With Abraham on the Mountain

On this second Sunday of Lent, as every year, we hear the story of the Transfiguration, but during this year of Mark, it is juxtaposed with another story – that of Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac.  Actually, Abraham is associated with the Transfiguration every year, since Year A has the call of Abram from Genesis 12, and Year C has the covenant with Abram from Genesis 15.  You might say that this is Abraham’s day.  I wonder why.  On the mountain, the transfigured Christ is seen with Moses and Elijah, two men whose peak experience was an encounter with the living God on Mount Sinai.  Abraham is not mentioned, although his mountain experience was no less momentous.  Peter could have built a tent for him too.  I wonder why he didn’t.

Perhaps a walk is in order, to trace with Abraham his path to the mountain, which is also ours, I believe.  Abraham, father of a multitude, lived before there was a people, because he was to be its source.  His life was spent wandering and worshiping, sustained by a series of promises.  The long walk began in Ur of the Chaldeans, with a trek to Haran accompanied by extended family.  From there God called him forth from country, kindred and his father’s house to something more: a journey to Canaan, a promise of land, and a promise of paternity.  We hear of Abraham’s faith, but what of his patience?  The father of us all spent most of his life landless and childless.  He and his wife Sarah grew old in a land not theirs, Sarah’s womb barren, and “himself as good as dead,” as the letter to the Hebrews so delicately puts it (Heb 11:12).  When at last he says to God: “You have given me no offspring,” he is pointing out that in spite of all his wealth, he has no future and no hope of fulfillment (Gn 15:3).  God invites him to look at the stars: “So shall your descendants be” (Gn 15:5).  He will be looking up at those stars until the day he dies, waiting, hoping, believing.

Do not we, children of Abraham and followers of Christ, walk a similar road?  Peter asked Jesus: “Lord, we have left everything and followed you” (Mk 10:28) – the implied question made explicit by Matthew: “What then will we have?” (Mt 19:27).  Christ answers him with the promise of “a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields” (Mk 10:30).  What could this mean?  We who choose to follow Christ by the narrow way place our lives in God’s hand, seeking its meaning in him alone.  This does not mean we do not hope for good things.  We do!  We hope to receive everything from him.  Everything: all the necessities of life, as well as companionship, meaning, purpose, direction for our energies, reward for our labors, present happiness and a future full of hope.  This is our hundredfold, and we expect to get it!  And yet, having heard the call and taken up our journey into the unknown, we may wait a long time and wander a long distance before finding what we are looking for.  Our lives of discipleship may take us through barren places without much sustenance or foreign lands where we do not speak the language and misunderstand the customs.  I am speaking of seasons of life in which we do not experience the rewards of discipleship, but only its cost.

After yet more years of wandering, Abraham is again promised land and progeny, and this time, prostrate on the ground, he laughs.  Sarah laughs too, though she has trouble admitting it.  But the laughter of Abraham and Sarah is soon to be realized in flesh and blood.  Laughter comes into their lives after they have almost stopped hoping for it, with the birth of their son Isaac.

We too, have laughter come into our life.  What is Isaac for us?  Isaac is the sense we sometimes have that God has received our offering and blessed it.  That he is actively bringing good into the world through us, though our efforts, our gifts, our presence.  Isaac is our fruitfulness, our fecundity, our generativity; he is everything we hoped for from the Lord when we gave him our lives.  Our children are not of flesh and blood, but they do come to us in real, tangible ways through things, events, and people. 

Then comes the day when God again calls Abraham to something more, but this time the “more” seems to be a total contradiction of all that has gone before.  He is to sacrifice his son, his only son whom he loves, in whom are to be fulfilled all God’s promises: Isaac.  What is striking about Genesis 22 is that every detail of the journey to Moriah and the preparation for the sacrifice is so carefully rendered, and yet not a word is said about Abraham’s inner state.  He just goes and does what is asked.  We may fail to notice this spareness because we find it so natural to fill in the feelings and the inner turmoil imaginatively.  Perhaps this is because we know well the road to Moriah.

How can Isaac be sacrificed?  How can it be that God takes away his gifts and nullifies his promises?  How can God even ask us to wield the knife ourselves?  We may have to give up a job that provides meaning and a sense of competence, or a relationship that supports and enlivens.  An ability or talent that once allowed us to shine is now diminished or must be set aside for some reason.  A once clear conviction about the meaning, purpose and direction of our life is obscured, even obliterated by a cloud that comes out of nowhere.  It could be the loss of faculties, the failure of health or finally even the threat to life itself.  Keep death daily before your eyes, says St Benedict, but for all my bursts of fervor, I have no idea if my last walk to Moriah will be undertaken willingly, bearing the fire and the knife, or perhaps the wood on my shoulders.

I do not know why the Church places Abraham before our gaze on Transfiguration Sunday in Lent each year.  But what I do begin to see is that Abraham’s long journey evoked in him an exquisite knowledge of the Father’s heart.  All those decades of waiting, longing for fatherhood brought him to the point where he could not let go of God, no matter how mysterious and seemingly contradictory his deeds.  As the letter to the Hebrews puts it: “he considered him faithful who had promised,” to the point where: “He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead” (Heb 11:11, 19).  Abraham had never seen the face of Christ, and did not know any better than the disciples, or any of us for that matter, what rising from the dead meant.  But he did see Isaac, the impossible gift of God, in flesh and blood before him: his hundredfold.  And he did believe, hoping beyond hope, that the author of life would never revoke his gift.  

If we find that we cannot let go of God, no matter what is taken from us, we too have learned something of the Father’s heart.  We may ask ourselves if it is really Isaac who is sacrificed – our life, our hope, our future – or something more superficial, just a symbol of our fruitfulness: a ram, perhaps.  Like Abraham our father, we have a fruitfulness beyond our imagining, which is hidden in Christ.  The Father’s heart is moved by one who does not withhold his beloved son, because he, too will not withhold his Beloved Son, his all, from us.  On the mountain, he shows us the face of his Son, saying:

“Here is my Isaac, my beautiful one, my Beloved, whom I give you as yours, who will lay down his life for you.  For love of you, I will lose my Isaac to the depths of hell.  By mutual consent, we will be lost to one another, we whose bond of love is stronger than any human bond, of which the love between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister is only a shadow.  On the third day I will reach down to the depths into which he has fallen and grasp my Son’s hand.  I will draw him out of death, and all creation with him.  Then, with faces unveiled, you will see the glory of God, shining on the face of Christ.”

Image: Abraham and Isaac on the Way to the Place of Sacrifice, by Marc Chagall