Christmas: the larger picture (2)

Fr. Leo Pabayo

WHAT we now know of God started with Abraham. It is now unknown to us the gradual growth in his consciousness that led to his discovery or encounter with God. But this discovery or encounter came about as the result of God taking the initiative to reveal himself again to man in the person of Abraham who responded with faith to his revelation. His story is already the story of rediscovery, a rediscovery of the reality of God and his presence in the life of man that man had forgotten. I think that we can presume from the Book of Genesis that man had known God before but then lost him because man and woman did not heed God’s wisdom and sinned.

This initial faith of Abraham would be tested when he thought that God was asking him to offer his son Isaac as a holocaust. The historical background of this testing will help us understand why he thought God was testing him to make such a sacrifice.

The story about Isaac as being nearly offered as a human sacrifice or holocaust by his father Abraham happened in the context of the culture of the contemporaries of Abraham.

Abraham lived at the time when the loss of faith in God left a vacuum in man’s mind. This vacuum would be filled up by bizarre notions about deities that were really projections of the human mind.  Man conceived of these deities as capricious or tyrannical gods that needed to be appeased if man hopes to obtain favors from them. Sometimes they had to be appeased by human sacrifices.

These conceptions or imaginings are found in various cultures and peoples in the time of Abraham and lasted for a very long time. As late as the 1500 a Spanish Jesuit missionary Philippines, Father Pedro Chirino, wrote about human sacrifices perpetrated by the kings or rulers in these islands. Legaspi, the founder of the city of Manila, would later convince these rulers to stop such practices.

Renowned biblical scholar Bruce Vawter in his book “On Genesis: A New Reading,” page 256, etc., has this to say about the universality of the practice of human sacrifices. “Human sacrifice, and particularly child sacrifice, was widely practiced by Israel’s Semitic neighbors, including those who would boast of superior cultural attainments. It assumed a variety of forms, sometimes as the ultimate sacrifice so to speak to the deity in time of great need (2Kings 3:27), sometimes in routine offering to satisfy the blood lust of a particular god (2Kings 23:10)…”

“One of the sadder aspects of Canaanite archeology is the constant recurrence of infant skeletons buried beneath the thresholds of city gates and houses, evidently of the tiny lives that had been sacrificed to ward off evil and ensure divine protection. Both in Israel’s laws and in the words of its prophets and historians, human sacrifice is excoriated as a heathen abomination, but the same sources leave us in no doubt that it was often practiced by Israelites all the same, and it was sometimes regarded as compatible with the worship of Yahweh.”

The Bible’s account about Isaac as being nearly offered as a holocaust by Abraham was the result of the influence of the culture of his contemporaries on him. Scripture scholar Bruce Vawter wrote that the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham must mean that at certain point in his life Abraham thought that if he was to be totally generous also to God who has been totally generous in his creation he had to prove himself totally generous also by being willing to sacrifice his son. In other words, earlier in his life Abraham had not reached that point in his consciousness about God to realize that God did not want this kind of bizarre generosity. “That later the Lord’s messenger called to him from heaven and told him that no such thing was desired of him means that this same man arrived at a conception of what is pleasing to God… or a new conception of God himself.”

In other words, the episode in the Bible about near sacrifice of Isaac only proved true Abraham’s faith God. With this faith he was able to father generations of descendants that had true faith in God although still imperfect. They would prepare for the final days of the coming of the Savior.

Many of the descendants of Abraham lived by this faith although this was sometimes blemished by the influences of other religions around them. The fact that this faith was faithfully transmitted and grew and developed through many generations, is a testimony to the truth underlying it.

The transmission of the faith reached a high point in the generation of the just men like Joseph, the husband of Mary, and the high priest Zachariah and his wife Elizabeth who would give birth to John the Baptist, the precursor of Jesus.

It was however in Mary that such faith that started with Abraham would be perfected. By her perfect faith Mary who was unblemished by the original sin of our first parents would conceive the Savior in her womb whom she would give birth to in Bethlehem on Christmas day.