"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it and was glad." So says our Lord in today's Gospel to the Jews. What did he mean? When did Abraham ever see Jesus' day? When did it fill his heart with joy? Well, we heard about it in today's first reading.
Faithful Abraham takes the wood for the offering and lays it on the back of his beloved son. Faithful Abraham takes in hand the fire and the knife. Faithful Abraham tells his servants: “The boy and I will go over there and worship, and then we shall come back to you.” Faithful Abraham and the beloved son move together toward the appointed mountain of sacrifice. And the beloved son, the child whose name meant laughter, the promised one through whose seed God would bring blessing to all the families of the earth, Isaac, notices that something is missing. He asks: “Father, we have the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Faithful Abraham, seeing the Day of our Lord, answered his son in a remarkable prophesy: “God will provide himself a Lamb for the offering, my only son.”
What Abraham foresaw was not what took place shortly afterward on Mount Moria. For there, the life of Isaac was spared as the angel of the Lord revealed to Abraham a ram caught in a thicket by its horns.
Abraham did indeed offer up the ram in place of his son. Isaac’s life was spared by the mercy of God. But did you notice what Abraham called the place? “Yahweh Yireh.” The Lord WILL see to it; and to this day it is said, on the mountain of the Lord it WILL Be seen to. Will be, future tense. Not has been, past tense.
Abraham knew well enough that the ram was not the Lamb, but that the ram pointed to the Lamb, even as did his son, Isaac. For the day was coming when God would indeed provide– quite literally – himself as the Lamb for the offering. The day was coming when wood would be laid across the back of another Father’s beloved and only Son. The day was coming when that Father’s Son would climb a mountain with that wood upon his back, and this time, no ram in the thicket. This time, when the Son is bound to the wood for the offering, there is no angel to stay anyone’s hands. This time the hammer blows fall, the nails pierce, and the Lamb is spitted and hoisted high. This time the Son offers Himself to the Father in infinite love for our fallen race, and the Father in infinite love accepts and rejoices in the Son’s self-offering. “It is finished” he cried. The sins of all wiped out and the death of all destroyed.
“Your Father Abraham rejoiced to see my day.” Christ meant the day of His sacrifice's culmination. The day when the High Priest of the good things to come would enter with His own blood into the Most Holy Place in heaven once and for all, having obtained an eternal redemption. The day when the Mediator of the New Testament, by means of His death, would redeem everyone from their transgressions so that they might receive the promised eternal inheritance. (Epistle)
But what makes this sacrifice of the Lord Jesus so powerful that it can wipe out the sins of the world? How can the spilling of one man’s blood – even though He is the perfect man who never sinned – still, how can His blood blot out every accusation of the Law of God against you? Listen! He who is truth and does not lie, tells you: “Before Abraham was, I Am.”
Not by accident did they take up stones to kill him when they heard him say that. He had just made a claim that they could not misunderstand. In those words Jesus told them (and everyone who will ever hear them) that He is Yahweh. That it is He who called Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees and set him apart and promised that through him blessing would come to all families of the earth. He spoke to Moses in the burning bush and revealed His name: “I am who I am.” He led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt. He parted the sea. He led them through on dry ground. He provided them manna from heaven in their forty-year wandering. He brought them into the promised land. He gave them their inheritance there. He sent them prophets to call them to repentance and faith, and now He had come among them in their own flesh and blood, to do for them and for all what He alone could do: yield His sinless life as the offering to take away the sins of the world. Not, however, by stoning, but by being crucified. And since His hour had not yet come, He hid himself and went out from the temple. But His hour would come; the moment when the Lamb foretold by Abraham would be sacrificed so that through Abraham’s Seed blessing – the blessing of eternal life – might indeed come upon all families of the earth.
So, then, when Jesus suffers, it is divine suffering. And when He bleeds, it is divine blood. And when He dies, it is a divine death. Who would dare to put a value on such suffering, blood, and death? The suffering, blood and death of God the Eternal Son is beyond calculation, without price! And that is Who ransomed you. He
thought you were worth that! Me too! Is that awesome or what?
Nor is that the end of the story. Because He knows how hard it is for us to believe that, and to hold on to it, on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided. What God once offered for you on Golgotha, He now offers to you on His altar – built up, you notice, like a little mountain. Here He gives you to eat and to drink as the continual memorial of His sacrifice, His body and His blood and He tells you that it is all for you: given in your place; poured out in your place, to blot out your sins. Here, He, who is before Abraham was, eternally is, comes to you, to be Your Lamb. Amen.
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