READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Genesis 22:1-14
Hebrews 9:11-15
- St. John 8:49-59
Grace to you and peace. (1 Thess 1)
Jesus speaks to you on this day from His Gospel heard,
saying:
“Your father
Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad”
Who is Abraham? Why did he rejoice to see a Jesus Who had
not been born in his lifetime? Jesus says earlier in St. John 8:
“If you were Abraham's children, you would be doing the
works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the
truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did” (v. 39-40).
So it will be beneficial to us today, to focus on these
words of our Lord and determine for ourselves just what the “works Abraham did”
are and how “father Abraham” is really “father Abraham”.
Though we are going to treat Abraham harshly, I do not want
to tear him down. It is in our modern thinking that we rewrite the past and
label everyone who used to be taught to us as “great”, as bigots and cowards.
This is popular thinking. God’s thinking is that He used much time and ink on
Abraham and we need to honor this great patriarch of the faith.
However, we think that Abraham’s first work was believing
God. Most others, those that call themselves churches even, believe and teach
that Abraham is great because he had blind, child-like faith. God said “go” and
he picked up and went. Or that because of him, all the nations on the earth are
blessed (Gen 12:3) so bless modern-day Israel or else!
But that is not how Abraham is introduced to us in the Bible,
neither are these his first “works”. Before all this, before God calls Abraham,
Abraham works three things: 1) he gets married, 2) he has no children, and 3)
he lives in Babylon, in other words, he is an idolatrous sinner who hates God.
I told you it would be rough…
Joshua 24:2 is even rougher. The Lord says to His people: “Long
ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and
of Nahor; and they served other gods.” So it is that the first of these
works that Abraham did was to be faithless. Kinda puts a big hamper on the
blessing-through-him thing, huh?
Abraham then continues his life of faithlessness. In fact,
he may have moved to Canaan (modern day Israel) as told by God, in Genesis 12,
but he encounters a famine there. So much so that, like his grandson Jacob will
do, he goes to Egypt to find food. He tells his wife to lie to Pharaoh and say
that she is his sister, because he’s afraid to die over her beauty.
Turns out, Pharaoh is more righteous than Abraham. At the
end of chapter 12, Pharaoh chastises Abraham telling him not to lie about his
wife and kicks them out. Did Abraham learn his lesson? No. He did this same
thing a couple times.
And this is just one example. Leviticus 18 and 20 go through
in detail what the idolaters in the area were doing and its not a good list.
There are some who want to sugar coat these incidents and make excuses for
Abraham, attempting to preserve his honor as a hero, but God’s Word just won’t
let us.
Repent. Here is our first lesson on heroes of the faith:
they are sinners in need of a Savior. What, do we think? God came down to earth
saying, “I’m gonna find the most idolatrous, too-old, adulterer with a barren
wife and through this guy’s works I’ll bless everyone”?!
Good heavens. The first sign of a cult is that there is a
single man that has been “super-blessed” by God. The Quran asserts that
Muhammad was a man who possessed the highest moral excellence, and that God
made him a good example or a "goodly model" for Muslims to follow (Sura
68:4, 33:21).
In a competing revelation, the Latter Day Saints’ god says,
“Verily, thus saith the lord unto you, my servant Joseph Smith, I am well
pleased with your offering and acknowledgments, which you have made; for unto
this end have I raised you up, that I might show forth my wisdom through the
weak things of the earth. Your prayers are acceptable before me.” (D and C
124:1–2)
Abraham is no exception to this idolization rule. This is
why calling Abraham your father is not good enough. Jesus directly says this by
chastising Abraham’s “children” telling them flat out that they don’t do what
Abraham did, regardless of parentage.
But aren’t they sinners too? Shouldn’t Jesus have said that
you ARE doing the work of Abraham in your sinning?
Absolutely not. This is because of God’s Call. God is not
responding to great life of faith or holy works that He found in Abraham, in
order to make him and everyone else around him greater. God is doing His proper
work of taking from nothing and making it something good.
The works of Abraham that Jesus praises are not active
works, but passive works. Abraham is not a godly example to be placed on a
pedestal, but a man who shows God’s glory of calling men from their idolatry
into His Light of Truth.
It is in Abraham’s rejoicing that we find the true works of
Abraham. Because what did he rejoice in? He rejoiced to see Jesus’ day. What is
Jesus’ Day? His Passion and Resurrection.
Jesus is the Hero of heroes. He is without sin, and yet
still like us in every way except that one. Jesus speaks the words of God. They
come directly from His mouth, because He is God. Jesus honors and glorifies the
Father as the only-begotten Son, not simply aping His Law but perfecting it and
completing it to its proper end.
He picks up His cross and follows the Father’s Will to be
bruised on the heel while crushing the serpent’s head. Jesus is greater than
the prophets and patriarchs in that He is the prophesies made flesh, bringing
them to their perfect conclusion. And He is the patriarch that leads perfectly,
speaks perfectly, and finally does not die, abandoning His people as the other
patriarchs did in their deaths.
Jesus was made man in this world that held nothing worth
saving. Sodom and Gomorrah had less than ten righteous men in them, and they
were still wiped off the map. The earth only had 8 righteous, when God flooded
the whole place. Surely no one is righteous, not one, says Psalm 14:3 and
Romans 3:10.
In the beginning there was only God and in the middle there
was only God and in the end there will only be God. He is the only one
righteous. But in Christ, we see that His will is not to keep His righteousness
to Himself, but to hand it out liberally and freely.
This is why we look up to Abraham, because he believed the
Lord (passive) and the Lord counted it to him (active) as righteousness,
Genesis 15:6. It is belief, not works. It is faith given that makes the man.
Abraham is a hero of faith, because the faith of Jesus was placed in him that
he would believe.
Faith that places a knife at your only son’s throat, fully
believing that God will raise him back from the dead. Faith that keeps the Word
close and Faith that looks to Jesus, the Author and Perfector of our faith,
sees Him go to the cross and die, but knows Easter comes in the morning.
What would these Jews be doing if they were to do the works
of Abraham? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They would be utterly passive in the
reception of God’s righteousness, because God is the only One handing it out,
in His own way, through His Son. They would be sitting in the pew, sitting at
Jesus’s feet, listening to the Lord’s teaching, as Mary did in St. Luke 10:39.
What would these Jews be doing if they were doing the work
of God? What active role does God give us in faith? Believing in the God-man He
has sent. In St. John 6 we hear: “Then they said to him, “What must we do,
to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God,
that you believe in him whom he has sent” (v. 28-29).
And how do we know Whom God has sent? Jesus concludes in St.
John 6:32-35: “Jesus then said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, it was
not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true
bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and
gives life to the world.’ They said to him, ‘Sir, give us
this bread always.’
Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread.’”
Jesus says to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, “…in you all the
families of the earth shall be blessed”, and then just after our Old
Testament reading, in verse 18, Jesus clarifies His statement saying, “…in
your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”
“Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his
offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but
referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ”, from Galatians
3:16. God has made Abraham heroic by making him a child of promise, instead of
a child of the flesh. Can Abraham be his own child, his own father, in order to
be saved?
That question is as ridiculous as it sounds. It is not
through Abraham’s flesh, but through God’s Promise to Abraham that Abraham is
both father and child. In the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ, Abraham is both
the father of the offspring Who is both God and man, and he is the baptized
child of God, clothed with the blood of the Lamb.
Abraham does not shoulder the burden of blessing all nations
any more than Isaac shoulders being the “offspring that is more than stars and
grains of sand” (Gen 22:17). That cross is placed squarely on the shoulders of
The Offspring, The Seed, as Psalm 22 says, “A seed shall serve Him; it shall
be accounted to the Lord for a generation” (v. 30), and the Seed is the
Word of God, Jesus Christ (Luke 8:11).
The works Abraham did were those of receiving what God was
handing out. He is our “father Abraham” because he kept the faith and was
passively made the Patriarch of the God-man Jesus Christ, Who was born of the
Virgin, and did His work by paying for the blessing of the whole world with His
Body and Blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of your sins.
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