Monday of the Twenty-Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, October 12th
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Typology
In God’s infinite intelligence, all of the details of revelation are deeply linked with each other from beginning to end. From the creation story in Genesis to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, you can find elements of Christ, the Church, the Sacraments, and the totality of our relationship with God at any point in Scripture. Particularly, the stories of the Old Testament are clear prefigurements of stories in the New Testament, which has been covered and studied extensively since the earliest days of Christianity. This link is referred to in Theology as typology—in the stories of ancient Judaism, we find “types” that correspond perfectly to Jesus and how he carried out his ministry. Typology continues to be built up as we read and investigate Scripture further, but its beginning can be found in the earliest days of the Church.
In today’s first reading, Paul writes out and explains in detail a very early example of typology in his letter to the Galatians. His specific typology is the relationship between the sons of Abraham and the covenants with God. Abraham had Ishmael through his slave Hagar first, and Isaac through his wife Sarah after that. God established a covenant with His chosen people before the coming of Christ, though they were still subjected to the enslavement of sin and death. It was only through Christ that we became children of a “free woman,” namely the Church established by Christ, which freed us from the bonds of sin and defeated death for us. This is a profound example of typology because it takes that which is from the book of the Law in the Old Testament, and assigns it to the events immediately after the time of Christ. But typology preexists even Paul; Christ himself seems to reference typological things in his own ministry. For example, today’s Gospel reveals that Christ saw a typological connection between the famous story of Jonah in the whale and his own coming death and resurrection. Through typology, we can discover ways in which Christ wished to communicate to us the truth of his own life, death, and resurrection. We are looking for signs as Christians in just the same way as an atheist is looking for signs of God’s existence; these signs cannot be found in persistent and explicit revelations that are divinely passed down through our senses. Instead, Christ tells us that the only signs we receive will be those that we can find in the past of our faith. The only signs we can find that tell us the truth about Christ will be found in proper and ordered typology.
If we want to understand the truth of the Church and our relationship to Christ as the Church, we need to study typology. If typology is finding the prefigurements and the types of the New Covenant within the writings of the Old Covenant, we should be able to find the most fundamental of such examples both at the very beginning of the Old Testament and the very end of the New Testament. Like Hagar and Sarah, Scripture itself begins with a woman who brings slavery into the world and ends with a woman who brings freedom. Through Eve, humanity became enslaved by sin and death. Through the Church, the bride of Christ, humanity is brought into a new level of freedom from sin and death. Our salvation came from Christ, and Christ came into this world through the same way that sin and death entered—a human woman. Typology allows us to understand who Christ truly is and why he did what he did. It reveals to us the truth of the Church and how it is embodied in the person of Mary. We want signs. God has given them to us; we just need to go discover them in the writings of our past. God is the master storyteller of the Cosmos, and He has delicately linked everything we need to know together. When the time comes for all to be revealed, we will then fully see what we merely catch glimpses of now in the typological beauty of this story of His that we are living.
