June 29, 2008
Pentecost 7, Genesis 22:1-14
Since John will be preaching while he’s at the beach in New Jersey, and I’ll be preaching here, it seemed like a great opportunity to spend time studying the readings for these weeks together. But the truth is that neither of us could get past today’s Old Testament reading.
I suspect John and I are not the only ones who have trouble with our reading from Genesis for this morning. What do we do with this story about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac? We thought about it, talked about it, read commentaries about this story for weeks, hoping against hope that there was some way around the idea that God would ask this horrible thing from Abraham.
There are so many problems with this story. Is testing ever really part of a loving relationship? Can you think of an instance where putting someone you love to a test is anything other than manipulative or distrustful? Even if God had no intention of requiring Abraham to actually kill Isaac, what God put Abraham through was cruel. How can we be expected to follow, let alone love, a God who would ask such an unconscionable thing?
And how are we supposed to revere Abraham, our supposed great patriarch of the faith, after this? Throughout Abraham’s story in Genesis we see him questioning God. Not three chapters before this story appears, we hear Abraham refusing to take no for an answer from God as he argued and bargained with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. We see Abraham challenging God about the offspring that God keeps promising him – “You said you were going to give me children as numerous as the stars, but where are they, huh God?” But Abraham is eerily silent now. Why doesn’t he refuse to sacrifice his son? Or at least attempt to talk God out of this crazy idea? Nowadays, Abraham would be locked up for child abuse for doing this.
And what about poor Isaac? It seems bad enough that God would put a parent through this trauma, but what about a child? What is he supposed to think about God after all this? How is he supposed to forgive his father, to return home with this man who just tied him up and was prepared to stick a knife in him?
So John and I have spent a lot of time these last few weeks earnestly searching for a loophole, looking for some way to make this story easier to live with. Something that might let God off the hook. We came up with a few possibilities.
Maybe it would help to categorize this as myth. It’s a 3000 year old story handed down from a time when sacrificing animals to appease God was common, and human sacrifice wasn’t unheard of. Maybe God was using Abraham’s experience as a way of explicitly illustrating what God meant by the saying “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” God’s stopping Abraham at the last second as a way of upholding mercy as the greatest good. Maybe creating a setting as extreme as possible was necessary to get people’s attention, to pound into their brains a better understanding of the relationship God wanted with them. But if this is just an outdated story about the end of sacrifice, then why does Abraham appear over and over in the New Testament as a paragon of faithfulness?
Which leads to another way of dealing with this story. It might be possible to avoid grappling with the idea of God asking Abraham to do the unthinkable and just talk about Abraham’s great faith, his ability to believe God would somehow make things work out. Or maybe to contain this story as exposing the inherent tension between our loyalty to God and everything else. God was testing Abraham to make sure he loved God more than his son Isaac. But if trusting God means being ready to act as Abraham did, if loving God most means being willing to sacrifice my children, I am certainly doomed to failure. Probably most of us are.
A somewhat Pollyanna-ish explanation might be that this story enables us to face the most difficult challenges in our own lives. Abraham’s test illustrates that while sometimes following God is difficult and we may be called upon to do something harder than we think possible, we can trust that God will provide for us. Except I can’t help feeling that it would be awfully difficult to trust a God who is the one setting up such stark and horrendous situations in the first place.
Origen, a third century writer and theologian, tried to relieve Abraham of his guilt in this spectacle by pointing out that when Abraham leaves the rest of his party behind and goes up the mountain with Isaac, he tells the others, “We will be back.” Origen thought that meant Abraham knew all along God would stop him, that he never believed he’d have to sacrifice his son. That Abraham really believed it when he told Isaac that God would provide the lamb for the burnt offering. But even if Abraham never intended to kill Isaac, even if he somehow knew God wouldn’t require it at the last, it doesn’t much help with the fact that God would ask such a terrible thing.
It’s hard to tell when you read the story, but since Isaac is trekking up the mountain with his dad you’ve got to wonder how old and strong he was. Maybe Isaac was old enough to have fought Abraham off if he wanted to, after all Abraham was more than 100 years old. Maybe Isaac submitted willingly to being tied up and placed on the altar – became Abraham’s partner in sacrifice rather than his victim. But even though that would help later with father-son relations (and therapy bills), it still doesn’t make God look any better.
There’s a Christian tendency to see this story as a preview of God’s ultimate sacrifice for us in giving God’s only child, Jesus, to die for us. An idea that through this story we might get a glimpse of, and therefore a greater appreciation for, what it was like for God when Jesus was killed. But if anything, for John and I, anyway, this story only serves to make the theology of seeing Jesus’ death on the cross as a necessary sacrifice seem more incomprehensible.
I have to admit that I was hoping – am still hoping – that there might be some way to read this story as Abraham failing a test, or maybe misunderstanding the test. Maybe God wanted Abraham to resist – to stand up for the promise of offspring, the promise of future generations who would continue in relationship with God. Maybe something happens in this story that we aren’t privy to that caused Abraham to realize that what he thought was God’s will actually was not. Interestingly, Abraham lives a good long life after this story, but he never again hears from God. Which hardly seems fair after all he’s been through.
With stories like this one, it is easy to see why some early Christians believed the God of the Gospels was not the same as the God of Hebrew scripture. Which would be incredibly convenient, except that Jesus made it clear that his God was the same God who had been in relationship with Israel from the start.
My Old Testament professor in seminary used to compare God to a high-tension wire. God is incredibly powerful, but there’s no guarantee of safety or simplicity when you get close.
After weeks of probing, arguing, stumbling over this story, John and I decided that maybe this story troubles us so much precisely because we have such a deep desire for a God who is for us. We like the end of the story – the depiction of God as providing a way out, as saving Abraham from heartbreak. But we don’t like the beginning, this awful test. The tension that exists in this story is a tension that confronts us over and over in our stories of faith – from Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit to Jesus on the cross. And, if we stop and examine our own experiences, isn’t that kind of tension present there also? Life leads to death; love cannot be experienced without heartbreak; we often meet God most clearly in our darkest, loneliest moments.
We thought about this story so much, John and I, that it led us to evaluate exactly what it is we believe, and don’t believe about God. You can see the beginning of John’s list in the bulletin this morning. There is something incredibly holy about a story that has so much potential to engage us spiritually. A story that helps us to admit, finally, that we do not understand God. A story that makes us want to fight to protect our own experiences of God. A story that encourages us to nonetheless continue to wrangle, to discuss, to look for God. And to find our own way to answer God, as Abraham did, “Here I am.”
Amen.
Elizabeth Rees