Genesis 22:1-14.
In Hebrew
Scripture, God usually communicates with human beings through angels. We see it
at the end of this passage from Genesis today, when it is an angel who tells
Abraham not to slay Isaac but to sacrifice the ram instead. But in this story,
the order to kill Isaac does not come through an angel: it comes directly from
God. There is a Yiddish folktale about
this very thing. In that tale, there is no angel because the angels refuse to
go along with it. They say to God, “If you’re going to command Abraham to kill
his own son, then you tell him. We’re not doing it!” This is a terrible story.
And I’m with the angels on this one. I want to go on strike and tell God, “If
you want this story preached in worship, then you come and preach it! I
refuse!” But apparently I have less clout than the angels. So here I am, and
this story will not be ignored. For one thing, it looms large in Israel’s
history. Christians tend to refer to it as the sacrifice of Isaac, but not
Jews: they call it the akedah, the
binding of Isaac. And according to 2 Chronicles 3:1, the mountain of the akedah is the very place where the
Temple is built centuries later; tradition holds that the altar of the Temple
was located on the exact spot where Abraham built his altar and bound his son.
But the story is inescapable for a more primal reason than that: it’s
horrifying. Would the God we worship really ask anyone to murder their own
child?
The answer to
that seems clear: other ancient religions practiced human sacrifice, but the
law of Israel strictly forbade it. Human sacrifice in general, and the
sacrifice of children in particular, was deemed an abomination (Lev. 18:21;
Jer. 7:30-34). Actually, our very notion of hell comes from it. The word
translated as hell in the New Testament is Gehenna,
which refers to the Valley of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem that served as a dump
where people burned garbage. Why there? Because it was in that place centuries
before Christ that the Israelites committed their worst apostasy: they
worshiped the god Molech by burning their children alive as an offering to him.
And so the place was held accursed forever, a symbol of everything evil. So the
Old Testament itself makes it clear that God would never desire such a
sacrifice, and our experience of God’s love in Jesus can only confirm that.
And yet we are
left with this story. One approach to understanding it, quite common in
rabbinic circles, is to say that Abraham flat-out got it wrong: God doesn’t
want him to sacrifice Isaac; Abraham just misunderstands. And certainly the
Bible is filled with stories of people who get it wrong. Or we could also hold
that this is a one-of-a-kind test, something which only Abraham would ever
undergo as the father of our faith. In that case, it could be like the event it
obviously prefigures, the sacrifice of Jesus, God’s only Son, on the cross,
which is also a once-in-eternity event. There is something to be said for these
interpretations, but they have one basic flaw: they keep this story at a
comfortable distance. Whether Abraham is just mistaken or unique, that means
this awful story doesn’t apply to us, and we can quickly skip over it.
But that won’t
work. The one thing this story can offer us can only be absorbed by entering
into the terror of it and not avoiding it. Abraham has no good choice here: he
can give up his son or he can give up the one thing that gives meaning to his
life and his son’s life. It doesn’t matter existentially whether God is doing
this to him or just it allowing it to happen; this is what Abraham is experiencing.
Every option is bad, and what seems “right” to him, is unbearable. And if you
are an adult and have never been in that same kind of situation, I don’t know
how you’ve avoided it. To be a person of faith — no scratch that, to be a human
being — means experiencing moments when every way forward is darkness, when the
very goodness of God seems absent and pain is our only companion.
I have sat with
people while they watched their child die. Do you surrender your precious
child’s life, trusting in the loving providence of God or do you curse God in
bitterness and heartbreak? No option is easy, even and especially the “right”
one. I have listened to recovering alcoholics and addicts who are frantic:
staying clean and sober feels impossible, but returning to alcohol or drug
abuse will only destroy them. People have cried in my office as they have
confronted devastating problems in their families that left them with no good
course of action. I have had sleepless nights when I knew how terrible the next
day would be, that no matter what I did, it was going to hurt me and cause pain
to others. Pretending that such moments don’t happen is not faith: it’s denial.
Authentic faith, Christ faith, means entering fully into the terror and
darkness of such moments, like Jesus did in Gethsemane and on the cross.
Because only then
do we discover the truth, which is embodied in one of the most powerful phrases
in the Hebrew Bible, the one we heard today (Genesis 22:14): יהךה יראה — The LORD will provide. It’s easy to say
that when life is good and there’s money in the bank, food in the fridge, and
loved ones in good health. But we don’t really discover what it means until our
day or our world implodes. I think I have shared with you one of the most
moving pastoral conversations I have ever had, which took place after a
Compassionate Friends memorial service. A married couple were telling me about
the death of their son some years before, which was awful beyond words. But
then they described the various ways they had experienced God’s grace and
redemption since that time, and then the father said, “I miss my son every day,
but, you know, I don’t think I would change anything.” How can you get to that
point after such a tragedy? How can a bishop dying from a brain tumor proclaim
the love of God, as a dear friend of mine did? How can a dead body hanging on a
cross lead to life? There is no way to answer such questions academically: our
creed and our catechism won’t suffice. Like Abraham, we can only live them and
experience the answer ourselves.
I don’t wish for
you any bleak moments this week or ever. But when they come, my charge to you
is simple: don’t avoid them. Don’t think that faith means denying them. Faith
means walking forward into the darkness with whatever trust we can muster, with
open hands and open hearts, willing to discover the truth for ourselves: יהךה יראה — The LORD will provide.
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