It’s hard to step inside someone else’s skin and know exactly what they are experiencing. It’s even harder when that other person has no skin.
What did God the Father experience on Good Friday? Dare we attempt to know? Can we know?
Our invisible “God dwells in unapproachable light” in heaven (1 Tim 6:16). We can’t know what he’s feeling. He doesn’t have sentiments, right? After all, “God is pure spirit.” (CCC 370)
God certainly transcends our pea brains, but as a master teacher, he also knows how to draft the perfect lesson plan. In Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (see Gen 22), some two millennia before Christ’s, God plays out on our earthly stage a dress rehearsal, as it were, of the agonizing sacrifice of his son.
In this heart-wrenching test of faith, God asks Abraham to offer up Isaac, his only son. What a nightmare for a loving father! What courage he must muster the morning he sets out on that dark adventure. The holocaust is to take place on a certain mountain in the “land of Moriah,” (a place identified elsewhere with the Temple mount, that is, Jerusalem).
“Hey, Dad,” Isaac huffs, heaving the wood on his back, “where is the lamb for the sacrifice?” To which our father in faith replied prophetically (if not nervously): “God will provide the lamb, my son.” Before innocent blood is shed, God’s angel stays the hand of Abraham, (Phew!) who spies at once a ram—not a lamb—“caught by its horns in the thicket.”
Sacrifice, Jerusalem, mountain, son, wood, lamb, thorns… Any of this sound vaguely familiar?
Two thousand years later, when Christ appears on the scene, John the Baptist hails the promised “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29). Condemned in Jerusalem, God’s only son carries the wood of the cross up a mountain (Could Calvary be Isaac’s hill?). Jesus, too, has his head “caught in a thicket,” one weaved by the iniquitous hands of angry men. But the omnipotent God makes no use of his “horns”. Instead of smiting his enemies in a show of divine power, “like a lamb led to the slaughter…he was silent and opened not his mouth (Isaiah 53:7). Finally, our Lord is put to death, St. John tells us, at the very hour when the Passover lambs are being immolated for the feast.
Maybe that’s just a coincidence.
I prefer to call it Providence. And that means that God really went through what Abraham was spared. He actually offered his own Son, himself a willing victim, that we might know the depth of divine love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” (Jn 3:16)
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