When I contemplate faith, I often remember something my younger son used to say during bedtime when he was four. He begged me to stay with him after turning off the light, so I would snuggle next to him in bed and allow the quiet to settle. He would anxiously cry out, “I can’t see your eyes.” I assured him that I was right there, hugging him close, and then I reminded him that it would take time for him to see me in the dark. Until then, he need not fear my absence, for I was right there.
Seeing with Faith
This experience has lingered with me as an icon of the nature of faith. What is faith? It is a new, profound way of seeing, as we walk through the dark paths of life; it is a sight beyond seeing. Just as my four-year-old son sought my presence in the dark and strained to see with his eyes, so too we search for God and seem to see nothing. Yet faith grants us a different and deeper certitude in his presence, a whole-hearted trust in his loving closeness. So, too, the faithful believer knows He is there right with him, even though he cannot see Him with physical sight.
Faith is intensely personal, in that it flows from God’s call to the soul. The inner mystery of the person becomes inextricably bound up with the mystery of God.
Abraham, the Father of Faith
To speak of faith is one thing, but to live out the abandonment of one’s whole life to the living God is another. We see this in the story of Abraham, a man who left everything he had known to follow the mysterious promise of a God yet unrevealed to his people. That first call sets him on the path of faith. From then on, his life is defined by this total entrustment to the Lord, culminating in one of the most dramatic stories of the Bible, the sacrifice of Isaac. In today’s reading, we read of how “by faith, Abraham offered up his only son,” the one through whom he had been promised descendants as numerous as the stars. How could he do such a thing? By faith, he reasoned that God could raise even his son from the dead.
The film His Only Son memorably depicts the three days in which Abraham sets out with Isaac and his servants to make the unthinkable sacrifice. In viewing this film, I was struck by the raw and vulnerable nature of faith as it is lived in real-time. Abraham could not fathom why the Lord had asked this of him. Yet such was his trust in the promise given, in the nature of this God who had given direction to his life, that he accepted the call.
Total Surrender
Here, we see, is faith being tested in the crucible. He walks in near total darkness, bearing the burden of having to offer up his son. Yet within that terrible darkness burns the flame of tenacious faith in the Lord. The final scenes leading up to the moment of sacrifice have a harrowing power. For we come with Abraham to the very edge of the act. He raises the knife in an act of pure, heart wrenching surrender, plunging himself into the Lord’s will.
God in His mercy stays the hand of Abraham and preserves his son. The sacrifice of the one beloved Son comes several thousand years later in the death of Christ on the Cross. Yet we see in Abraham’s offering the deep and total surrender demanded by faith. As Jesus reveals in the Gospel reading, “to whom much is given, still more is demanded.” We who have received the treasure of faith are also called upon to surrender everything we know. So that we may fling ourselves with total trust into the heart of the Lord.
[Readings: Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19; Luke 12:32-48]
