Genesis 22:1-14
First Reading for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Year A)
Did the title tip my hand too much? The near sacrifice of Isaac has always been a troubling passage for me. Now I can put on my religious studies hat and tell you that compared to some other religious stories of the day that this tale is actually kind of progressive. The religion following the God of Abraham is different from other faiths; even though it feints in that direction, this God does not require child sacrifice. This story conveys the important message (one that I wrote about just last week) about the necessity and difficulty of obedience to God above all else. It asserts that such faithfulness will be rewarded. I also know that this story was told in a context that is dramatically different from our own. It is not written for modern audiences.
But, whew, I really hate this story. I didn’t feel great about as a kid and I truly do not like it today as a father. Despite all the caveats mentioned above, I cannot read this story and not imagine how everyone involved would walk away with irreparably scarred relationships.
How could Abraham have lived with himself knowing that he was moments from killing his own son? How could Isaac—who was tied up, laid upon an altar, and watched his father grab a knife to sacrifice him—not be a complete shell of a person? How could the relationship with father and son ever be the same? And how could either of them not feel conflicted about a God who played such a seemingly cruel game with both of them?
I believe what has always gnawed at me about this passage is that I rarely heard anyone truly wrestle with this thing. No one acknowledged all the caveats that I mentioned in the first paragraph. But even more, the binding of Isaac was typically presented as a straightforward story about what God is really like. In this passage, we see a God who is someone who puts people through torturous trial to test their mettle.
I remember talking with a woman once who was nervous that something would happen to her children because she loved them more, she feared, than she loved God. I tried to quickly and compassionately explain that God is not that kind of God to harm children to make us love God more, but you can draw a straight line from Isaac on the altar to that belief.
There are so many times that the Christian faith renders God as the Man Behind the Curtain who is orchestrating our heartache to teach us some sort of lesson. And part of that is understandable. When we are going through a trying season, we want it to mean something. We want there to be a lesson or a reason; something to explain the chaos that has been unleashed upon our lives. So God becomes the puppeteer who pulls the strings on our heartbreak.
Yet what if God is the One who is with us in our woundedness? Not the One who is putting us through some sort of cosmic exam, but the One who walks with us through the trials, questions, and chaos that we encounter. I sometimes wonder if Abraham got his signals crossed and thought that God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac because that’s what gods do. They live on high and they demand sacrifices from tiny mortals.
This God was different. That is likely what this story was trying to get to, but it was still feeling out just how different, how radical, how far afield God was from the old gods that created through war and bloodshed. I wonder if there was a version of this story where God walked up the mountain with Abraham and Isaac trying to get dissuade a father from killing his only son.
Because what if God is the One who is with us in our woundedness? Not asking us to slaughter our sons and daughters from on high, but willing to be made low, to walk with us, to live with us, to love us, and to die. Not to die as a ritualistic sacrifice, but as the sure and true sign that God is with us even in our darkest moments. And to show us that such faithfulness will be rewarded.
I still do not really like this passage because of what it does to many people. But I am grateful for the opportunity to wrestle with it.