While the account of Abraham’s (non)sacrifice of his son is regarded as the most dramatic episode in the life of the patriarch, Gil Bailie argues (in God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love) that the story in Genesis 13 of Abraham’s deference to Lot in the selection of land to occupy is also an account about sacrifice.
“While Lot is pondering whether to take the lands to the left or the right, Abram has already chosen between the power that belongs to him as the patriarch of his clan and the act of self-sacrifice that will preserve the peace which would otherwise have to be restored either by intra-tribal violence or some form of blood sacrifice. For Abram has before him no non-sacrificial option, and neither do we. The fact that evidence of a self-sacrificial spirit is presented in such close proximity to the story of sacrificial renunciation on Mount Moriah is yet another indication of the incomparable anthropological perspicacity of biblical literature.
“Why, we wonder, has Abram relinquished his power and prerogative? He has done so in order to resolve the potentially dangerous intra-clan rivalry. Yes, we know that. But why has he done that? Is it just that he is a very magnanimous man, or that he is terribly fond of his nephew? The Bible surely has more to do than familiarize us with the personal virtues of its protagonists, which are, for the most part, not that impressive in any case. Abram has chosen the path of self-renunciation, not because he is especially virtuous, but because he has begun to place more trust in the God who accompanies him on his journey than in human strategies for ensuring its worldly success.”
Bailie insists that this “simple act of self-renunciation . . . is the absolutely essential corollary to the dramatic scene on Mount Moriah.”
Later in the book, Bailie outlines the common posture of faith in the lives of Abraham and the Virgin Mary. “Faced with impossibilities, Abraham placed his trust in God. He went. Not until we come to the New Testament do we see an act of faith as utterly simple and unreserved as the one represented by the words: he went. Mary, the living repository of Jewish faith and Jewish experience, a child of Abraham in the deepest sense, in responding to the angel at the Annunciation, utters words that bring the faith of Abraham and the journey of his faithful people to fulfillment. The Old Testament begins with the faith of patriarchal Abraham. The New Testament begins with the faith of the young and all but nameless daughter of Zion, Mary of Nazareth. Whereas Abraham had been promised that his cooperation in God’s plan of salvation would mean that his descendants would be as many as the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, Mary was promised a sword that would pierce her heart. As the ultimate and final expression of the Yes first elicited from Abraham, Mary’s fiat inaugurates her pregnancy and brings that of her people to term. Writes David L. Schindler: ‘[Mary’s] fiat reveals in all of its profundity what it means to be a creature. The fiat expresses the dependent relation on God that discloses the inner meaning of all of reality as gift, which in turn disposes one toward service.’
“Mary’s fiat, her total self-gift to the Trinitarian God who is nothing but self-gift, is intrinsically linked to her Magnificat. For it is her self-gift that ‘proclaims the greatness of the Lord.’ In her exposition of the theology of Adrienne von Speyr, and specifically von Speyr’s Marian reflections, Michele Schumacher makes an important comment:
“Adrienne thus teaches that the most personal and personalizing activities of the human being are not primarily of his or her own doing, but rather of one’s allowing to be done to oneself (geschehen lassen). Requiring — contrary to appearances — an extraordinary exercise of the free will, such “actions” of allowing God to determine the direction of one’s own accomplishment by grace consist primarily in the continued and generous perseverance of readiness and expectation.
“The scriptural aftermath of his assent to the summons of the Lord makes it perfectly clear that Abraham’s ‘Yes’ inaugurated the gradual religious maturation of the people who would one day look back to him as the father of faith. By contrast, Mary’s fiat is quite obviously the assent nonpareil of the human race as such, precisely the pure ‘Yes’ uncorrupted in any way by self-regard. Whereas the response of Abraham, the father of faith, was one of action involving many dramatic events great and small, Mary’s fiat was pure assent. She brings the Yes of Abraham to its supreme expression. She consents, not to do, but to be, to be available as a vessel of divine will. Writes Joseph Ratzinger:
“The typological identification of Mary and Zion leads us, then, into the depths. This manner of connecting the Old and New Testaments is much more than an interesting historical construction by means of which the Evangelist links promise and fulfillment and reinterprets the Old Testament in the light of what has happened in Christ. Mary is Zion in person, which means that her life wholly embodies what is meant by ‘Zion.’
“Concurring with his theological colleague, Balthasar writes that Mary’s Yes ‘recapitulated (while raising to a new level) the whole Abrahamic faith of the Old Testament, together with the hope that it entails.’ The Church was quick to recognize Mary as both the summation and epitome of Old Testament Judaism and the unsurpassable personal embodiment of the mystery of the Church. Apropos of which, those who see Jesus’s heavenly Father prefigured by Abraham the father of Isaac on top of Mount Moriah, though they are by no means mistaken, might consider the more earthly analogue suggested by Joseph Ratzinger: ‘The parallel between Mary and Abraham begins in the joy of the promised son but continues apace until the dark hour when she must ascend Mount Moriah, that is, until the Crucifixion of Christ. Yet it does not end there; it also extends to the miracle of Isaac’s rescue — the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.’ As for Mary as the New Eve, both the authors of the Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium, and John Paul II in his encyclical, Redemptoris Mater, quote Irenaeus: ‘The knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience; what the virgin Eve bound through her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosened by her faith.’”