Day 10: The Tree That Was Not There the Day Before
Shoonoyo/Dormition Fast | The Second Eve series: August 2026
In the name of God the Father, Christ Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit, One True God. Amen.
And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.
– Genesis 22:13
This is the hardest chapter in the Old Testament, and we should not pretend otherwise.
Abraham is told to take Isaac, the son for whom he had waited so long, and go to the land of Moriah. He rises early, cuts the wood himself, and begins the journey. For three days father and son walk together toward the mountain, carrying between them everything needed for a sacrifice except the sacrifice itself.
Three days is a long time to carry a question in silence.
On the final ascent Isaac gives voice to it. He sees the fire and the wood, and he knows enough to notice what is missing: “Where is the lamb?”
Abraham answers, “God will provide Himself a lamb.”
Perhaps Abraham meant it as faith. Perhaps it was the only answer he could bear to give his son. Scripture does not tell us. What it does tell us is that the words proved true in a way deeper than Abraham himself could yet have understood.
What St. Ephrem Noticed
Our Fathers read this chapter with enormous attention, and Ephrem saw something in it that most of us walk straight past.
There was no tree on that mountain.
We know because Isaac was carrying the wood. Ephrem therefore imagines Moriah as a place where the wood needed for the sacrifice is not simply waiting to hand. If there had been trees on Moriah, Abraham would not have made his son carry firewood up a mountain for three days. And there was no ram either, because Isaac asked where the lamb was, and a boy does not ask that question if there is one grazing in the bushes.
So where did they come from?
For Ephrem, this is not a convenient detail in the story. It is a sign. He writes:
That the ram had not been there before is testified by Isaac’s question concerning the lamb (Gen 22:7); and the tree had not been there before is assured by the wood on Isaac’s shoulders. The mountain burst forth with the tree, and the tree with the ram, so that, through the ram that was suspended on the tree and became the sacrifice instead of Abraham’s son, that day of His might be depicted when He was suspended on the wood like the ram and tasted death on behalf of the whole world.
– St Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis XX.3, quoted in Bride of Light.
The mountain gave birth to a tree, and the tree gave birth to a ram.
Ephrem is telling us what it was that Abraham saw. Not a lucky escape. A rehearsal. Ephrem sees the whole scene opening toward Golgotha.
A son walks up a mountain carrying wood.
A victim is found upon that wood.
The victim dies and the son goes home alive.
What Abraham sees is not merely a last-minute escape. In Ephrem’s reading, he is being shown beforehand the shape of another day, when another Son will ascend another hill and the wood will again become the place of sacrifice.
This gives new weight to the words of Christ: “Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.”
Mary and the Tree
One of the Syriac poets then takes Ephrem’s reading and presses the image further:
Never before, and never again,
has a tree given birth to a lamb here on earth,
and no other virgin has given birth without any man’s help.
Mary and the tree are one;
the lamb was hung up in its branches,
as our Lord was on Golgotha;
the lamb saved Isaac, as our Lord saved creation.
– Bride of Light, no. 10 (Hymns on Mary, no. 5), verse 7.
Never before, and never again. The comparison is unusual, but the logic is clear.
A tree does not give birth to a lamb. A virgin does not ordinarily give birth to a son.
In both cases, something impossible by ordinary nature becomes the place from which salvation comes.
The poet is not merely saying that Mary is beautiful like a tree or fruitful like a garden. The link is that a tree once produced a lamb, which trees do not do, and a virgin once produced a son, which virgins do not do, and in each case what came forth was going to be offered.
And the poet will not leave the image standing on the mountain as he moved immediately from Moriah to Golgotha. The lamb was hung up in its branches, as our Lord was on Golgotha. He goes straight from Moriah to the Cross in a single line, because that is where the whole thing was always pointing.
The ram is caught in the wood. Christ is raised upon the wood.
Isaac is spared. Creation is saved.
Another Syriac poet says the same thing more tenderly.
He became a lamb from the virgin ewe
so as to offer up that sacrifice which would deliver us.
The tree which provided the lamb prefigures you:
through it Isaac was delivered.
– Bride of Light, no. 14 (Hymns on Mary, no. 9), verse 3.
He became a lamb from the virgin ewe.
There is something very deep in that phrase that is worth sitting with.
Christ does not appear in the world as a victim detached from us. He receives His humanity from her. He takes flesh from her flesh. The One who will one day carry the wood of the Cross first allows Himself to be carried in her womb and in her arms. He did not arrive as a victim. He became one, and He became one out of her, from her own flesh, the way a lamb comes from a ewe.
The wood on Isaac’s shoulders on the way up that mountain is the wood on His shoulders on the way out of Jerusalem.
The sacrifice is not abstract. It comes from within our humanity.
From Moriah to Golgotha
The wood on Isaac’s shoulders naturally leads Christian readers to the wood carried by Christ on the way to Golgotha.
But the resemblance only takes us so far.
Abraham did not look at it twice. He looked at what was caught in it, and he went and took the ram, and he offered it, and he went home with his son alive. The tree existed for one purpose, which was to hold the ram long enough for a father to see it.
And then the turn inside the turn, which is the thing that makes this day different from all the others.
At Moriah, the son was spared and the substitute died.
At Golgotha, there was no substitute.
God asked Abraham for something, and then stopped his hand at the last moment and provided a lamb instead. And centuries later God did not stop. There was no ram in the thicket that Friday. The Father did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all.
Abraham was asked to be willing. God was not merely willing.
Saint Paul puts the difference with terrible clarity:
He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all…
Romans 8:32
That is why we should be careful about reading Genesis 22 as a story about how much Abraham loved God. It is a story about how much God loved us, told in advance, using a father and a son and a piece of wood, because there was no other way to say it that anyone would have understood.
In the Gospel, God Himself gives what Abraham was not required finally to give. The Christian reading of Moriah therefore reaches beyond Abraham’s willingness. It leads us into the love of God.
What Abraham was asked to contemplate for one agonising moment, God entered fully.
The Father gives the Son. The Son gives Himself.
And the Cross becomes the place where that self-giving love is revealed to the world.
The Mother Beneath the Wood
There is another person whom the image eventually brings into view.
Mary gives birth to the Lamb, but she does not remain safely at the beginning of the story. She follows Him to the Cross.
The same woman who once held Him against her body stands later beneath the wood on which He hangs.
At Moriah, an angel calls out and Abraham’s hand is stopped.
At Golgotha, no voice stops the Crucifixion.
The sword does not fall upon Isaac. But as Simeon had told Mary years earlier, a sword would pierce through her own soul.
That does not make her suffering equal to Christ’s sacrifice, nor does it make her the one who redeems us. It tells us something more human and perhaps more painful: the Mother who gave flesh to the Lamb also had to watch that flesh offered.
The mystery she welcomed at Nazareth leads eventually to Calvary.
The yes of the Annunciation was not a promise that nothing would hurt.
It was trust in God without knowing where that trust would finally lead.
What Today Asks Of Us
We are ten days into the fast, with five days remaining. By now the discipline may have become familiar, but life itself may be asking something much harder of us than fasting from food.
Some losses cannot be chosen neatly for fifteen days and then taken back. Sometimes what is being surrendered is a hope, a plan, a relationship, a future we had imagined for ourselves, or simply the certainty that life would unfold in the way we expected.
Abraham’s three-day journey speaks to that kind of experience.
He walks without having the whole answer. He carries the wood, walks beside the son he loves, and continues toward a place he does not understand. The provision comes, but it comes on the mountain, at the point where Abraham has nothing left to control.
That does not mean God always gives us back exactly what we fear losing. Genesis 22 should not become a promise that every painful situation will reverse itself at the last possible moment.
What it does reveal is that Abraham’s journey is not taken in the absence of God. The God who asks for trust is also the God who provides, and Christian faith sees the fullest proof of that provision not in the ram at Moriah, but in Christ Himself.
Whatever our fasting costs us, and whatever this year may be asking us to surrender, we are not praying to a God who observes sacrifice from a safe distance.
He has entered suffering. He has known the mountain. He has carried the wood.
And in Christ, He has given Himself for us.
That is why the Cross is not finally the story of what humanity gave to God. It is the story of what God gave to humanity.
The ram saved Isaac for that day. The Lamb saves creation.
Blessed is He who came forth from the Virgin, who carried the wood, who was offered upon it for our sake, and who turned the place of death into the place of life.
I end with the Manitho, sung during the intercession to the Blessed Theotokos:
Peace, O Lady, for through you,
The curse of old was lifted;
Peace, O Lady, for through you,
Adam was raised from the fall.
Your brother in Christ
Jobin
Tomorrow – Day 11: A house built for a king, with seven pillars, and the difference between a palace and every other building in the city.
