Doing the Word
Do you have faith? How do you know? Because you believe you believe? What if there’s the slightest doubt? Is it still faith? As long as we imagine faith as mental agreement, we can run round these questions forever without ever really knowing.
So Jesus’ brother James comes to the rescue, holding up Abraham as a hero of faith.
Promised by God to be the father of many nations and innumerable descendants, Abraham is still childless at age 100 with his wife Sarah who is 90. The miraculous birth of their son Isaac is the proof to which he clings that God’s promise will be fulfilled. But he’s not our hero until he agrees to sacrifice his miraculous son of promise at God’s order. Christians have seen Isaac as foreshadowing Jesus, made to carry the firewood as Jesus carried the cross to the top of the same hill on which Jesus died.
In what are we placing our faith? Is God really so monstrously cruel as to require the death of a son only to pull back at the last instant?
The overarching message of all Judeo-Christian scripture is that God is one and God is love—making oneness and love the same quality—the actual substance of God. So when any scriptural passage seems to refute that oneness/love, we can calmly know there is a message beyond the literal meaning that reasserts the One…that the literal story is also metaphor pointing to deeper truth. For thirty years, Abraham had been clinging to his son as the physical means of fulfilling God’s promise. Something he could touch, control. But the moment he is capable of killing the last thing to which he clings in fear, he has engaged the action of faith, passed into the experience of trust—a word for what it feels like when we’re no longer afraid.
God didn’t require human sacrifice. Abraham’s idol happened to be his son, and the idol had to die for Abraham’s belief in God to grow into an ultimate risk-filled action, a relinquishment that realized his faith in unshakable trust. Trust that required no visible support.
For James, faith without such works is dead. Hearing the Word means nothing until we become doers of the Word. Not in fearful obedience, in trust.
