Genesis 22:1-14
June 26, 2011
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
The Bible is not a pretty book. It is populated with glorious stories of deliverance and reconciliation, of promises made and kept. It has lyric poetry that soars as high as the human spirit can fly. It has depths we cannot plumb in a single lifetime.
But it also contains what the scholar Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” There are stories that horrify and repel. This story is one of them. This is one of the stories that gets the Bible an “R” rating. Reading this story closely is not for the faint of heart. That the Revised Common Lectionary committee has set it before us suggests that this story is also one that cannot be ignored. So we won’t ignore it.
But neither will we clean it up or sugar-coat it. If the Bible and the God whom we meet in its pages could not stand close questioning, then they would not be worth my time. If they could not withstand careful scrutiny, I would find a different line of work doing something more worthwhile and useful.
But as it is, I believe that even these texts, perhaps especially these “texts of terror,” are worth the strenuous conversation we must have with them. For it is in part in deeply engaging stories like this one that we grow up to mature faith.
So let’s begin by setting aside the notion that, since God was only testing Abraham, somehow that makes everything okay. The narrator tells us that God set out to test Abraham, but Abraham knew nothing of this. All Abraham knew was that he was summoned: “Abraham!” Abraham was summoned by a voice that he recognized. He answered in the way that people usually do in the Bible when God addresses them: “Here I am!” In this exchange, this two-line dialogue, God and Abraham are set in a relationship in which God addresses and Abraham answers. From that fact alone, we would know where the power lies. God has the initiative. If this were a chess game, we would say that God is playing white.
So that’s how this story begins. And Abraham knows it.
“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 on one of the mountains that I shall show you,” God said. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” God names Isaac three times, as if there could be any question about which son God meant.
Abraham was new in the covenant people business and did not have a tradition to draw on for understanding the sorts of things God would ask. There were no seminaries filled with scholars writing books of systematic theology that would help Abraham sort things out. There was only the Voice who had promised an inheritance and a son to inherit it, the miracle son born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.
Abraham did not know and could not know whether this demand was in or out of character for God. There was only the Voice and its demand. We do not know, but we can imagine, what went through Abraham’s mind as he gathered what would be necessary for the sacrifice and for the journey. I suspect that Abraham brought nothing for the return trip; his life, too, would end at Moriah. We shudder to imagine what it would do to any of us to be put in Abraham’s position. What did he tell Sarah?
We can imagine, but we do not know what was in his heart as he walked, Isaac carrying the wood, and he the fire and the knife.
We do not know what was in his heart as Isaac innocently asked, “Where is the lamb?” and he replied with an answer with a double meaning, “God will provide.” He avoided saying the obvious—“You are the lamb for sacrifice that God has already provided.” In his use of the future tense—God will provide—was he calling God’s bluff, if a bluff it was? But there was no answer as Abraham walked with his son, his only son Isaac, the son whom he loved.
Abraham went about the preparation of the altar, piling the stones, laying the wood, binding his son and readying the knife. And there was still no answer from God.
What was in God’s heart as Abraham obeyed God’s summons? We do not know. Did God expect that Abraham would resist this insanity, this inhumane demand? After all, Abraham had resisted God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s argument then had been precisely that innocent blood should not be spilled—even by God—in the name of justice. But if God was surprised there is no hint of it in the story.
So there they went, a stubborn old man and his God, or perhaps a stubborn old God and his man, it’s really hard to say which, toward the edge of an abyss. There is such an abyss in every relationship. God and Abraham were racing toward the edge of theirs.
Abraham reached out his hand to kill his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loved, and God blinked. Someone had to. Someone had to call off this terrible game of chicken. This, after all, was not simply a test of Abraham. It was also a test of God. That’s the way it works in a covenant. If we have ever been so foolish as to put someone we have loved to the test, we know that it works both ways. And we learn that we cannot do this to someone we love and expect a relationship to come out of it without wounds. Abraham and God learned this the hard way.
Sometimes our journey takes us through a very hard place. It may feel like a test. Hard places, however, in life, in our relationships with each other, in our relationship with God, are not tests. They are reality. Reality is sometimes very hard, but it is not a game that God plays with us. Not again. Not after the fiasco at Moriah.
That’s something at least. Something we can take away from this tale of terror. But it is not all that we are asked to see.
There is one more character yet to be heard from. This story is told as if it were a contest of sorts between two protagonists. There is God; there is Abraham; and, there is the narrator who offers us a safe place from which to view the events as they play out. But there is a fourth position in the story and we have not looked at him yet.
That position is Isaac’s. He was a child at the mercy of an adult who was caught up in a contest with God. If Isaac was old enough to carry the wood, if he was old enough to ask where the sacrificial lamb was, he was certainly old enough to have an inkling of what was happening, to sense its menace. Perhaps Abraham and God learned their lesson about the futility of testing each other’s love. But what did Isaac take away from this? Could he ever trust his father again? Abraham may have protested that he wasn’t going to go through with it, that the angel intervened at precisely the point that Abraham was going to refuse to pass, but how could Isaac ever know that for certain? God may have protested that, after all, the angel did intervene and nothing really happened. But Isaac was really brought by his father’s obedience to God’s demand to a place of stark terror. Isaac would live his life in the shadow of that memory.
Perhaps God and Abraham came to the place where they could trust each other once again. I’m not so sure of Isaac. Or of his children and descendants, across whose lives this shadow also fell. Did this demand for a child sacrifice echo through the generations and centuries? Did it haunt God as well as God’s people? Was the death of Jesus—I’m speculating here. Remember I don’t necessarily believe everything I think—was the death of Jesus God’s way of atoning for the crime committed at Moriah?
I ask the question because I think it still haunts us. We seem unable to avoid reenacting it. Even though we know that a god who demands such a death is not worth our worship. Even though we know that a father who obeys such a command is not worthy the title. Even though the very hint that people would offer up their own children as a sacrifice is repugnant to us. In spite of all of that, in spite of all of that, why is it that we still do it?
Make no mistake, this story is a mirror held up to our own life. And looking into it we see into our souls. We are summoned by a voice that demands their lives. And we send them. When they come back to us, scarred by what they have seen and done and had done to them, wounded in soul and body, or perhaps even dead, we call their injury or their death a “sacrifice.” And I want to know, “Who is the god who dares to demand this blood?” And I want to ask, “Who will rescue Isaac now?”
This has been hard, I know. I did warn you that the Bible isn’t a pretty book. I said that the Bible contains stories of deliverance but also texts of terror. In this case they are one and the same. Here, in this terrible text, precisely because of the terror, we have the possibility of being delivered from the cycle of death that our world has turned into a religion. In this story we, too, hear a Voice that summons us, not to offering our children as sacrifices, but a Voice that says, “Do not lay your hand on the child.”
It is a long journey from where we are to the peace that God promises, fully as long as the journey to which God called Abraham and Sarah when they left their homes for the land of promise. But if we hear the Voice that calls to us and take one little step in that direction, we will be well begun on that journey. Whatever else we might need for that journey, God will provide.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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