Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

God put Abraham to the test.


He called to him, “Abraham!”


“Here I am,” he replied.


Then God said: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love,


and go to the land of Moriah.


There you shall offer him up as a burnt offering


on a height that I will point out to you.”


The Test of Abraham may well be the most important story in the Old Testament. After hearing of the favor God has given to Abraham, and his many blessings of protection, prosperity and promise, Abraham must demonstrate his worthiness. It is important to Christians, of course, because we see it as a precedent of Jesus’ crucifixion. Even the language of “your son…, your only son, whom you love” is echoed in the gospels: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1: 11) and "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." (Mark 9:7)


We understand Isaac as the “type” of Christ. He is Abraham’s beloved son; he carries wood up the hill as Jesus carried a wooden cross to the hill; he calls to Abraham, “Father” as Jesus spoke to God his Father; he was stretched over the altar as Jesus was stretched on a cross; he surrendered his life to his father as Jesus surrendered to God; and both were restored to life by God’s intervention.


The Test of Abraham takes us to the very edge of madness and we ask, “How much must we give to God?” We all know of people who went over the edge, trying too hard to be good, faithful, obedient servants of God. The only thing that saves Abraham is his hard-learned habit of obedience. He is just as ready to say hineni (“Here I am!”) at the end of the story as he was at the beginning. One can well imagine a grim determination to carry through with the criminal sacrifice that would ignore and despise any further interventions from God. But even with his teeth set and his heart steeled in the very act of murder, Abraham drops the knife and replies, “Here I am.”






I spent months meditating on this story in the early 1980’s. I began with a clay figure of the naked boy on a rock. His face cried to heaven for deliverance but his hands and feet were bound beneath him. His fear, horror and helplessness spoke to me as I recovered from my trip to the edge.


I intended to create an Abraham with his knife raised high over the boy, but the soft clay could not hold an erect human figure. He fell, kneeling against the rock, his face pressed against its unyielding surface with the deadly knife in his hand. A third clay figure appeared, an angel holding a torch and demanding that the sacrifice go forward. Finally, after many weeks, another angel appeared. She stretched an arm over Abraham’s back, with her face on his shoulder, and gave him comfort. There were scars of a whip across her back.






Surely every parent who hears this story experiences its horror. How could God demand so much? How could Abraham be so willing? It is beyond our imagination. To say that no one among us is actually tested in this way is to dismiss the story and ignore the hard facts of life. Many lose children to accidents, sickness, suicide and war. They must give their children to God, even as Mary surrendered her son to God on Calvary.


All of us must finally surrender everything that is most dear to us, even our own personal salvation. Jesus insists on that:


“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.