I confess to having spent a lot of time with Genesis 22 over the past several years. For a time, it was in Old Testament survey classes; before that, it was the very different setting of middle school religion classes encountering the Bible for the first time. I’ve also encountered it here and there in parish settings, not to mention the many years of Sunday School and Bible School growing up.
I mention this simply because the most common way today of reading this story—among both Catholics and Protestants—still strikes me as deeply disturbing. It goes like this: God tells Abraham to kill his kid; he takes said kid up the mountain with the kind of characteristic silence of a stoic father; in the end, it all works out, though we might wonder about the psychological damage to both father and son.
When asked about the meaning of this story, most people seem to respond with a kind of rote familiarity: obviously, God is testing Abraham. As if that somehow makes it better. This is often among Catholics who are deeply committed to various pro-life issues. In what world would we think that God would ask us to do something intrinsically evil just to mess with us? That doesn’t really sound like the eternal, impassive, transcendently good God whom Christians claim to worship.
It turns out that this modern reading is an aberration, a novelty. In fact, there is a long tradition of reading the sacrifice of Isaac that assumes a crucial difference: that Isaac is not a child, but a young man; that he knows what is going on; that he is not the victim of some cruel child abuse, but rather the willing participant in his family’s self-offering to the one true God. This makes all the difference in the world. Because it is one thing to offer to God everything that is yours; it is another to offer to God something that belongs to another.
I used to think of the moment at the end of the story, when the angel of the Lord stops Abraham from killing his son, as the end of this great ordeal, this existential crisis in which God and Abraham come to their senses. But if we read this with the tradition of the Church, and of Israel before it, it becomes rather the dramatic endorsement of Isaac’s sacrifice, and a clear indication that the whole exercise was always, from the beginning, ordered as a type of something else to come.
In the end, Isaac’s willingness to lay down his life, and Abraham’s willingness to give up any claim over the life of his only son, are in themselves meaningless. I think that is part of what the story is meant to say, in relation to the religions both of Abraham’s day and of ours. Even the most profound religious impulses of humanity can fall short of accomplishing anything of real value. Isaac’s sacrifice could not take away sin; it could not do anything new and different from the blood sacrifices already offered on the altars of the ancient people of God. If anything, it would merely suggest the horrific inadequacy of sacrifice—the fact that even when we give our best to God, it is never enough. But this willingness to give up one’s life for another is not meaningless if it can be qualified by a higher reality—a higher story, yet to come, in which the one person willingly gives his life in offering for many.
On a different mountain, or perhaps the same mountain, Jesus ascends with his disciples for prayer. In Luke’s version, the three disciples fall asleep—surely one more statement of the natural human inadequacy in the face of God’s reality—while Jesus converses with Moses and Elijah, the representative figures of the Law and the Prophets, the two great pillars of Jewish revelation. Here also there’s a sense, in the mind of the Church, that the Law and the Prophets ultimately point to and submit to Jesus. He is the source of both. And so again the merely human attempts to approach God have failed. Something more is required.
The more is another hill, another transfiguration; it is of course the hill of Calvary, and the cross. For it is on the cross that Jesus shows himself as king, and the revelation of his kingship comes not because of his power and his might, but because of his weakness and humility. The world has no shortage of those willing to climb the hill and set themselves up as king over the mountain. But there is only one who embraced his kingship and his Godhood most fully when he submitted himself to the most abysmal humiliation. He has no equal.
On the transfiguration that is the Cross, most of the disciples also fall asleep—which is to say, they are not present. Yet on either side, rather than the Law and the Prophets, we find there a penitent thief and an impenitent thief, the two possible reactions to Jesus. For we are all thieves; we are all sinners in the face of Christ. We all must shrink back at his glory. But it is still up to us whether we choose to follow him into that brightness or run back down the mountain in fear toward the hell of our own making.
At the cross, as Abraham brought Isaac, so Our Lady stands in sorrowful offering to the last, willingly giving up her most precious gift. Unlike Isaac, this sacrifice does take away sin. Unlike the Transfiguration, this glory will last forever—and so the booths that Peter wants to build are not wrong in intention, but wrong in time and place. Peter will, in fact, build a church, but it will be built on the glory of the cross.
As our Collect today reminds us, the vision of Christ’s glory on the mountain was meant, in part, to strengthen his disciples for the days to come. So it is for us as we move deeper into Lent. Remember that we are giving up and abstaining and fasting and performing devotions not merely because we are dust and need to remember how awful we are. We are offering meaningless sacrifices not just because God wants to test us. We prepare so that we will be able to see Christ when he appears. We want to see him at Easter not as we want him to be, but as he really is. We want to be able to hear his voice and listen, as the voice of the Father tells us: this is my beloved Son, listen to him. And if we can learn to see the Son, and listen to him, we can hope to hear one day those same words that he speaks from the cross: today you will be with me in paradise.