Abraham didn't understand why God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac, but he trusted because he knew God. So must we trust God whom we know, writes Father Hawkswell. (Pieter Lastman, Wikimedia Commons)
Second Sunday of Lent, Year B
First Reading: Gn 22:1-2, 9-13, 15-18
Second Reading: Rom 8:31b-35, 37
Gospel Reading: Mk 9:2-10
This Sunday, we see Abraham’s utter faith in God. He has left his home for a strange land, believing God’s promise that he will have numerous descendants, even though he and Sara have no children. Finally, when he is over 100 and Sara in her 90s, they have one son.
Now God asks him to sacrifice this son “as a final stage in the purification of his faith,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Abraham’s faith does not weaken, for he knows God is able “to raise men even from the dead,” as the Letter to the Hebrews says.
Faith like this is a gift from God, says the Catechism. Before we can believe, God must “move and assist” us with the “interior helps” of the Holy Spirit, whose seven gifts make it easy for us to embrace the truth.
Why do we believe God? It is not because divine truth appears “intelligible to our natural reason,” the Catechism admits. (To Abraham, God’s command to kill his only son must have seemed utterly unreasonable.) No; like Abraham, we believe God because of who he is.
Nevertheless, believing is “an authentically human act,” says the Catechism. St. Thomas Aquinas called it “an act of the intellect,” which assents to divine truth “by command of the will, moved by God through grace.” It is not just “a blind impulse of the mind.” Nor is it opposed to human reason.
In fact, God often gives us external proofs, “adapted to the intelligence of all,” to help us see that what he proposes for belief is “in accordance with reason,” the Catechism says. Examples are “the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the Church’s growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability.”
Christ’s transfiguration before Peter, James, and John was just such a proof. Probably Peter told Mark about it, and Mark recorded it for us like a historical fact. It is not unreasonable of us to believe it. In fact, we would be unreasonable to deny it just because it does not fall within our experience.
Even in human relations, the Catechism notes, it is not unreasonable to believe other people or trust their promises. What would marriage be without such belief and trust?
What we know by faith in God is more certain than any human knowledge, the Catechism stresses. Nevertheless, a believer will always try “to know better the one in whom he has put his faith and to understand better what he has revealed.” As St. Augustine said, “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe.”
Of course divine truth will be difficult to understand. Here on earth, we perceive God only “in part,” St. Paul said: “dimly,” as “in a mirror.”
“The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith,” the Catechism admits. “Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice, and death, seem to contradict the good news.” Our faith is often lived “in darkness” and, like Abraham’s, “put to the test” by things we do not understand, like the death of a child.
Nevertheless, we must continue to believe God. Without faith, it is impossible to please him or to join the fellowship of his children.
To live, grow, and persevere in our faith we must nourish it and ask God to increase it, says the Catechism. We must also turn to the “witnesses of faith,” especially Abraham, “our father in faith,” and Mary, who were both asked to sacrifice their only sons. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” we must persevere in faith, says the Letter to the Hebrews.
If God “did not withhold his own son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” St. Paul asks. “If God is for us, who is against us?”