Many years ago, when my brother was sick and dying, I was hesitant to pray that he be healed because I felt I knew inside that he was going to die.  I thought that to pray that he be healed was equivalent to praying that he not die.  Yet, I still prayed with some timidity for his healing, even though it seemed to fly in the face of what I had figured out would ultimately happen.  After he died, I began to slowly realize this timid prayer for healing was answered, indeed is still in the process of being answered.

Was my brother healed?  Yes, of course he was, in the most intimate and life-giving way.  The healing was not meant for just him in the throws of physical death, but was meant to heal far beyond that situation, touching mine and others’ lives from that moment on.  But this was something that I could not see at that time because I had a narrow understanding of what healing means and what it truly could mean.  My understanding was confounded by my own sense of who I was, who God is, and the seeming terrible loss in this death.

God put Abraham to the test…
God said: “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah.
There you shall offer him up as a burnt offering on a height that I will point out to you.”

Today’s first reading (Gn 22:1b-19) describes God asking Abraham – a man who at 100 years of age was given the gift of a son through a promise by God – to sacrifice his son.  And how does Abraham respond to this?  Although the scriptures do not describe the inner psychological confusion and turmoil that Abraham may have experienced at this time, we hear how Abraham simply does as instructed by God.   When they get to the designated place on the mountain, Isaac gets curious about the situation…

As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father Abraham:
“Father!” he said. “Yes, son,” he replied.
Isaac continued, “Here are the fire and the wood,
but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?”
“Son,” Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the sheep for the burnt offering.”
Then the two continued going forward.

For those familiar with the story, it is known that just before Abraham prepares to sacrifice Isaac, God instructs Abraham to stop and declares to Abraham that because of his willingness to sacrifice the very thing most precious to him, his son Isaac, God would “… bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.  Here in this almost crazy-sounding spiritual scene, Abraham names the place where it all happened with a reference that we are told in the scriptures means ““On the mountain the LORD will see.”

So, is this story primarily about the willingness to give up anything that God asks of us, as a sacrifice, so that God will see that we trust him?  I am not so sure.  Did something die on that mountain that day besides the ram?  And if so, if it wasn’t Isaac, who or what was it?  Was it Abraham?  I am not talking about literally physical death here.  What if something inside of Abraham was surrendered and did die?  In Abraham’s willingness to trust God, he was able to perhaps surrender more of those things that prevent him from going deeper into his relationship with God, or understanding with his heart the depths of his own true self, which ultimately lies in the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine Love!

If we look at ourselves, our world today, we can see those things that we hold onto that can get in the way of our seeing as the Lord sees “on the mountain.”  What could it mean to see in this way?  Could it be that this is seeing through a lense of abundance – the abundance that God promises to Abraham?   Notice that the metaphors used to describe the abundance are the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.  It’s everything above us and everything below us, indeed everything around us already.

How can we begin to see in a way that places us naked before God?  What kind of death does this require?  Maybe “require” is not even a good word to use.  Although we as Christians liturgically celebrate the transformative qualities of new life found in and through death, we tend to turn away from a real consideration of how important death is in our life journey.

In one sense, I think that it can be said that we have to die in order to be healed.  This type of dying can involve the oftentimes painful surrendering of rigid mental frameworks that disallow the possibility for something new and unexpected to come along, which could really lead us into new life.  The story of the paralytic in the Gospel today (Mt 9:1-8) could be telling us something about this.  When Jesus sees the faith of the people carrying a paralytic, he tells the paralytic, “Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.”  However, the scribes were appalled at this “forgiveness” that Jesus was offering, so Jesus confronts them:

Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’?
But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”–
he then said to the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.”
He rose and went home.

The scribes will not surrender their own framework for how they think God can operate in their lives.  They will not surrender what can be called the false self or that self that we all think we are.  This is the self that is characterized by what we do, how people see us, how we see ourselves, etc.  It is the mistaken identity that we think we are that most of the time prevents us from seeing who we really are – that true self held in the all-encompassing embrace of Divine Love.

In this way, the scribes are all of us, refusing to die to this false self and receive the healing that would come through this type of death.  As Richard Rohr says, “there is clearly plenty of death moving around that will not die.”[i] We refuse to let death die.  Old mindsets and stale identities prevent us from allowing the forgiveness – which is really the gift of our true self that can never die in God – to reveal to us real abundance amidst everything good and bad that can and will happen in our lives.

We rise and walk when we can begin to drop the weight of that false self that paralyzes us and prevents us from accepting true healing.  This healing comes through death, i.e., it walks through all the deaths of our lives and by seeing them for what they are and then acting in accordance with that sight – sometimes successfully sometimes not – we live deeper from our true self, which can see life in all its vicissitudes as not something to fear but something that points to the abundance of God available everywhere!

This is another way of responding to Jesus as the paralytic did, who “rose and went home.”  Going home is falling into your true self held in God.  This is the surrender in “continuing to go forward” as Abraham and Isaac do as they leave the mountain.  We can practice this type of death (to the false self) throughout our lives so that when we ultimately face our physical death in whatever form it takes, we will have already begun to live in our true self with and in God, and so going home is in a very real sense already here!

Peace,

Thomas

[i] Richard Rohr, IMMORTAL DIAMOND (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), p. 44.

(originally published July 7, 2017)