Shayna Appel, Associate Pastor
June 29, 2008
According to our church calendar, we have now returned to what some call “ordinary time”; a designation more to do with the numbering of weeks than a plain or mundane time. Rather than celebrating a particular season or event such as Advent or Christmas, each Sunday in ordinary time is a celebration of resurrection—which isn’t so ordinary after all.
Following our Easter readings from the books of Acts, Luke, and John, we return to the Hebrew Bible and gospel of Matthew. This month we’ve been reading passages from the first half of the gospel; some are lengthy, some very short, some ignore divisions that most scholars recognize, others skip verses in the middle of a passage, some constitute portions of the collected sayings of Jesus, and others narrate scenes of action. All of them challenge me, and most of them disturb me on some level or another!
The lectionary for this week is no exception; it takes us to one of the most important, most famous, and most famously disturbing passages in the entire Bible, the gist of which resides in just two verses. In Genesis twenty-two, verses one and two, we read that, “Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ he replied. Then God said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I shall show you’”. Few Scriptures, Jewish or Christian, have provoked more art and anguish, more controversy and commentary, than Abraham’s radical obedience to God’s command that he sacrifice his son Isaac; his only remaining son, the one whom he loved (Gen 22:2), the one through whom God would create a nation that would be a blessing unto all peoples (Gen 22:18).
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). Later than what? What had preceded this test? We remember that Abraham lied when he told the Egyptians that Sarah was his sister (Genesis 12:10). He fathered a proxy progeny (Ishmael) with his slave girl Hagar (Genesis 16). He laughed with Sarah in disbelief when God promised them a son in their old age (Genesis 17:17; 18:12). At Sarah’s command, Abraham allowed his son Ishmael to be cast out of his household along with his mother Hagar (Gen.20). This nomadic believer who had left the known of Haran for the unknown of Canaan because he believed that God had commanded him to do so that He might bless all people on earth through him—this same Abraham now faced a preposterous, twofold test of faith. First, he had to believe that God really had commanded him to sacrifice his son, his only son and the son of promise (Genesis 21:12). Further, he had to act upon that conviction and perform the hideous act himself.
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). As tests go, this one was pretty extreme even considering that child sacrifice was not uncommon in the ancient Near East, and it is referred to several times in the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps God wanted to see whether Abraham’s dedication was as great as that of others to their pagan gods. Perhaps Abraham believed that God would give him another son or somehow miraculously restore Isaac to life. The story is remarkably silent on these issues. In our record of the story, Abraham never wavers, and his doubts, if any, are never recorded. Instead, Abraham arises early in the morning and sets out on a journey that he believes will end with the death of his son. Or does he?
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). Terence Fretheim, the Elva B. Lovell Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Luther Seminary writes about this test that;
Some people read this story as if God were a detached observer, a heavenly homeroom teacher watching from afar to see if Abraham passes the test. But God puts much at risk in this ordeal. [Let us remember that it was] God [who] had chosen Isaac as the one to continue the line of promise…[And] Although God does not intend that Isaac be killed, the test places God’s own promise at risk, at least in the form of the person of Isaac…This story presents a test not only of Abraham’s faith in God, but of God’s faith in Abraham as well, in the sense that Abraham’s response will affect the moves God makes next. God places the shape of God’s own future in Abraham’s hands. [And], given [Abraham’s] somewhat mixed responses to God up to this point, God took something of a risk to put so much on the line with this man.
Renowned Hebrew Scriptures theologian and author Walter Brueggemann notes that this test, “is not a game with God; God genuinely does not know [how it will all turn out]…The flow of the narrative accomplishes something in the awareness of God. He did not know. Now he knows.”
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). In our record of the story, Abraham never wavers, and his doubts, if any, are never recorded. Instead, Abraham arises early in the morning and sets out on a journey that he believes will end with the death of his son. Or does he? In verses seven and eight there is recorded a conversation between Isaac and Abraham. It is the only time in this story that Isaac does, in fact, speak. In verse six, we read that Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, in other words, he gave Isaac the wood to carry, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Then, in verse seven, Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” We can almost hear the love Abraham has for this child in this response. Not just your average, “Dad!”
“What?”
Abraham responds with his whole self, saying, “Here I am”. It is the same response he gives to God. “Here I am”…it is the response of prophets throughout all ages; “Here I am”…not simply “What?”, as in, “What do you want?”…but rather, “Here I am…Here is my whole being, my whole self, and I put my whole self before you”, and beyond that, “Here I am, my son.”
Isaac says to his father, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering”? And Abraham, fully present and standing before his son with his whole self responds to Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
This isn’t some flip response Abraham is giving to his son. He is not, in the parlance of our day, ‘blowing him off’, nor, do I believe, is he fabricating a story in order to assuage the fears of his son in that, “Honey, don’t cry because we flushed your beloved goldfish down the toilet…it’s how goldfish get to heaven” sort of way. Abraham, fully present with his whole self before his beloved son, in the same way he brought his whole self before God when God called on him, reveals to Isaac something from the depth of his being; and that is, the absolute conviction that God would provide. And, of course, God did.
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). Sometime later, God’s gonna test us all! Again! And again! And again! Someone we love is going to get sick and die. Someone we love will move away. Someone we do not love will live forever and never go away! The cost of everything is going to continue to rise, and we are going to have to learn how to make do with less. Men will continue to find reasons to go to war, and so we will just have to find surer paths to peace. States will continue to kill people who kill people in order to show that killing people is wrong, and refuse to even want to talk about it, so we’re going to have to talk about it. Not just among ourselves, but with our friends and communities, and state legislators, and local newspapers. Somewhere in a place unknown, human beings are being tortured, and you can bet that will continue until our inability to tolerate that anymore out paces our concerns about being called unpatriotic. Our children will change, our communities will change, our societies will change, and our world will change. And, if our churches are to remain relevant, they too will have to change.
You see, “Sometime later God tested Abraham”, just like sometime later, God’s gonna continue to test us all. And it begs the question, “If God has given so much for us, does God ask us to give anything for God? The story of the Binding of Isaac, tells us that God did indeed ask Abraham to give up something. How much was Abraham asked to surrender? Only the one thing in life that was most precious to him: his son. The call of God comes: “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love . . . .” Lest there be any doubt about whom God is speaking, God refers to Isaac four times in four different ways: “your son,” “your only son,” “Isaac,” “the one you love.” Each appellation hits Abraham like a sledge hammer hits a spike, driving it ever deeper into the ground, for God is asking the unthinkable: “Go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
In the end, of course, God delivers Isaac, having seen that Abraham was willing to sacrifice anything for God. What do you suppose God is asking us to sacrifice today? What are our ‘Isaac’s’? Time? Money? Power? Our need for control? Our need to be right? Our attachment to the past? A Saturday morning, or Sunday afternoon? Our children? Our children’s futures? Appearences? Our academic prowess? Our connections? Our church?
What are our Isaac’s? What are the things that stop us from getting into the river alongside ‘the least of these’; things that might attempt to dictate the terms of our struggle for justice and our standing against injustice? What are our Isaac’s? And, if sometime later God tests you and me for the purpose of building up the kin-dom, will we put our whole selves in, or will we hold something back? What are our Isaac’s, and, whatever they are, are we willing to give them up?
“Sometime later God tested Abraham” (Gen 22:1). Sometime later, God’s gonna test us all! Relax…it’s only a test.
Amen.