ABRAHAM, OUR FATHER.

Abraham is the patriarch of Judaism. But he is also a patriarch of Christianity; so his name, which means "father of many", is fitting. Abraham is the earliest (around 1700 BC) biblical character for whom we have a fragmentary or episodic biography.

Abraham may have been a merchant or a farmer; he lived a nomadic life, moving from Ur to Canaan to Egypt in a pattern that tracks the migrations of the Jewish people.

The Book of Genesis tells us many stories of Abraham. For example, it is Abraham (in chapter 18) who bargains with God to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; like a skilled union negotiator, Abraham bargains God down from 50 to 40 to 10 righteous men as the minimum necessary for the cities to be spared. But before Abraham can find even ten, fire and brimstone are rained down, and Abraham and his family only narrowly escape. By contemporary standards Abraham was already elderly (75) when God spoke to him: "Leave your own country, your kinsmen, and your father's house, and go to a country that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great" (Genesis 12: 1-2). So Abraham, and his wife Sarah, uprooted themselves; when God, in effect, said: "Go west, old man", they obeyed.

Now Abraham and Sarah were childless. Yet God also told him: "Look up in the night sky and count the stars if you can. So many shall your descendants be." When Sarah first heard this she gave her servant girl, Hagar, to her husband's bed. Hagar conceived a son, Ishmael, but God did not need such contrivances to make good on His promise.

When Abraham was a hundred years old, and Sarah ninety, God renewed his--in human terms, absurd--promise of fecundity. This time Abraham laughed in God's face (17: 17), and Sarah too laughed to herself thinking, "after I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" (18:13). But God said: "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" and, a year later, Sarah conceived.

The child born to elderly parents is often doted upon, and their son, Isaac, was no exception. The best known episode in the story of Abraham is his offering up of Isaac in sacrifice. God decided to "put Abraham to the test" (22: 1). Take your son, Isaac, Abraham was told, go to the land of Moriah, and there upon a hill offer him up to me as a sacrifice. Again Abraham was obedient to the voice of God, setting off with Isaac and a bundle of firewood in the early morning hours. As they reached the designated hill, Isaac, still innocent and trusting, asked his father a heart-wrenching question: "Father, here is the wood and here is the fire, but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?" Abraham choked out: "God will provide", and then bound his son and laid him on the altar atop the firewood. As Abraham raised the knife to plunge it down into his beloved son, the voice of God commanded him to stop, told him that he had shown obedience, had passed the test, and then said, "Do not touch the boy". And Abraham l ooked around and saw a ram, caught in a thicket, a substitutionary sacrifice which was offered up in Isaac's place.

This story is at once so horrific and so familiar that we can easily miss the point. Yes, it is about obedience to God, even when that runs against every instinct and fibre of our being. But, more important, it prefigures another hill, this one called Golgotha, more than a millennium later, when the Son of Man would be offered up as a sacrifice for wayward humanity. This time no voice from on high stopped the executioner's hand. Instead a naked man writhed in agony on a gibbet, enduring the final extremity of suffering, while forgiving his tormentors. No ram in the thicket. No divine intervention. Why not?

Well, because this was already a substitutionary sacrifice - Jesus dying in my stead, and yours.

Abraham and Isaac--two patriarchs of Judaism, two patriarchs of Christianity. But Christians do not worship patriarchs; rather we worship the One who said: "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8: 53), the same Jesus who freely, willingly, gave Himself as a sacrifice for me.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario and a weekly columnist in the National Post.