Second Sunday of Lent 2012

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/030412.cfm

God put Abraham to the test.
He called to him, "Abraham!"
"Here I am!" he replied.
Then God said:
"Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love,
and go to the land of Moriah.
There you shall offer him up as a holocaust
on a height that I will point out to you."


There may be no passage in the Old Testament as monumental and challenging as this story from the Book of Genesis. Those contemporaries of ours who despise religion of every sort might use this as the "anti-poster child" of everything they hate about religion. 
There is both the insane demand by "God" and the equally insane response of Abraham. They will ask, "Is this your ideal of faithful obedience?" 
Feminists will point out that Sarah is conspicuously absent in this story. There is only a terrible god, a mad father and a befuddled son. Surely Sarah, had she known was happening, would have fought like a tiger to prevent what happened. We have already encountered her jealous wrath when the slave child Ishmael challenged Isaac's position as Abraham's heir apparent. 
The resolution of the story only partly resolves  the tension; it probably does nothing for the anxiety, anger, resentment and terror it has evoked. One wonders from a psychological perspective if Isaac ever got over the trauma. Later, as his story unfolds, we find he was as gullible before his wife Rebecca and his son Jacob as he was when he asked his father, "Where is the lamb to be slaughtered?" 
And yet the Church honors this story as one of the most important -- if not the most important -- in the Old Testament. Abraham's unquestioning, ready obedience and Isaac's supposed willingness to be sacrificed prefigure the willing obedience of God's "only begotten Son" Jesus. 


Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and famous Jewish author, suggested that Abraham was actually testing God as he raised the butcher knife. Wiesel imagined Abraham's muttering, "How far will God let me go with this insanity?" Seeing Abraham's willingness, God actually backed down and called off the murder. 

Perhaps Abraham, watching the smoke mushrooming over Sodom and Gomorrah as if from a furnace, wondered how he would deal with the God who had claimed him as his sole believer. Realizing that God had chosen him as his only friend; a God who is ferocious enough to incinerate cities at his whim, Abraham would have to muster all his courage to stand before Him. He alone would have to tame this God and present him to his descendants. The authors of Genesis assure us that Abraham saw the destruction, but they do not tell us what was going on his mind. 

The "taming" or civilizing of God would continue throughout Salvation History until the Fullness of Time came when the Son of God become a man and dared to stand before his Father as our sole representative and only Savior. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his wonderful poem The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe, wrote:

Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

God and God's demand upon us -- a demand which is both profoundly reasonable and infinitely beyond our capacity -- can only be humanized through a long process in which the Virgin plays an indispensable part. God becomes approachable only through his becoming human, as the Letter to the Hebrews teaches us: 

You have not approached that which could be touched and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness and storm and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them,for they could not bear to hear the command: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.”Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, “I am terrified and trembling.”No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering,and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect,and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel. (Hebrews 12:18-24)

The Transfiguration of Jesus evoked that terror in Peter, James and John. They were reassured only by the soothing, familiar presence of Jesus after the vision ended. 


We probably have no answer to the critics of religion who blame us for all the wars of human history -- although the wars of the last three centuries were ideological rather than religious, and far more savage than any war ever waged in the name of God. 

Nature has all the time
in the world to prepare
for life. 

But during this season of Lent we must contemplate this God who demands and deserves sublime, absolute obedience. And we must be grateful that Jesus has stepped forward to satisfy and gratify our Loving and Merciful Father.