Friends
Peace be with you.
This week we get to spend some time reflecting on the notion of sacrifice through the prism of the sacrifice of Isaac in the first reading. So, let’s look at the first reading to make sure we understand what’s happening there. It probably seems rather barbaric, a father, Abraham, feeling like he is being called upon by God to sacrifice his firstborn son, Isaac. He takes him out into a part of the country called Moriah, sets up an altar of sacrifice, ties little Isaac to it, and, right before he plunges the knife into him for the sacrifice, an angel comes and stops him. The angel says it was a test of loyalty and he passed. Abraham is so relieved that he takes a ram that seems almost supplied by God caught in some vines and sacrifices it instead.
In looking at the surrounding passages to this, you may get the feeling that there’s not much context to why this is happening. Actually, there’s a lot of context that the people of Israel would have understood that is so far from our world that it’s hard to even consider. It was probably a common occurrence for people living in and around Israel to sacrifice a first born son for a religious and a practical reason. From a religious perspective, it would be a way of expressing trust that your god or gods will bless you with many more sons, an ultimate leap of faith. From a practical perspective, while it takes many women to have the necessary number of children to keep a family or village alive, you don’t need as many men. The men of the time would have been seen as an asset if there was a war going on but too many men just means that there will be fighting over who gets to farm the land when their father passes away. So, the solution that many cultures came up with was to sacrifice the first-born son as a kind of population control similar to the one child policy that China has.
Now, I know this isn’t really all that...pleasant in terms of the context of a homily. But it deserves to be known that it was common and, one of the novelties of Judaism was to bring it to a halt. Instead, God replaced child sacrifice with an animal sacrifice offered in thanksgiving for a newborn child. We may remember a few short weeks ago when the parent’s of Jesus brought him as a child to the temple to offer a sacrifice of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons”, as it says in the Gospel of Luke. In the rosary, this passage is commemorated as the Presentation and is the fourth mystery of the Joyful Mysteries. And, after the destruction of the temple in 78 AD, even this sacrifice is no longer expected.
Still, early into our Christian tradition, we saw a contrast between what happened to Isaac, the first born son to Abraham, and what happened to Jesus, the only begotten son of God. Isaac was called by God to have his life sacrificed by God but was spared. Jesus was called by God to have his life sacrificed and he was crucified. Or, to add even more contrast and be more honest, when humanity asked for mercy from God to spare our sons and daughters, he gave it to us before we even made the first sacrifice. When God asked us to have mercy on his son, we killed Him.
Now, I know this can seem like I’m trying to lead us down a path of shared guilt. None of us were alive in the year 33 when Jesus was crucified and, if we were, there’s little chance we would have been in Israel either as a part of the crowd chanting “Crucify him! Crucify him!” or as one of the guards leading him to Golgatha.
I’d like to suggest that this story of Abraham and Isaac isn’t just a counterpoint to the terrifying religious understandings of the people surrounding these patriarchs or even the foundation of the idea of sacrifice. It’s about being willing to give everything we have for God and seeing the blessing in that. The end of that reading said, “I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing—all this because you obeyed my command.” God’s command is to be willing to give it back, to let everything go, even the possessions and people that are most important to us. It’s a command that challenges the way we think about what we own and the longevity of it.
Now, I might really upset some of you with what I’m going to say next but I’ve remained quiet on something for many years that I think needs to be said and I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings but I’m just trying to get us to think about how this passage might apply to us here. One of the real challenges in this world, I think, is the idea that, once we possess something, we think we should keep it even if we don’t need it or someone else could benefit from it. I think about our young people interested in farming, for example. They graduate from high school or college and find they’ll likely never be able to purchase a farm on their own because larger, more established farmers purchase land at prices the young people could never afford. And a lot of people would rather keep owning their farms or their parent’s farms and renting the space to a farm management company for the income. Now, I’m not saying you don’t have the right to do this. I’m just suggesting that we may have our priorities off when we do. Wouldn't it be better to let a young, upcoming farmer have the farm so he or she could raise a family and contribute to the local economy? I know that land was a blessing for you. I know it’s frightening to let go of it. But, if your children or children’s children have taken other paths in life than farming, isn’t it time to let someone else get the blessings you and your family received?
But this isn’t just true of farming, of course. It’s true of people who stay in positions of leadership refusing to let someone new do things differently than they do it. It’s true of people who run out and buy all the toilet paper at the beginning of a pandemic so they could hoard it instead of sharing it with the elderly who didn’t realize there’d be a shortfall. It’s true of people who couldn’t imagine turning down their furnace a few degrees during a cold snap to protect the energy grid.
The problem is that we are so often unwilling to sacrifice our comfort and security and possessions for someone else’s needs. God reminds us today that we may think our blessings come from holding on to what he has given us when the true blessing comes in being willing to give it away in sacrifice.
