Abraham Saw My Day

In the Temple of Jerusalem, Christ holds a long dispute with interlocutors who claim Abraham as their father. The discussion turns on Abraham, on death, and on the identity of Christ, and it ends with the claim that he is before Abraham.

The dispute over descent from Abraham

Christ’s interlocutors hold their descent from Abraham as a sufficient title before God. Christ shifts the question: true sonship rests on works, not on blood. “If you were the children of Abraham, you would act as Abraham did.” John 8:39 And their work is the opposite of Abraham’s. “But here you are, seeking to put me to death, me who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This, Abraham did not do.” John 8:40

For Abraham not to have sought to put him to death, Abraham had to have had him before him. And Abraham had indeed had him before him: the Lord had appeared to him at the oaks of Mamre, and Abraham had welcomed him. “Looking up, Abraham saw three men standing near him. As soon as he saw them, he ran from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed to the ground.” Genesis 18:2 Tradition recognises in these three guests the appearing of the one God in three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, come to visit Abraham. Abraham received and served this Lord; they, before the Son now come in the flesh, seek to put him to death. The blood of Abraham does not make them his children when their act denies what Abraham did. Their conduct discloses another origin. “Your father is the devil, and you want to carry out the desires of your father.” John 8:44 To those who call themselves children of Abraham, Christ will reveal that he is before Abraham.

The day of Christ

At the heart of the exchange, Christ declares: “Abraham, your father, rejoiced with joy at the thought of seeing my day: he saw it, and he was glad.” John 8:56 Abraham lived nearly two thousand years earlier. The day of Christ means his coming among men and the work of salvation he accomplishes there, the moment when God brings about in the flesh what he had promised from the origins. To say that Abraham saw it is to set this day at the centre of all history, and to affirm that Abraham knew it beforehand, in the light of the faith that makes present what is still to come.

The faith that sees from afar

Abraham received from God a promise: an innumerable descendance, and through it a blessing for all the nations. “through them all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” Genesis 22:18 This offspring through whom the blessing comes is Christ himself. “Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his offspring. Scripture does not say, ‘and to his offsprings,’ as though speaking of many, but of one: and to your offspring, that is, Christ.” Galatians 3:16 In believing the promise, Abraham believed in the one who was to fulfil it: his faith already bore on the Christ to come. The patriarchs lived and died in this waiting, seeing from afar what was promised to them. “It was in faith that they all died, without having received what was promised; they had only seen it and greeted it from afar” Hebrews 11:13 Abraham’s vision belongs to this faith: he greeted from afar the day of Christ.

How Abraham saw this day

Abraham saw this day in a precise event of his life. God asks him to offer Isaac, his only son, the one he loves. Father and son go up together towards the mountain, and Isaac carries on himself the wood of the sacrifice. To the child who wonders at the missing lamb, Abraham answers: “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Genesis 22:8 At the last instant, Abraham’s hand is stayed, and a ram is offered in Isaac’s place. Abraham contemplates there beforehand the sacrifice of the only Son: a father leading his beloved son, a son carrying the wood of his offering, a victim substituted so that life may be given back, all of it shows beforehand the sacrifice of Christ, where the Son delivered up by the Father himself carries the wood of the cross and dies to give life back to men.

Abraham’s joy is inscribed even in his son’s name. The name Isaac, in Hebrew Yitsḥaq (יִצְחָק), means “he laughs”: at the announcement of his birth, given against all hope, Abraham and then Sarah had laughed, and that laughter became the name of the child of the promise. “God has given me cause to laugh, and everyone who hears of it will laugh with me.” Genesis 21:6 In Isaac, the only son received and given back, Abraham already held the pledge of the salvation to come, and his joy was the joy of one who sees from afar the day of Christ.

Before Abraham was, I am

His interlocutors retain only the impossible. “You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham!” John 8:57 Christ answers with a word that no longer says only that he has seen Abraham, but that he is before him. “Amen, amen, I say to you: before Abraham even existed, I Am.” John 8:58

Everything rests on the choice of words. Abraham “was”: he began to exist, he came to be at a moment in time. The Greek sets two verbs against each other: of Abraham it says genesthai (γενέσθαι), “to come to be, to become,” a verb that implies a beginning; of himself it says eimi, “I am,” the verb of pure being, without origin. Abraham came to be; Christ simply is. Christ, for his part, says “I am”, in the present. The Greek word rendered by “I am”, egō eimi (ἐγώ εἰμι), does not say “I was before Abraham”, but “I am”. Abraham belongs to becoming and to time; Christ stands in a present that does not begin. Where one expected “I already was”, he says “I am”, and this very gap affirms eternity.

This word takes up the Name that God had revealed to Moses at the burning bush. “I AM WHO I AM.” Exodus 3:14 In the Greek version of Scripture that his interlocutors read, God names himself there egō eimi, the very words that Christ utters of himself. This “I am” without complement is also the one by which God sets himself alone apart from the idols in Isaiah and in the Law: “believe me, and understand that I am he” Isaiah 43:10, “it is I, I who am, and there is no other god but me” Deuteronomy 32:39. Taking it up absolutely, without saying what he is, Christ claims more than precedence over Abraham: he takes the name God keeps for himself alone. He thus takes to himself the divine Name and declares himself eternal, the Son who is from all time with the Father, before coming in the flesh.

This declaration crowns the whole exchange. Twice already, Christ had said “I am” in the same absolute manner. “Yes, unless you believe that I Am, you will die in your sins.” John 8:24 Then: “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I Am” John 8:28 The word about Abraham is the third of these “I am” sayings, and the highest.

The stone raised

At these words, his interlocutors take up stones to stone him. “Then they picked up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself and left the Temple.” John 8:59 Their gesture says that they have understood perfectly: that a man should name himself with the Name of God is in their eyes a blasphemy, which the Law punishes with stoning. “whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord will be put to death: the whole community shall stone him.” Leviticus 24:16 The reaction confirms the meaning of the word: Christ did not say himself older than Abraham in the sense of a long life, he said himself God.

The day of Christ thus runs through the whole of Scripture. Before his coming, it was promised, awaited and seen from afar by the just who lived by faith in him, and Abraham, the father of believers, bore this hope and rejoiced to see it open. The one whom Abraham saw from afar now stands in the Temple and names himself with the Name of God. For the one who believes, the coming of Christ accomplishes what God was preparing from Abraham onward, and the one who accomplishes it is God himself, come in the flesh.