2nd Sunday of Lent, B February 28, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Obedience. In our journey through the fundamentals, it is time to look at the reality of obedience. Last week took us through that fundamental conflict of Good vs. Evil, begun with original sin and carried on today in the heart of every human person. After promising never to use a flood to destroy evil again, God gives us the sign of a rainbow, which foreshadows the way in which he will overcome evil once and for all, by aiming it’s destructive power at himself.
To get to that, however, our fight against evil must continue and that fight consistently takes the form of obedience. And this should make sense. If the very first sin of humankind is to disobey God, we should expect that countering this evil would take the form of obeying God. Some time after Noah’s obedience saves his family and the human race, Abraham is called to deepen that saving trend with something that, quite frankly, should shock us. He is asked to sacrifice his own son.
To truly appreciate this reality, we should recall the greater context. Abraham’s son Isaac is not just a beloved child, he is himself proof of God’s promises. The story starts with Abraham old and childless when God speaks to him and promises to make him the father of many nations, to grant him many descendants and make his descendants the source of blessing for all the world. Isaac is the fulfillment of that promise. God has already promised to raise up his heirs through Isaac, whom he now wants to be sacrificed. Surely, this should be evidence that God is not really as good as we thought, that God may not always be on our side in the battle against evil, right?
Of course, there is more to the story. Part of what’s missing is just how thoroughly God has shown himself to be trustworthy up to this point. He spoke to him and blessed him. God showed himself to be powerful and genuinely interested in the well-being of Abraham and his wife. He did, after all, give them the miracle of having a child while being more than 90 years old. This is not a random voice asking for sacrifice – any reasonable person should ignore such voices and commands. But this voice is the same God that for years, possibly decades, manifested his love and power clearly and directly. The difficult part of obedience is that it requires trust that the one you obey sees more than you do. Abraham trusted that there was more to be seen.
Another important factor in this scene is the wider culture. Abraham lives in a pagan world where some religious practices involved human sacrifice. So, while it remains horrific, the idea of such sacrifice would not have been new to Abraham. An important difference, however, is that unlike these pagan religions, Abraham had reason to believe God would bring him back from the dead. In fact, Scripture itself interprets this passage to tell us that Abraham “reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead.”
As we saw with Job a few weeks ago, God often uses apparent contradictions to lead a soul to deeper faith. What looks like a contradiction is actually a paradox; it turns out to be the pressure, the conflict needed to raise the soul and mind to a higher perspective. In this case, Abraham’s faith that God would keep his promise – the promise to raise up descendants through Isaac – is in tension with God’s command to sacrifice him. The only way both can be true is that God must be able to raise him from the dead. That is an important foreshadowing of a future time when God will raise a certain Son from the dead.
Still, there is yet more to consider. One is that Isaac himself probably wasn’t a helpless victim. In a verse omitted for brevity, scripture tells us that Isaac himself carried the wood for the sacrifice. Think about it. Isaac was strong enough to carry enough wood to burn a whole human person. This is not a feeble 8 year old, but probably a young adult in his late teens or 20s. And Abraham is over 100 years old. It is unlikely Abraham could have ever tied up Isaac without his consent. The son was just as obedient as the father.
Finally, at the moment of sacrifice, God commands him to halt and offer a ram in the child’s place, definitively proving that God does not want human sacrifice. In a fallen world and a pagan culture, God uses this dramatic series of events to demonstrate that he is unlike these false Gods, that human sacrifice is not something he expects from his people – this is a victory over evil. As with Noah and the flood, the real events of Abraham and Isaac are also a symbolic foreshadowing of the final victory over evil through the death of his son.
Which brings us to the Transfiguration. As God did with Abraham, Jesus leads his apostles on a journey meant to deepen their trust in him. Besides the teachings, the compassion, the miracles, Jesus offers this transcendent moment of glory to impress upon his apostles that they can trust him even when things don’t make sense. God the Father adds his own voice, emphasizing “this is my beloved son, listen to him.” As Jesus begins to reveal his plan for letting himself be killed, his followers will struggle to accept it. But, as with Abraham, this tension between the promises of God and the evils they see will lead to faith in the resurrection, if they remain obedient.
And that brings us to where we are today, during Lent in the midst of a broken world. The battle of good vs evil rages on and it’s not always clear which side is winning or even which side we’re on. Do not forget, then, how this started: with disobedience. If you desire the victory of the good – and who doesn’t – then there is only one sure way forward: obedience to God.
But that obedience is not mindless. As with Abraham and the Apostles, God gives us reason to trust him if we maintain a relationship with him and remember the glories he’s already revealed. If you do not know and trust the Lord, then seek him out. Strive to recognize and recall the promises he has kept: the whole story of salvation, the gifts of baptism, confession, the eucharist… of providential moments in your own life. When – not if, but when you find yourself face with the choice to obey God in something you don’t understand, remember these things. If it really is God speaking this command, then obey him remembering that he can do all things, even raise you from the dead.