"This Awe-Filled Story" - Sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter 4-4-26

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

It is one of the masterworks of ancient literature, this brief story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. And it strikes many modern listeners as abusive and sadistic. What kind of God would ask such a thing? What kind of father would agree to it? What did Sarah, the boy’s mother do when she found out, if she found out? What was the emotional aftermath between Abraham and Isaac? And why, in God’s name, do we read this in church, much less on the holiest night of the year?

This story implies and reinforces Abraham’s deep faith in his covenant-making God. God, it is often said, will not ask more of us than we can handle. God had deep faith in Abraham’s ability to meet this awful testing. God promised Abraham limitless offspring. Abraham promised to obey God. They both kept their covenant. Isaac lived and Isaac begat: generations later, along came Joseph, the guardian of Jesus.

By the end of the second century after Christ’s birth, we Christians decided that the Hebrew scriptures would remain our scriptures – the Old Testament alongside the New. We search in them and see where Christ, the Son of God, the Word of God from the beginning, shows up. We read this awe-filled story of Abraham and Isaac on this holiest night because in it is a type, an indication of God’s great passion for us in the Pascal Mystery of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

Abraham and Isaac could not do for us what God did for us, but they came close. They walked on together, father and son, side-by-side as participatory equals – Abraham carrying the cleaver and the fire, Isaac the wood laid on his back. “Father, where is the lamb?” the son asked. “God will provide, my son,” the father answered. The father bound the son, stretched him on the wood of the altar, and raised the cleaver for the slaughter. And God’s angel said, “Enough!” God provided a ram, which Abraham sacrificed in Isaac’s place.

Generations later, in the fullness of time, God sent his only Son to be our savior. God the Father and God the Son, participatory equals, completed on the altar of the cross the sacrifice for us and for our salvation. The Lamb of God provided and offered himself. Our salvation is not up to us. It was not up to Abraham and Isaac. The saving act is left to God alone, once and for all.

Abraham’s covenant-making God is our covenant-making God. We make covenant with God in our baptism, our participation in Christ Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. Saint Paul makes this abundantly clear in this portion of his Letter to the Romans that we also read on this holiest night of the year. Paul’s epistolatory masterwork gives the theological foundation of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, which we recall on this holiest of nights, and whose covenant we renew.

This covenant will not require of us the near-sacrifice of a blood relative. But it does ask much of us. To believe in core tenets of the faith. To meet regularly to pray and to worship. To resist evil and to repent when we sin. To proclaim and to live the Gospel of Christ Jesus through acts of service, of justice, and of love.

We do not walk alone. We walk with Christ Jesus, God’s Incarnate Son, the One who walked forth from the tomb and whose resurrection we remember and celebrate on this holiest of nights. The One who is passionate for you. Passionate in love. Passionate in suffering. And passionate in giving us the promise of life-eternal with Him, and the Father, and the Holy Spirit.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Great Vigil of Easter – April 4, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“This Awe-Filled Story”