Some time later God tested Abraham. God said, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” Abraham replied. God said, “Take your son, whom you love - Isaac - and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took two servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and gave it to Isaac to carry, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them walked together, Isaac said, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham replied, “God will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” The two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he took the knife to slay his son. The angel of God called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” Abraham looked, and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He took the ram and sacrificed it instead of his son. Abraham called that place “The LORD Will Provide”. To this day it is said, “On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided.”
************************************************************************
The sky darkens, the wind howls as two people walk up a wild and windy mountain. The conversation had started early that morning. No wasted words. “Get up, old man. Take your son, your only son Isaac, and sacrifice him on Mount Moriah.”
So the old man and the boy walk on in the thinning mountain air. With each step the old man grows older. With each step he chills, but the boy doesn’t feel it. The boy hops three steps to each stride of the old man. Now stoop-shouldered from years of field work, the old man clutches fire and a razor-sharp flint knife. Trust and obey, for there’s no other way. “Must be another way,” the old man thinks. “Old woman,” he mutters to himself, “what will I tell her? Barren before. Barren again. Old woman, forgive me.”
Terror crouches in his throat; swallows his steps. Swallows his muttering. Now atop the mount, the old man stares at the ground. “Father, how can we worship without a lamb? Where’s the sacrifice?”The old man chooses his words cautiously. “So we have come without our lamb. I guess God will have to provide the lamb for us.”
On top of Moriah, Abraham sees his son, and then beyond his son to his own life that rewinds back through the years. He sees himself again as a kid - a foolish young man blinded by love and drunk with a passion for adventure. There he goes - Abraham meandering across the desert with his bride in tow. Off to no place in particular, just following what he takes to be the voice of his God. The years pass and he sees himself once again - a middle-aged man, living in goatskin tents, breathing sand and rearranging the dust. Childless. The conversation with God continues. More years pass, leaving him with cracked, leathery skin. He entertains strange guests who tell him a cock-and-bull story about his old woman becoming pregnant and he becoming a father. The years pass, no children. When the conversation breaks down and still no promised child, he and Sarah are so desperate that he has an affair with a household slave - so that his wife can at least have the child as soon as it descends the birth canal. Ishmael is born. But he is sustained by the conversation with God over the years and the impossible happens. He hears an old woman cackling at the newborn she has just birthed. He sees his life in the eyes of the boy. Abraham has lived a full life, a life of promise and miracle.
“But Father, where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” The question is not mouthed; it’s the boy’s eyes talking. The altar waits, the child waits. Abraham waits for a moment as he searches the boy’s eyes, his hands clenching tight the razor-sharp flint knife. He knows! How? He knows! There’s no scene, no struggle, no wrestling to apprehend Isaac, to tie him to the pile of wood. He offers his arms to be tied. The old man fumbles with the ropes. “I must steady my hands, “ he thinks. The end will come suddenly. The boy watches the old man tremble in silence. The old man says aloud to the barren mountain: “So be it. But you hear me, demanding God. This death will not end my journey. You promised me a son. Nothing can take that promise from me, not even you.” The old man will hobble home, childless, to his old wife, twice barren.
***********************************************************************
When I was in seminary, one of my professors insisted that only the Gospel could be preached. I argued with him. Why do we have a lectionary which presents us with four possible texts each week, if none of them are worth preaching except the Gospel. He didn’t give a good grade in that class, but I didn’t care......because I have always believed that other texts sometimes offer much more, that we need to tackle the harder texts, even if they make us uncomfortable.
So - the bare bones of the story - we are told - is that God decides to test Abraham’s faith, by telling him to sacrifice Isaac, his only son, as a burnt offering. The way the story is written, Abraham doesn’t tell Isaac what he is going to do, only that they will go into the hills to find an appropriate place to worship God. He loads Isaac up with wood, and he takes the spark of tinder and the knife.....
One of my online discussion groups is called “Midrash” - a Hebrew word, which describes a process of interpreting biblical stories, which goes beyond simple distillation of religious, legal or moral teachings. It fills in gaps left in the narrative - where we might only get a hint from the text. The simple explanation is that every text is evaluated for its simplest meaning, and then hidden meanings, hints, and even a revelation of meaning. So today is less a sermon and more of a series of possibilities.
One of my colleagues on Midrash wrote:
“I have little doubt that this story is so overlaid with mythologising and theologising by the time it reaches its final form around the time of the Babylonian Exile that it contains little of an ancient event and a lot of a "story". Abraham is challenged to love the relationship with God more than he loves whatever gain he gets out of that relationship. The problem for telling this story today is the way it presents God in the incarnation of the challenge. God is presented as one who deceives a man into believing he wants child sacrifice and puts a child through a terror from which he would most likely never recover. In ancient times when the rights of, and effect upon, a child would be disregarded, this story might have passed muster; but not today.”
So one way of looking at this text is that it is an early prophetic sanction against child sacrifice which was a serious issue in Israel, after the Canaanite settlement, as the later prophetic tradition notes. Child sacrifice was not unknown in almost all cultures - and perhaps this was a story designed to demonstrate that God was different.
Christians evaluate God in the light of the words of Jesus. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father". So, if we hold Jesus as the example, we cannot get away with presenting a God who deceives someone into child sacrifice, who puts a child through such trauma.The "New Atheists" describe such a God as a moral monster. Perhaps the call in this passage is to re-evaluate some of our pet theories and theologies.
Reading this text from a Christian perspective, there are clear parallels between this and our belief that God required Jesus literally as a sacrifice - in atonement for all the sins of humanity. But if we read Genesis as a prohibition against child sacrifice, where does that put the death of Jesus and the theology of sacrificial atonement?
Right off, I have to tell you I simply cannot believe in a God who would require a sacrifice of any kind. Because I don’t subscribe to the sacrificial atonement theology, I decided to ask a friend, Rav Roy Tanenbaum, at the Canadian Yeshiva and Rabbinical School in Toronto - how this text would be read in his tradition.
Rav Roy responded: “Christianity gets it. Bringing a sacrificial animal or dove to the Jerusalem Temple was an act of expiation. One did not have to be forever stuck in sin. There is a way to get on with one's life. It is a powerful ceremony. The penitent places his hands on the animal and knows that there, but for the animal, goes him, because he is the one that is really deserving of this. When Christianity turns a personal sin into Sin, that is, Original Sin, faith in Jesus becomes the mode of expiation, and Jesus is the "sacrificial lamb" in that sense.”
However, I believe we got that original notion from Paul, and Christianity has run with it ever since. We forget that as a trained theologian - a rabbi who had a startling spiritual experience - Paul would have tried to fit that experience into his cultural and theological understanding at the time - and to me much of Paul's writing really feels like someone who is also wrestling with a way of explaining an experience. Then the question is - does this actually work today?
In the Hebrew understanding, sin was the state of being separated from God. So, in that context - I could understand a voluntary sacrifice as a way of confessing separation from God - and we also confess in the Christian church - and putting ourselves right with God again. That is different from God requiring an act of great barbarism in exchange for whatever sins all humans have committed. That, in my mind, is not only contrary to who I believe God is, but it also removes personal responsibility for actions. It is also quite different from God asking Abraham to break the law given by God in the first place.
Back to Abraham and Isaac. Rabbi Tanenbaum says the approach which “we DON'T have is (Soren) Kierkegaard's suspension of the ethical as the ultimate test of faith....... mostly, we say once there is Torah, G-d cannot command against it. So, in that sense, prophecy becomes redundant, and you can never get a prophecy to kill someone.”
So there’s a second thing for you to think on. Once there is the law, the Torah, as given by God to Moses, even God cannot go against the law. God cannot suspend the ethical.
He goes on to say “One of the explanations I like is that Abraham is challenging G-d, by going through with it and forcing G-d to respond. Remember, this is the man who challenged G-d at Sodom. Now, however, he is involved in the matter - not at arm's length - and therefore must frame the challenge differently.”
This I like. Abraham forces God’s hand - by actually preparing to go through with it. Abraham challenged God before, at Sodom. God announced the city will be destroyed; Abraham asked if God would spare the city if 50 righteous men could be found, and when God agreed, Abraham kept bargaining God down till they got to ten.
So Abraham goes through all the motions of preparing to sacrifice Isaac, right up to the moment of lifting the knife. - and when it comes to that moment, in this interpretation, God - or an angel of God - jumps in and says “Hang on, I didn’t really mean for you to DO it!!!”
Then there are more questions. How did Isaac react, as Abraham tied him up, and set him on the altar? Abraham says “we will come back.” Yet if we go further on into the story, Abraham comes back down alone. What happened to Isaac? And here is where we try to fill in some of the gaps in the story. What if Isaac were so terrified, he ran away? The story at the beginning has Isaac not frightened, but figuring out what Abraham is doing and going along with it. In the Jewish tradition, one midrash says that Isaac went off to a yeshiva to learn. He determines that if he is called upon to be the sacrifice, then he needs to know why that would be.
When Abraham comes back down alone, what does he tell Sarah? As we read the story, Abraham just goes off, and Sarah has no idea. But in the next chapter of Genesis, Sarah dies. There is a midrash which says that when Sarah hears what Abraham had gone off to do, she expires, and thus she never knows the real ending of the story. It raises this question - how often are there unintended consequences to our acts. Our actions have reactions - like ripples in a pond - and we can't always see how they will affect other things.
In both interpretations, there is to be a sacrifice. In one, God tests Abraham by asking him to set aside the law which was given by God in the first place. This presupposes that God is above God’s own law. In the other, Abraham is not willing to accept that God is above that law, and challenges God to carry through. Personally, I am with Abraham.
So what is the lesson in the story for us? We don’t literally practice human child sacrifice any more, but we do still sacrifice our children in so many ways. How many are condemned by starvation, or a lack of health care? How many have been sacrificed by abuse, sexual or otherwise - and a church which is willing to cover up? How many have been sacrificed to belief systems? I am thinking of native children ripped from their lives, and sacrificed on the altar of our religious beliefs. How many are sacrificed to our ambitions, or to war, or to ideologies which demand that they go willingly?
Perhaps the lesson in the story is that instead of the barbaric sacrifice, we instead have to sacrifice some of our own misplaced ideas. In the biblical text, just as Abraham was about to do the deed, he saw a ram caught in a thicket - and he then used the ram as the sacrifice instead of a child. It doesn’t say God provided the ram - but we assume that. An alternate way of resolving the issue was provided. Something else was sacrificed instead of the child. May it be so.
Sources:
1. Janet Weiblen, Greg Crawford, Rick McTeer, John Shearman, from the Midrash list, for their thoughts on this text.
2. Rav Roy Tanenbaum, Toronto Yeshiva and Rabbinical school, who was willing to help me engage the text from another perspective.
3. With material from “The Place of the God Who Provides” by Rev. Thomas Hall (including a story from William Willimon “On a Wild and Windy Mountain”, Nashville. Abingdon Press 1984.)
No comments:
Post a Comment