Homily 2ndSunday of Lent Year B(Faith like Abraham’s)
Fr. Dwight P. Campbell, S.T.D.
Imagine that you are Abraham. God has made a covenant with you, promising that your descendants will number like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.
Imagine that in your old age God has granted you and your wifea son, named Isaac, and you believe that all these descendants that God promised will come through this one son.
Imagine further that God commands you to take this son up a mountain, Mount Moriah, and to kill him as a sacrifice offered to God.
This is exactly what happened with Abraham. God tested his faith in an incredible manner.
Why did God do this? It remains, at least in part, a great mystery. But in hindsight we know that Abraham’s willingness to offer his son Isaac in sacrifice was a foreshadowing of God the Father sending His Son to be offered in sacrifice for our sins.
In fact, if we look at the full account of this event as related in chapter 22 of the Book of Genesis (our reading today omits some parts of the story for brevity), we see that Isaac is clearly a type of Christ. I’ll read here from the full account:
“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 holocaust on height that I will point out to you. Early the next morning, Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him his son Isaac, and the wood he had brought for the holocaust. Abraham took the wood for the holocaust and laid it on his son Isaac’s shoulders, while he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father Abraham: ‘Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?’ ‘Son,’ Abraham answered, ‘God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.’”
Isaac is clearly a type of Christ:
He was Abraham’s only son, his beloved, who was to be offered in sacrifice, just as Jesus was the beloved Son of the Father who offered Himself on the Cross in sacrifice for our sins.
Abraham took a donkey as he led Isaac up Mount Moriah; Jesus rode a donkey down the Mount of Olives shortly before being led to his death (which we celebrate on Palm Sunday).
On their way up Mount Moriah, Isaac carried the wood on which he was to be sacrificed on his shoulders; on the way to Mount Calvary Jesus carried on His shoulders the wood of the cross on which He was to be sacrificed.
Isaac asked his father, “Where is the sheep (or lamb) for the sacrifice?”, to which Abraham responded: “God will provide the lamb.” Jesus is that Lamb: the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world by His Sacrifice on the Cross.
Abraham was willing, in his great faith, to obey God and offer His only beloved son Isaac in sacrifice; but God did not require that Abraham go through with the sacrifice.
That is because God would send His only beloved Son to accomplish His will, and by His suffering and death redeem us from our sins; Jesus was, as St. Paul tells us, “obedient unto death, to death on a cross.”
St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, provides us with a valuable insight which helps to explain Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. He says:
“By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac; he who had received the promises [about his descendants numbering like the stars] was ready to offer his son, . . . He reasoned that God was able to raise even from the dead, and he received Isaac back as a symbol” - a symbol, that is, of Jesus Christ, who would rise from the dead.
In the account of Genesis that we read today, God revealed to Abraham that “in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing – all this because you obeyed my command.”
All the nations of the earth have been blessed through one of Abraham’s descendants: Jesus Christ. All who believe in Christ and are baptized, and who obey His teachings, are brothers and sisters of Jesus and are spiritual children of the heavenly Father.
Elsewhere St. Paul tells us that we are descendants of Abraham, not in the flesh, but in faith. We must strive to have an unshakable faith in God like that of Abraham. Abraham’s faith is a model for all of us.
To have a deep and abiding faith like Abraham we need to have absolute trust in God’s loving Providence, especially when our faith is tested. Our problem is that when things go bad, don’t go the way we think they should go, we begin to doubt God. This we cannot do. St. Francis de Sales once remarked that if we knew all that God knows, we would will to happen whatever does happen: “Thy will be done.”
Abraham must have wondered why God commanded him to sacrifice his beloved son. God had a reason which He knew, but which Abraham did not. We now know that God wanted Abraham to be a model for us in faith, and for his son Isaac to be a type of Christ. But this was not clear to Abraham. Still, he did not doubt God’s command; he trusted that God had a plan which he, Abraham, did not see.
In the Gospel today we read St. Mark’s account of Christ’s Transfiguration, when with Moses and Elijah – who represent the Law and the Prophets from the Old Testament – Jesus appeared to the Apostles Peter, James and John, revealing to them a glimpse of the future glory He would enjoy after His Resurrection from the dead.
Why did Jesus reveal Himself to the Apostles in this manner? So that their faith would not fail them when Jesus was crucified, and to give them assurance that He would, in fact, rise from the dead; that’s why He told them on the way down the mountain, “Do not tell anyone what you have seen until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.”
Our faith must be firm and unshakable, knowing that Jesus has achieved the definitive victory over sin and death: He died, and then rose, in a body glorified; and He promises us that if we are faithful to Him, He will raise us up on the Last Day – in bodies glorified, like His own.
As Pope St. Leo the Great says, through Our Lord’s Transfiguration, “the whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation it would receive as His gift. The members of that body [that is, us] look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their Head.”
As St. Paul says in our second reading today: “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?” Then he says: “Christ who died, . . . was raised – who indeed intercedes for us.”
Let us turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary. As Abraham is the model of faith and trust in God’s Providence in the Old Testament, Mary is in the New. As people of faith, we must always make her wordsin response to the Archangel at that Annunciation, our own: “Let it be done to me, Lord, according to your word.”