Today’s first reading is often one that completely confuses the reader. Why would a merciful God ask the Father of our Faith, the most faithful man in the world to sacrifice his beloved son and then just as he is viciously traumatizing the boy have that God send a messenger say, that is enough, you do not need to prove your love for me any further. Many people, especially, atheists describe this as an absurdity that proves God is not merciful. Other faithful Catholics describe this as an aberration to overlook and pretend it is not there. However, the message of this story is a key message for its time, but it is not for our time.

The reason why we don’t understand this well today is that the context that is behind the scenes is no longer in existence today, but it was then. If fact, with few exceptions, that context has not existed since the 1500’s. So let us ask what is happening. In order to prove his love for God, Abraham is demanding to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. Once he does that, then God will know that he loves Him more than anyone else. God is not actually trying to get Abraham to show him how much he loves Him. He is actually teaching Abraham h0w to show Him love.

What is not understood in just a superficial look at the reading is that in the cultures that surround Abraham’s Bedouin life, such form of human sacrifice was completely normal. Indeed, one thing that fascinates me as an amateur student of anthropology that there cultures, that have never met, that practice the same things.  Why can you find cultures that engage in human sacrifice in the history of the middle east and in the Americas, although the various cultures never met. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, because this is what he would be demanded to do if he was in one of the surrounding pagan cultures. Indeed, centuries later when the Jews strayed from God, they would embrace idolatry and practice human sacrifice just like the other cultures engaged. When the Spanish arrived on the shores of the Americas they found the Incas, The Aztecs, the Maya and other tribes all engaging in human sacrifice. This was such an abomination to them, they began their process to overrun these cultures and put an end to their practices. It is illustrated well in the movie Apocalypto.

So, what Abraham is actually encountering is God calling him to treat him as he would another god by committing the ultimate human sacrifice. Then our Heavenly Father intervenes and teaches Abraham that things are now different. He has demonstrated his love as others do, but now that practice is not to be part of his relationship with the Father. Those outside of a relationship with God do engage in these barbaric processes. What is fascinating and even disturbing is that God is leading his creatures through a form of evolution where he is infusing them with His wisdom that they grow and develop from their very soul. Those that have embraced God go through this form of evolution, those that do not, can even devolve.

We are seeing this today. Human sacrifice was performed to keep the gods happy and to bring prosperity on the nation. It was also used politically as a form of manipulation. Any time human sacrifice is practiced it is practiced always in the name of a better society. We can say, that we no longer practice human sacrifice in our society, but indeed we do and for the same reasons, minus the theology. This is what abortion is all about. Why do societies allow abortion, to promote prosperity on an individual and national level that would not be possible without it. Recently, in Australia, two ethicists promoted the idea that babies, born with a birth defect that could be legally aborted in the womb, should be killed outside the womb after they are born because they would have been aborted legally. The term they have for this practice which has yet to be legalized in any country is after-birth abortion. There is no difference between that and the practice of the Spartans in regard to such children. The Incas practiced child sacrifice as did the cultures surrounding the Jews. If you saw the movie the Passion of the Christ, those children that follow Judas to his death are the souls of those children who were murdered in child sacrificed practiced by the Jews when they turned from God and adopted the religious practices of the surrounding pagan cultures.

Abraham discovered that the practices of the surrounding cultures will not be demanded by His new found God. The message continues to today. Our beliefs and practices are always different from the secular culture surrounding us. Because this culture has turned from God it is now devolving into the type of society that existed prior to Abraham’s discovery of God. It may not devolve all the way back, but it is clearly in a cultural regression. If you join them, then you too will enter the way of devolution. The choice is yours. Meanwhile in the gospel we can see the type of sacrifice that God demands. It is the self-sacrifice of obedience rooted in love of God and neighbor. That form of sacrifice is also foreign to the secularists and their predecessors in the pagan cultures. Human sacrifice is all about sacrificing another for our benefit. God calls us to sacrifice ourselves in the form of loving service to others, it is the reverse of the pagan system.

The Catholic family that decides to bring up a Down’s syndrome baby acts in ways differently than the surrounding pagan culture that is on the road to after-birth abortion. The former sacrifices themselves that another may live, the latter sacrifices the other so that they themselves may prosper. None of those cultures that practiced human sacrifice survive today, the last of which were the Aztecs, Maya and Incas. The Judeo-Christian cultures have survived and the Book of Revelation at the other side of the Bible from our first reading reminds us that they will be the only cultures that ultimately will indeed survive.

God Bless You,

Fr. Robert J Carr

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