A Blood-Thirsty God (2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A); Genesis 22:1-14; June 26, 2011)

A Blood-Thirsty God

2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A)
Genesis 22:1-14
June 26, 2011

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Like a lot of congregations, we give Bibles to our third-graders.  It’s a highly questionable practice.  The only thing that lets us get away with it is the assurance that our children won’t read them.  Otherwise, what are we doing giving an R-rated book to eight year olds? 

We want our children revere the Bible, but we’d rather they not actually read it.  Oh, some of it is okay.  They can read some of the psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount, the Love Chapter from 1 Corinthians, and maybe the creation stories.  Those are okay.  Other parts are sleep-inducing and harmless enough.  But then there are what Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” This is one of them.

We’d like to dodge stories like this one, but I won’t let us do that.  This is our book.  These are our stories.  We don’t have to like them, but we do have to reckon with them.  So reckon with them we will.  And we’re not going to permit ourselves the sugar-coating and evasions that usually go with the story.  No, let’s look it straight in the eye.

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!”  And he had to answer.

So that’s how this story begins.  God has the upper hand.  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.  

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.  What did he tell Sarah?  

What blackness was in his heart as they trudged to Moriah, Isaac carrying the wood, and he the fire and the knife?

What was in Abraham’s 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.”  Was his use of the future tense—God will provide—a sort of prayer, a reminder to God that there was still time to make a substitute?  But God was silent 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 still God was silent.

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—not even in the name of justice.  But if God was surprised, there is no hint of it in the story.

So there they were—a stubborn old man and his stubborn God—at the edge of a moral abyss. 

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, of God’s nature and character.  What sort of God is God?  Is God a God of justice and mercy?  Or is God a God of violence and bloodshed?  Does God value life?  Or does God value death?  

Abraham passed the test, but God struggled with his part,at least at first.

Sometimes our lives take us through very hard places.  We don’t need for God to play games with us by setting up any other tests than what reality throws at us.  Reality is already hard enough.  God seems to get this.  He doesn’t do this again.  Not after the fiasco at Moriah.

I will pass over what this episode must have cost Isaac who is thrown into a story of madness and menace as God and his father play a game of chicken with his life at stake.  I’ll also pass over the hapless ram who had been minding its own business, doing whatever it is that rams do when they’re not being sacrificed—maybe he was on his way to see that cute ewe in the next valley—when he found himself hopelessly tangled in brambles, then rescued by Abraham, then tied up and killed as the “happy” ending to someone else’s story.

I’ll pass over these things except to observe that this contest between God and Abraham didn’t stop there.  It cast its shadow over Isaac and over his children and his descendants.  This demand for a child sacrifice echoed through the generations and centuries.

This story is not just a love story about the triangulated relationship between Abraham, Isaac and God.  The shadow of this story still haunts us.  We suffer under a compulsion to repeatedly reenact it. 

We know that a god who demands such a death is not worth our worship.  We know that a father who obeys such a command is not worthy the title.  The very hint that people would offer up their own children as a sacrifice is repugnant to us.  And yet, in spite of all that, we still do it.

Make no mistake, this story is not just a story with which we have to reckon.It is a story that reckons with us; it’s 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 our children’s lives.  And we send them by their hundreds and by their thousands.  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.”  It is as if offering our children to God to be killed or to kill other children whose parents have offered them somehow makes their obscene wounds holy and their tragic deaths sacred.

I want to know, “Who is the god who dares to demand this blood?”  Because it is not the God of Abraham, who stopped Abraham’s hand on that day of contest and terror.  It is not the God of Jesus who taught us that we must love even our enemies.  It is not the God of the martyrs who died rather than lifting a hand to injure another child of God.

When our politicians of whatever party invoke God to justify war, the God whom they invoke is neither the God of this book, nor the God of Jesus our master.  The blood-thirsty God of war who demands that we let our country’s children go hungry and send them to crumbling schools, who demands that we drive on roads and across bridges that are long past needing repair, who demands that those with treatable illnesses go untreated so that we can afford to feed the war machine that feeds the blood-thirsty God, this God is not our God.  He is not the God of the law and prophets, not the God who fed the hungry and healed the sick, not the God who raised Jesus from the dead.  

No, when our God speaks, we hear a different summons,not one to offer our children as sacrifices.  No, our God wants to deliver us from the cycle of violence death.  Our God has no desire to be worshiped with bodies and blood.  Our God’s final word is, “Do not lay your hand on the child.” 

 

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