I have often heard people say that the
story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac is horrific.
Maybe it shouldn’t be read at all. It is horrific. It is
meant to be. The point is that God asks the unthinkable of
Abraham, but more importantly Abraham trusts in God and goes along
the path that makes absolutely no sense to him at the time. Not
only was it horrific that he should be asked to sacrifice his child,
but it was also through this only child that God had promised him
many offspring. So nothing at all made sense. So Abraham
suddenly finds himself in a situation of complete darkness, where
nothing was right, nothing made sense. But Abraham trusts God
and then everything changes at the last minute. God ‘put
Abraham to the test’ not in the sense of seeing if he was good
enough, but because God knew that Abraham had great faith and he
wanted to stretch that faith to its full capacity. An athlete
won’t reach his or her full potential unless they are pushed to the
limit. Sometimes God does the same with us. He knows what
we are capable of much better than we do ourselves and sometimes He
stretches, or pushes us to the limit because God wants us to reach
our full potential as human beings.
Did you ever notice that sometimes when
you pray for a situation to get better it gets worse first?
There is a temptation to panic and not pray any more. But if we
believe that God is listening to us and helping us, then we persevere
in prayer and we try to trust that the Lord will bring the best out
of the situation, even though it often doesn’t make senses to us.
That requires faith, and it’s not easy at the best of times.
Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac
his only son, but in the end he didn’t have to go through with it.
Because he was willing to do anything that God asked and showed his
remarkable trust in God, the Lord said that He would bless him
greatly:
I will
shower blessings on you, I will make your descendants as many as the
stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore.
3000 years
later God sends his Son Jesus and allows him to be sacrificed for the
human race. It says in the second reading that because Jesus
went through with this, the Father would refuse him nothing.
That is why we can have such confidence when we pray to Jesus.
It says in the second reading that Jesus now intercedes for us before
the Father in heaven. If Jesus the Son of God is interceding
for us before the Father, then what could we possibly be afraid of as
long as we remain open to God? Not only that but we also have
Our Lady interceding for us too. Is Jesus going to refuse his
mother anything? Is the Father going to refuse Jesus anything?
And these are the ones who are interceding for us. Hopefully
that will help us not to be afraid.
In the Gospel the three disciples
Peter, James and John are granted this extraordinary vision of Jesus
in his divine glory. Why were they given this privilege when
none of the others were? This happened just before the Passion,
when Jesus would be tortured and killed before their eyes.
Peter, James and John were also the three who would be with him in
the Garden of Gethsemane watching him fall apart. They were
going to need great strength not to despair themselves. But
what is especially worth noting is that after the vision was over
they suddenly found themselves in a cloud where they could see
nothing, only then did they hear the voice of the Father speaking to
them: ‘This is my Son the Beloved. Listen to him.’
God spoke to them when they were in a
cloud. Have you ever been on a mountain when a cloud suddenly
descended on you? It’s quite frightening because you cannot
see anything. You have just stop and wait. Sometimes it
is only when we are in a ‘cloud’ or darkness/confusion that God
will speak to us most powerfully. When we cannot see the way
forward, and we cannot get any clarity on what to do, then God will
show us what the next step is, but often He will only show us the
next step, not the whole path ahead. This brings us back to the
need to trust that God knows what God is doing when He leaves us in
the dark. And most people are in the dark most of the time,
especially with regard to their faith. That just seems to be
how it works. We are only shown one step at a time, if
anything, but God asks us to trust him that He knows what He is
doing. If He doesn’t show us the path it is because we don’t
need to see the path ahead only the next step.
‘This
is my Son the Beloved. Listen to him.’
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