The sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most misunderstood passages in all of Holy Scripture, and the first thing to say about this strange episode in salvation history is that the living God is not a fiend or a murderer seeking twisted pleasure by playing games with Abraham and Isaac. A voice in all of us protests “I will not worship a sadistic god who commands one of his creatures to sacrifice his own son as a test of loyalty,” but that objection misses the entire point of this difficult passage, which must be read in its proper depth to be understood.
Consider: Abraham was so easily persuaded to sacrifice Isaac because human sacrifice was a part of the many false pagan religions in the ancient world which were too often filled with darkness, lust, violence, and brutality. No, the point of Abraham’s test is not that God demanded human sacrifice but that he ended such slaughter for all time as a means of divine worship, and in so doing, the living God also prepared the world for the true religion of Israel, a way of worshiping the living God in keeping with human dignity.
But, more than that, Abraham’s test was also a prefiguring of and a preparation for the one complete and perfect sacrifice that brings peace to the whole world and restores the human race to the life of grace for which we were created. And that sacrifice, of course, is the atoning death of Jesus Christ on the Cross. The eternal Father sacrificed his beloved and only Son in our place to redeem humanity from everlasting death, the grave which we made for ourselves by the rebellion of sin, and thus “he who did not know sin became sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
We read in Genesis today that the land to which God directed Abraham is called Moriah. The exact geographical reference in this text is disputed, but an ancient tradition holds that this is none other than Mount Moriah, the location identified in the Book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 3:1) as the site of the Temple in Jerusalem, which means that the altar built by Abraham to sacrifice Isaac was on the same spot where (1200 hundred years later) sacrifice was offered in Solomon’s Temple and in Herod’s Temple after that, the Temple in which the child Jesus was presented to the Lord forty days after his birth, in which he taught the elders as a boy of twelve, and from the pinnacle of which he was tempted by the father of lies.
Notice that when the angel of the Lord stayed the hand of Abraham from offering Isaac, a ram was substituted in place of the son so that a sacrifice could still be offered. And that ram, a male sheep, was caught by its head in a thicket of thorns. Here the Holy One of Israel prepared the world to understand the sacrifice of his Son, the true Lamb of God, whose head would be crowned with thorns before he mounted the altar of the Cross to lay down his life for the salvation of the world.
And now we are ready to understand a bit more deeply an event just as strange as the sacrifice of Isaac: the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus on a mountain unnamed in the gospels but long identified as Mount Tabor in Galilee. Scripture does not say but ancient tradition holds that this event took place forty days before Christ’s death on the Cross, which is why the Gospel on the Second Sunday of Lent is always one of the three accounts of the Transfiguration.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the story of the Transfiguration comes just after Peter’s confession of faith that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, the same moment when Christ taught the Twelve to their horror that he must suffer and die to accomplish his mission. Mark and Luke place the Transfiguration a week after Christ foretells his coming death, and so there is a clear connection between the Transfiguration and the final Passover that awaited the Lord Jesus in Jerusalem.
Saint Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah conversed with Jesus about his passion to come, and so we learn the central purpose of the Transfiguration: to prepare Christ for the ordeal ahead and to prepare Peter, James, and John both for the scandal of the Cross and the unbelievable joy of the Resurrection to come after the grave.
We who live after the Resurrection and know that Jesus Christ is Lord must forever remember that the Son of Mary is and always will be both true God and true man. Jesus is a man like us in all things but sin, and so his human nature gave him both the capacity to suffer and die and the ability to unite himself to us by sharing our humanity so that we could share his divinity. And Jesus is also the Eternal Word by whom all things were made, and so he is, as the Creed confesses, Light from Light.
But the light of Tabor is not the created light of the stars which fills the cosmos. No, that star light was created by the Father’s eternal Word when he made all things from nothing, beginning with: “Let there be light.” The Light of Christ, rather, the Light which shone out from inside of him on that high mountain, is the uncreated radiance of God’s eternal glory. In their brief moment on Mount Tabor, Peter, James, and John were given a glimpse of that divine glory in the Lord Jesus to prepare them for the scandal of the Cross which was so close at hand.
And in addition to that bright light, the Transfiguration was also marked by the presence of a cloud. This is the glory cloud which filled Solomon’s Temple at its dedication, the same cloud which guided the Hebrews to freedom, and covered Mount Sinai when Moses received the Law, and filled the Tabernacle or Meeting Tent as a sign that the living God dwelt among his people in their exile. This is what the rabbis called shekinah, the glorious and visible habitation of God with his people, and that is what the Lord Jesus is: God with us; God on earth.
That is why the three apostles wanted to build tents or booths as at Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles which recalls that the children of Israel dwelt in tents during their long journey from Egypt to the Land of Promise and were guided and protected by the glory cloud. On that mountain Peter, James, and John saw and heard that their rabbi was the Father’s beloved Son, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, and that in him the salvation of the world was at hand. And so, despite their fear and perplexity, they wanted to linger on that mountain in the numinous presence of the living God.
But that was premature. First, they had to come down from that high place and await the final Passover at Mount Moriah. There in Jerusalem was accomplished the Paschal Mystery of the passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And now we live in the time of grace when that Passover has been forever fulfilled for all, and Christ Jesus calls us to receive the Gospel of salvation by the repentance of our sins and in the obedience of faith.
Friends, we will have very few mountaintop experiences of God’s glory in this life, and the fight to live in the light of Christ and to follow him in the Way of the Cross is never easy, but the psalmist declares today that “I believed even when I said, I am greatly afflicted. O Lord, I am your servant. To you will I offer sacrifice of thanksgiving, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.” (Psalm 116:10,16,17)
And in the second lesson today Saint Paul gives us hope to sustain us in the midst of our struggle against the darkness in our world and in our own hearts: “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?” (Romans 8:31-32)
And so we press on, confident not in our own strength but in the mercy and grace of God and sustained by the flesh and blood of the Paschal Lamb which we receive in the Most Holy Eucharist. And by faith, hope, and love we declare to the best of our ability and to everyone we meet that Jesus Christ is Lord.
This is the text of my homily for the Second Sunday of Lent.
Fr Jay Scott Newman
I love it when we get a glimpse of the New in the old. Praise God of the universe