Where's the Animal?

Second Sunday of Lent

What is our reaction to the first reading today?  What thoughts cross our mind when we hear about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah?  Perhaps we weren’t really thinking about it too much because we’ve heard the story before.  We know that the angel will stay Abraham’s hand and the ram will take Isaac’s place.  But when we do that, we lose the force of this passage.  What if God asked you to sacrifice your child or one of your children?  What would your reaction be?  Would you start marching up the mountain?

This story should make us shudder.  Part of the story wasn’t so strange for the Jews and pagans hearing it, because the sacrifice of the son was part of a few pagan worship practices.  In fact, the Israelite and Judean kings will be blamed by God later for taking upon themselves the worship of Moloch; and the way Moloch was worshipped was by immolating, killing, the first son by throwing him into the fire.  But even while Abraham was probably not surprised that a god might ask for the sacrifice of the son, that didn’t make it any easier for Abraham.  He had sent away Ishamel, his son by the slave woman, Hagar.  He and Sarah were even more past the age for bearing children than when Isaac had been conceived probably around twelve years earlier.  And yet, God had promised that Abraham’s descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the sky or the grains of sand by the sea.  You can imagine the question Abraham has going through his mind: ‘How could this be?  How will I have all these descendants if God is asking me to kill my son?’  

Maybe some of the children could relate to Isaac, too.  Hopefully not because they think their parents would kill them!  But imagine what must have been going through Isaac’s head: ‘Dad says we’re going to offer sacrifice to God today.  And here I am carrying the wood, and the knife, and everything to make the sacrifice, but where’s the animal that we’re going to sacrifice?  It’s just me and dad walking up the mountain!!’  With each step, maybe Isaac got a little more nervous about what was going on.  And Isaac is even forced to set up the wood for the sacrificial fire.  And Isaac even lays down, no doubt asked by his father to do so, as Abraham was an old man, and there was no way he could have caught up to Isaac if he decided to run away, or fight off Isaac if he decided to resist being sacrificed.  Hopefully we’re starting to feel the tension, like in a movie where the hero is about to die, but you’re not quite sure the hero is going to be able to escape and wondering how the plot can continue without the hero.

Even though this account that we hear today is a true account, it also foreshadows a future event to which St. Paul refers: the crucifixion of Jesus.  Isaac becomes a prefigurement of Jesus: he carries the wood for his own sacrifice; he willingly lays down upon the wood to be sacrificed.  But, instead of an angel appearing at the last minute to stop Abraham from killing his own son, God the Father allows Jesus to die.  The scourges fall on Jesus’ back; the nails pierce through Jesus’ hands and feet; the spear punctures Jesus’ side.  There is no ram to take Jesus’ place.  Jesus Himself, the only Son of God, the Beloved, dies, the sacrifice of the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world.  The hero of the disciples dies, as an unexpected twist in the plot of their lives and in salvation history (at least from our point of view).  

With such drastic suffering that the disciples were going to experience in watching their master be arrested, scourged, and put to death by evil men, God did not want the disciples to be without hope.  And that’s where the Gospel comes in today.  God gives the disciples a preview of the end of the movie: the Resurrection and Ascension as Jesus is transfigured before their eyes.  Peter, James, and John get a preview of the heavenly life and what a glorified body will look like to help carry them through the dark days of the Passion of our Lord.  Of course, they don’t understand that it’s meant to carry them through.  Especially in the Gospel of Mark (by tradition Mark’s source for Jesus’ life was St. Peter) the disciples never seem to understand what’s going on, with a few brief exceptions.  But afterwards, they see how God was preparing them for suffering by seeing a taste of glory.

That preparation is important for us, too.  For many of us, there is suffering in our lives: unemployment; loved ones with diseases; dysfunctional families; a lack of friends.  God doesn’t say to us: deal with it!  He does, sometimes just in fleeting moments, give us a foretaste of the joy that awaits us in heaven.  Mass is supposed to be something of that, as we come together to worship God with precious metals and vestments that remind us of heaven, where we will see God face to face and be embraced by His love and by all those who have been faithful in following Christ.  God gives us the Eucharist to give us strength to make it through suffering, as food for our pilgrimage.  And He shares glory with us in so many other small ways, that we often don’t recognize them until later.  

The same could be said for Lent.  During Lent we focus on suffering: on Jesus’ suffering; on uniting our own suffering and penances to Jesus on the cross.  But it’s not meant to be all suffering.  Even this early, in the second week of Lent, God gives us a foretaste of the glory that comes after suffering through Him, with Him, and in Him.  Lent is not the end of the story.  Jesus’ death is not the end of the story.  God has prepared glory for us, just as He prepared glory for Jesus and raised Him from the dead.  May we recognize the foretastes of glory that God gives to us, so that the joy of Easter carries us through the Good Fridays of our lives.