Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth:
come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
I
know that the sermons over the past month have been heavy – not in a depressing
sense, but they’ve been about the weighty matters of justice and race. Well,
this Sunday, it’s Genesis giving us a lot to chew on: God said, “Take your son,
your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him
there as a burnt offering.” This is, quite possibly, the most challenging
passage in the entire Bible. I’ve been ordained for eleven years and have never
preached on the binding of Isaac because I knew enough to not ride the bull the
first few times you go to the rodeo. I’m not sure that one is ever ready to
wrestle with this text, but Holy Spirit wasn’t going to let me take another
pass on it this time through the lectionary.
What
makes this passage so difficult is that this just doesn’t seem like God –
asking someone to kill their own child to prove their commitment to God. And,
yet, that’s what we have before us. Not surprisingly, a lot of people have
sought to explain the problem away. One way is by saying that the God of the
Old Testament isn’t the same as the God of the New Testament – but this is a
terrible heresy called Marcionism. When we take the Jewishness out of Jesus, we
are left with almost nothing. And it is this sort of thinking that led to the
horrors of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
Others
say that this passage is really just about the prohibition of child sacrifice,
which was somewhat common in the Ancient Near East. But that dog doesn’t hunt.
If God wanted to teach that lesson, it could have been done more easily with a
commandment, for example. There’s way too much psychological trauma in this
incident for it to be a mere object lesson. Others say that when the text says
that God told Abraham to offer Isaac on the mountain, it could also be
translated as “take up” to the mountain. So God just wanted Abraham to take
Isaac with him while the sacrifice was made. But that really doesn’t work –
after all, Abraham puts a cleaver to his son’s neck. Or maybe it’s that God
needed to know if Abraham was trustworthy. But as we pray at the opening of our
liturgy: to God all hearts are open, all desires known, and no secrets are hid.
Do we really want to claim that God did this because God wasn’t sure what was
going to happen? I’m not sure that I want to say that.
Another
way of getting around this passage is to make it about something else. You can
find some scholars suggesting that the real message of this text is that
Abraham did not argue with God about such an outlandish request. After all,
Abraham argued with God repeatedly over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
(you can go back to Genesis 18 and read about that). Correctly, they note that
this incident was a pivotal one in the story of Genesis. The next action that
happens in the narrative after this incident is that Sarah dies. And never
again does God speak to Abraham. We can read a lot into that, but what we can
say for sure is that this event was a turning point in the story of Abraham.
And some suggest that it was not a good turn. They say the test wasn’t about
whether or not Abraham would sacrifice his son, but whether or not he’d stand
up to God. But, again, Abraham has already demonstrated that he would and
willful defiance of the Almighty is not actually a character trait we want to
see in a patriarch. We have to read between the lines while ignoring the actual
text to come away thinking this is a commentary on the importance of bargaining
with God.
No
matter how much we try, we are left with that image painted by Rembrandt in our
minds of an angel grabbing Abraham’s hand as the blade falls to the ground and
Isaac is bound like a sheep for the slaughter. This isn’t a parable that has
some meaning for us to decipher or discover. Instead, this is a story that
reveals a truth that we have to wrestle with.
This
means that when Genesis says: “God tested Abraham” it means that God tested
Abraham. So the question is: why did God test Abraham? Sometimes it’s called
the “scandal of the particular.” In Creation, God intended a blessing upon the
whole of humanity. But that didn’t work out – just ask Noah about it. Instead
of working among all people, God chooses to act through one person – Abraham.
And through Abraham, a people would be born and God would work through this one
people. And this people would become the nation of Israel, whom God would bless
in order to be a blessing to the whole world. And from this people, God will
choose one woman, Mary, to birth the one Messiah who will be the Savior of the
world. And Abraham agreed to this when we left his family upon God’s call back
in Genesis 12.
But,
understandably, just as God questioned the goodness of Creation before the
Flood in Genesis 6, God has reason to question Abraham’s fitness to be the one
person through whom the plan of salvation will unfold. Abraham, twice, tried to
pass his wife off as his sister out of fear that people would try to kill him
and take her. But by asking her to pretend to be his sister, Abraham was
hanging Sarah out to dry just to save himself. Then, when Sarah hasn’t yet
become pregnant with the promised heir, he goes and conceives a son with one of
Sarah’s maids, Hagar. Abraham, when he gets into a tough situation, has shown a
penchant for impatience and taking the easy way out. But God’s plan demands
more of Abraham than this, and so he must be tested. If all the eggs are going
in the Abraham basket, we need to know how strong that basket is. Is Abraham
going to live into the covenant with God, or is he going to do this his own
way? What greater test could there be than to have the very seed of the promise
on the altar of sacrifice?
Now,
I absolutely agree with you if you are thinking that this is unreasonable. But
when did God ever promise to be reasonable? In a sermon, Will Willimon once
said that God doesn’t worry about appearing dignified before the Rotary Club.
No, God is fierce, wild, and untamable. If God wants to test Abraham in this
way, who are we to judge the Almighty?
Rabbi
Eliezer Berkovits wrote a book called With
God in Hell that explored the question of why so many Jews kept their faith
in the death camps. As he wrestles with this question, he turns to this story
about Abraham and Isaac and finds the bottomless trust that Abraham has for
God. It’s not about obedience – God could have found plenty of people that
would be mindlessly obedient. God needed trust. Berkovits imagines Abraham
saying to God, “Almighty God, what you are asking me is terrible. But I have
known you. You have loved me and I love you. My God, you are breaking your word
to me. Yet, I trust you.” That’s the sort of trust that was being tested.
Did
God know how Abraham would do on this test? I’m not sure, I’m not going to
claim to know the mind of God. What I am willing to suggest though is that
Abraham had no idea how we would respond if this had been an abstract idea.
It’s one thing to say “I trust God with everything” and it’s something else to
have to put your trust in God with everything. Perhaps God learned something
that day, perhaps not. But, without question, Abraham learned something in this
test. And for the promise of God to be fulfilled in him, Abraham needed to
deeply know of his trust in God.
Abraham
had to know that more than being his son, Isaac belongs to God. God’s promise
of salvation needed Isaac more than Abraham needed him. But this can be an
uncomfortable truth for us. We tend to think of our children as belonging to
us. And, by extension, we think we are in control of our lives and our futures.
But we are not in control. Our lives are not our own. We belong to God. Who
knows about Abraham, I don’t want to try to psychoanalyze someone who lived
nearly 3,000 years ago – but I know what I see in our culture and what thoughts
are in my mind. God is not a means to our ends, even if that’s how we so often
treat God – as a deity to please so that we get nice things.
A
family member recently told me about a church they’ve been watching during this
pandemic instead of their own. I had my suspicions about it, but decided to
actually watch a sermon before arriving at a conclusion. And it was a heresy
known the Prosperity Gospel – which really isn’t Christianity, but rather a
blend of nationalism, consumerism, and religious niceties. It’s a deeply individual
and transactional view of faith. And though we rightly reject that sort of
faith, it still seeps from our culture into our thoughts. God isn’t here to
serve us, to make our lives nice, or to make us better people. No, God is to be
feared. At the end of this encounter, God says to Abraham, “I now know that you
fear God.” Again, whether or not God already knew this isn’t the point, the
point is that Abraham now knows that he fears God. And fear isn’t only about
being afraid, it’s about recognizing the grandeur and awe of God. Abraham now
knows that this covenant is not a partnership of equals, is the Lord of heaven
and earth working out the plan of cosmic salvation through Abraham’s
faithfulness.
Psychologically,
this is a difficult test, but theologically it is essential. The test leads Abraham,
and us, to recognize that God is God and we are not. And in that recognition,
we come to see how God is providing for us. Genesis tells us that Abraham looks
up and sees the ram that will be sacrificed, just as he had told Isaac earlier
– God will provide the sacrifice. What’s so interesting about God’s provision
is how it sounds in Hebrew. The text of Genesis does not say that God provided
the ram, as if God fashioned it out of thin air. No, when Abraham names the
place “the Lord will provide,” the
Hebrew actually says “the Lord
sees.” Just a few chapters earlier in Genesis, when Hagar is running from
Sarah’s poor treatment of her, God comes to her and tells her that he will
provide for her son and Hagar, who at this point has never met God, names God
“the God who sees.”
This
is how God provides – God sees us. In the tough moments and the joyful moments
of life, God sees us. As one of the Psalms says, “Where can I flee from your
presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed,
you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right
hand hold me fast.” God was with Abraham and Isaac on that day and saw to it
that the ram was there for the sacrifice. Sometimes we don’t see God’s provision
for us until the moment when we need it – as the ram had likely been there for
a while. God sees our suffering, our trust, and our failings. Our salvation is
always rooted in the fact that God sees us with the eyes of our loving Creator.
This passage about
the binding of Isaac is about the testing of our faith, not so that God knows
where we stand, but so that we know it. When our trust is fully with God, grace
is able to flow through us. And when our trust falters, well, we can take
comfort in knowing the story of another Son who was on a hilltop not far from
Mount Moriah. About a quarter-mile away from where the binding of Isaac took
place is a hill called Golgotha. Just as Isaac carried the wood for the
sacrifice up the mountain, a man named Jesus, who was God in the flesh, carried
his Cross up the mountain and was sacrificed there. It was the ultimate test of
God’s love and faithfulness to the covenant. God in Jesus Christ was
sacrificed. God the Father saw this and provided Resurrection life on the third
day. And so even when we falter in faith, Jesus has passed the test and by his
faithfulness, we are saved by God’s grace. The story of Jesus reminds us that
after the testing of Good Friday comes the providing of Easter morning. And that’s
a story you can put your whole trust in.
