may spontaneously fall to our knees or unthinkingly join our hands in prayer when shocked by grief or extreme joy, but prostration requires a decision.
Although the passage has been translated less deliberately as “Abram fell face down,” the Jewish Study Bible dramatically asserts, “Abram threw himself on his face.” I have, on one or two occasions, prostrated myself; it required thought to painlessly get my body from a standing position to lying prone, nose pressed to the ground, with arms and legs outstretched.
Prostration is a willful humbling. And this is when God speaks.
Abram’s encounter with God reminds us that we must be silent to listen. Lenten prostration opens the path to Easter’s paradoxical message: it is in giving that we receive and in dying to ourselves that we are reborn.