Ties That Bind
A Reading from the
Book of Genesis:
After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He 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 on one of the mountains that I shall show you." So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.
On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you." Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.
Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together. When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
So Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
We come now to the climax of Abraham’s story, one of the most troubling and befuddling episodes in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible. In Judaism it is known simply as the Akedah, the “Binding” of Isaac. We tend to call it the sacrifice. Anguished tomes have been written attempting to wrestle it, to make it make sense.
See, the whole story of Abraham up to this point has been that God chose a man “as good as dead” and gave to him an impossible promise: that in their exceedingly advanced age, he and his barren wife would conceive and bear a child; that this child would become a family, that family a nation, and that nation a blessing for all the families of the earth. The descendants of Abraham would number more than the stars in the heavens, more than the sands on the beach.
And Abraham believed in this promise—though what had he really to lose?—and the Lord reckoned his faith unto him as righteousness. Through all the many misadventures that followed, the roamings, the warrings, the lovings, the scandals, Abraham trusted in the Lord, had faith in God’s faithfulness, despite the decades rolling by, despite his centennial age. And this faith did not disappoint; God did not disappoint.
When Abraham hit 100, with Sarah a sprightly 90, she bore them a little boy, Isaac by name. Keep in mind that the ridiculousness of the promise is the point. Nothing and no-one can ever prevent the Lord from keeping His Word. Only a miracle could explain the child born unto Sarah and Abraham. For these two, it is a hope fulfilled after lifetimes of anguish and sorrow, lifetimes of patience and waiting. At last, at long last, they are finally a family of three.
Which makes the climax of the story all the more jarring. “Abraham!” calleth the Lord. “Take your son, your only son, Isaac whom you love, and offer him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” This is some sick joke, right? We’ve come through this entire story, so many chapters of the Book of Genesis, only now to have the rug pulled out from beneath us?
It makes me think of the darker European fairy tales, in which a mysterious benefactor saves someone’s life only then to claim as due payment their firstborn child. And what’s worse, Abraham concedes! He takes the child up the mountain. And when Isaac, shouldering the wood for his own pyre, asks why they seem to lack an animal to sacrifice, the old man replies, “God Himself will provide the lamb.”
Once they are alone, Abraham binds Isaac, lays him upon the sacrificial altar, and raises his knife to deliver the deathblow—only then to be halted at the last second by an angel from the Lord, proclaiming that because Abraham has withheld nothing from God, not even his son, God shall bless his offspring forever—which He’d already promised to do.
Abraham then finds a hapless lamb to sacrifice instead. Well, great. I’m sure that makes the whole thing less traumatizing. It’s hard for us to hear this today and to come away with any conclusion other than that Abraham herein acts monstrously, and so too must be his God.
There are so many interpretations to this story. Some say, drawing from the Prophet Jeremiah, that child sacrifice had never entered into God’s mind, nor Abraham’s. Did he not say, “God will provide the lamb,” and did not God then promptly do so? Abraham must have known it was a lesson, a demonstration of God’s faithfulness, and so known that his son was never in any real danger at all. God can always be trusted, my son, against any worldly evidence to the contrary.
Another tradition, just beyond the edges of the biblical narrative, indicates that he actually went through with it: that Abraham killed and burnt Isaac. And the child then miraculously returned to him from the dead. We find echoes of this in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and also in the writings of Martin Luther, who believed that Abraham had trusted in God’s promise of resurrection. Even death could not prevent the Lord from keeping His Word unto him.
More frightening to me are the later works of interpretation which argue that this story should convince us to place revelation over reason, faith over love; that we should be willing even to kill our own children should God deem it meet and fit. “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities,” wrote Voltaire, “can make you commit atrocities.” God cannot work evil. If He could, then He wouldn’t be God.
The takeaway for me is that this story is a victim of its own success. It is set some 4000 years ago; the edition in which we have it is at least 2500 years old. Back then, child sacrifice was all too horribly common. Give Molech a google sometime. What greater devotion could there be, than to offer that which you love most? What would have shocked the original hearers of Abraham’s tale is not that he might have been willing to sacrifice Isaac but that God forbade him from doing so.
This is the story that condemned human sacrifice, that ceased child sacrifice. We are disgusted by the notion of offering up our children because of this tale, because of this book. The whole point is that God does not want this, God would not ask this. In a story all about the ridiculous lengths to which God will go to keep His Word to us, this is the most ridiculous bit of all. God does not promise to us good only then to snatch it away. He is not cruel. He is not fickle. He is not false. God is love.
He did not ask of Abraham his son, though we have asked His Son of Him. Jesus also bore the wood of His own sacrifice. Jesus indeed is the Lamb whom God provides. And the Word that He would never break, we broke upon the Cross. Yet even this could not stop His forgiveness. Even this could not bury His love.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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