— On the Mountain, It Shall Be Provided

After these things God called,
Abraham,
and the old man answered in the dark,
Here I am,
two words like an open hand
held out beneath the stars
before the question came.

Take your son, your only son, whom you love.
Each word a step nearer the heart,
the way frost creeps inward on a winter branch.
I cannot read this quickly.
I have a son.
I remember the smoke of Hinnom,
and the prophets crying, this God never commanded.
The whole story leans away from that valley
like a tree leaning from the fire.
I grieve for Isaac, who trusted,
for Sarah, left in the tent with no word,
for every child laid on the altar of a nation’s god
and never untied.

Abraham rose early.
I know that hour, three in the morning,
the house asleep, the lamp waiting.
He split the wood in the gray light,
each stroke of the axe a heartbeat,
sap bright on the blade like dew.

Three days they walked,
three nights under the same stars God once told him to count,
the boy asking about birds and hills and the way,
and on the third day, far off, blue in the haze,
the mountain.
I remember another third day,
a garden, early, a stone rolled away.

We will worship, and we will come back.
A sentence spoken past the edge of sight,
the way a lamp is carried into a room
before anyone knows what the room holds.

He laid the wood on his son.
The father carried the fire and the knife.
So the two of them walked on together,
footsteps on stone, breath in the cold,
the fire pot glowing like a small red star in his hand.
I remember another son, another hill,
the wood on his shoulders, the place of the skull.

Father.
Here I am, my son.
To heaven, here I am.
To the boy, here I am.
The fire and the wood are here,
but where is the lamb?
The question of every child,
waiting through Passover and altar and prophecy
until a voice by the Jordan says,
Behold the Lamb of God.

God will provide, my son.
The Hebrew says, God will see.
The God who saw Hagar weeping by the spring
will see, and in the seeing, provide.
So the two of them walked on together,
up into a mystery neither could name,
the clouds parting around them like a veil.

He built the altar,
laid the wood in order,
bound the boy,
lifted the knife.
The sun burned on the blade.
The whole sky held its breath,
the wind stopped in the thorns,
the birds fell silent on the slope.

Abraham, Abraham!
Twice, the way you shout a child’s name at the edge of a road.
Do not lay your hand on the boy.
Echo it softly:
do not lay your hand on the boy.
Here the Bible turns on its hinge.
God says no to the knife,
no to every god that eats children.
Let it be carved over every war room and every border tonight.

He looked up, and there, behind him all along,
a ram caught in a thicket by its horns,
like the well Hagar could not see
until God opened her eyes.
I remember a crown woven from thorns.
Instead of his son.
Two words that hold the whole gospel.

He named the place, The Holy One will provide.
Moriah, where centuries later the angel’s sword was sheathed
over Ornan’s threshing floor,
where the cloud of glory filled the house,
where the exiles laid foundations again, weeping and shouting.
It shall be provided.
Not was. Shall be.

Then the promise came down like starlight:
offspring like the stars of heaven,
like the sand on the shore,
the same sand Job said his grief outweighed,
now every grain a life still coming,
blessing for all the nations of the earth,
from my homeland across the sea
to the hills where I grew old.

He returned to Beersheba,
to the tamarisk he planted,
its roots drinking hidden water,
its shade waiting for an old man coming home.
And in a list of names at the foot of the mountain,
Uz the firstborn, Buz his brother,
the seed of Job’s long night,
and Rebekah, already drawing water at a far well.

Before dawn, far from my homeland,
I lay my hand on my mouth before the test I do not understand,
and keep two sentences in my pocket like warm stones:
Do not lay your hand on the boy.
The Holy One will provide.
And I look up, as Abraham did,
and see in the thicket of the world’s thorns
the Lamb provided, instead of us.

God who said, Do not lay your hand on the boy,
stay every hand raised against a child in every land,
walk with each parent and child who climb a hard mountain together,
open our eyes to the ram already waiting behind us,
and on your holy mountain, provide.