When God promised Abraham that He would establish an everlasting covenant with him and his descendants, He instituted circumcision as the sign of that covenant. The order is clear: first comes the promise, and then circumcision as the sign and seal of the promise and the covenant.

In the world in which we live, it often seems that whenever there is something beautiful—a flower in bloom, for example—someone is bound to come along and trample it underfoot. This can seem almost like an inevitable feature of human nature: when we see something beautiful, and even recognize its beauty, we may nevertheless feel an almost irresistible urge to spoil or destroy it.

And yet this is not an inherent feature of human nature. It belongs to our fallen and sinful nature. Just as leprosy, or any other disease, is not a natural part of the human organism, neither are sin and vice part of our true nature.

We like to be right. And we like to think of ourselves as righteous—before other people, before the law, and before God. After all, being righteous makes us feel good about ourselves. Sometimes we feel especially good when we compare ourselves with others whom we consider less righteous than we are.

But God’s Word reminds us that none of us is perfectly righteous. None of us can honestly say that we have never broken the law, never done wrong, or never misunderstood something or someone.

Whenever Moses had been in the presence of God, his face shone. The radiance of Moses’ face was so bright that the children of Israel could not look upon it—just as we cannot look directly at the sun, because its brightness hurts our eyes and can even blind us.

We probably do not often think of the glory of the sun as itself a reflection of God’s glory. Still less do we think that we, too, are called to reflect God’s light and glory in this world, to the people around us—not to blind them, but to help them truly see.

Saint Paul says in today’s Epistle: «I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received.» It is a self-evident truth that no one can give what he himself does not have. And it should be equally self-evident that no one can possess anything that he has not first received.

This means more than simply admitting, honestly and humbly, that we brought nothing into this world and that everything we have has been given to us. What matters is that, once we understand that everything we have is a gift, we become able to distinguish between what is truly important and what is not.