4 March 2011

4 March 2011


"I know now how devoted you are to God,
since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son."

To sacrifice his son would have been bad enough.  It would have been much easier for him to give his own life.  To have to surrender the life of his son must have been heartbreaking.  But it was even more than that.  It was all of the promise and plan that God had for him, at least as he understood it.  That he even had a son was already unlikely enough.  It only happened because the LORD intervened.  

He therefore had every reason to believe that the LORD would fulfill his promise through Isaac to make him a great nation in which all the earth would be blessed.  Faced with the clear voice of the LORD Abraham surrendered not only his own son but also his own understanding.  Letting go of his human understanding "[h]e reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead," as the book of Hebrews tells us, something he would not have arrived at through his human reasoning.

But as much as Abraham loved his son and as much as he had invested in him it is still nothing in comparison to how the Father loves Jesus.

"This is my beloved Son. Listen to him."

There is no love greater than the love between the Father and the Son.  In the Father sending Jesus, and in Jesus accepting the call, we have an unfathomable gift, much greater than Abraham's surrender of Isaac.  All that the Father is he gives to the Son in love. How then can he give him for  creatures like ourselves?

It is therefore easy to conclude as Paul did:

"If God is for us, who can be against us?

He who did not spare his own Son
but handed him over for us all,
how will he not also give us everything else along with him?"

Let us believe even when we say "I am greatly afflicted."  Let us trust that the LORD will see us through to the sacrifice of thanksgiving.  This sacrifice he himself has already provided.  It is Jesus in the Eucharist.  In it we begin to see a glimpse of Jesus as the disciples saw on Mt. Tabor when he was clothed in "dazzling white".  We see why Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, give witness to him.  He is the beloved of the Father.  In him all the promises of God to Abraham and to the world find their yes.