Trust is a lot more difficult these days with terrorists waiting around the corner. Trust today can seem foolish. Which city has the latest massacre?

Yet human bonding is entirely dependent on trust.

Let us take a closer look.

In the USA we had developed substitutes for trust and for human bonding. We overwork, overeat, over-celebrate parties, invent formulas such as “quality time” to fit family and children into our loaded schedules, etc. And in the USA we simply drop a husband or wife who no longer pleases us. It is expected that we will go get another one, isn’t it?

Can such be a foundation for human bonding? Even bonding just for a little while?

There is a wonderful example of trust in the readings for Sunday. The Second Reading talks about risky deeds that God asked from Abraham. Travel to a land he did not know, pass through great deserts and villages full of strangers, dwell in temporary shelters all the way, and most difficult of all, believe that Sarah would at last conceive and give birth—even though, as scripture says, their old age made them “as good as dead.”

And it got worse, not better. God ordered Abraham to make a bloody sacrifice of this promised son born to the aged selves. Kill him.

Remember, God had promised that Abraham and Sarah would have “descendants as numerous as the sands on the seashore.” Therefore the question before Abraham was not one about obedience, as is often thought, but whether to trust in God. Could God’s promise come true even if Abraham went through with the sacrifice of his son?

Sunday’s Second Reading says what he decided. Abraham “thought that the one who had made the promise was trustworthy.” The terrible action could be taken because he believed in God’s fidelity. Maybe God would raise their son from the dead!

How would you or I have responded? Wouldn’t we say it was time to cancel the trust stuff and save whatever we can of our family?

Yes.

But notice: trust consists of more than just a generally sunny attitude. Trust means believing in someone. It means remembering the love that resides in that person, remembering the promises, the pacts made in fidelity. It means taking the risk.

Can you or I wait? In some kind of trust?

We are told that Abraham did. Perhaps he was being trained by God to rely on God’s word. And of course, the Israelites were waiting, looking ahead to the coming of a Messiah in a future age. And Jesus worried about God’s abandoning him as he was being crucified. Yes, he trusted, even though he was filled with the raw human fear that God might have rejected him (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Mt 27:46)

But God had been with him even in the hardest patch of life, the cross, when no one could see any divine evidence. But human bonding is always subject to doubt. If we are lucky, we discern and pray and forgive, and then give it another try. All of us remain “strangers and aliens on earth” (Second Reading) and we long for someone to trust.

We long to be able to trust.

Can we open our hearts to God and let Jesus’ own trust be ours?