Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, June 30, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Matthew 10:37-42; Genesis 22:1-18 Abraham called that place: "The Lord will provide."
-Genesis 22:14
Abraham loved his son Isaac, we know this: loved Isaac as fiercely as I love my children or you love yours, only with added intensity arising from the circumstances. He waited till he was a hundred years old for the boy to be born, and on that boy alone rode all his hopes.
And one other thing we know: Abraham loved God — loved, feared, trusted and obeyed God with a single-mindedness that has made the name of Abraham a synonym and a watchword for faith to every Jew, Christian, and Muslim who has ever lived.
You wouldn't think these two great loves of Abraham's would clash with each other. Isaac was after all God's gift to him and Sarah. But here on Mount Moriah they do clash, and the clash is captured in Genesis by an inspired master storyteller and poet, and we are drawn in, fascinated, horrified, and outraged — and at the end we are relieved, yes, that Isaac lived and Abraham didn't kill him, but appalled that such any such thing as this should happen at all, much less that the God we worship should be the author of it.
Every time the story comes around I grab hold of it and obsess about it as if it could keep me (and you) afloat, keep us from drowning in stormy seas. You may find that odd, since it could not be less comforting or reassuring than it is, but it cuts straight to the heart of things. This is a story that means business. It doesn't piddle around with small or nonessential things. It's about how to live this life as well as one possibly can.
The Jews call this the Akeda, which means "binding", the binding of Isaac, and they tell it with great ceremony every Rosh Hashonah, every Jewish New Year. Apparently that ram, the ram that appeared at the end, with its horns caught in a bush, for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac, is the inspiration for the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn, to signify new year, new life, new time, new future. And when they pray on Rosh Hashonah, they say over and over Hineni —which is what Abraham said three times in the Akeda: Here I am. Here I am, God. Here I am, my son. Here I am, right here with you; here I am, ready for whatever comes next.
They could have called it "the testing of Abraham," but they didn't. They named it for Isaac, for the boy, and they chose one moment to name it for, not the moment when Isaac wondered where the lamb was for the offering, the lamb asking about the lamb, but rather the moment when the fire had been laid, and Abraham bound his son, tied him up, and was raising the knife to kill him. The Jews think that moment is what the whole thing is about, that moment is why the story consumes us still, and I think they're right.
One man said to me: This story is so barbaric it doesn't belong in any Bible, and no sane person could possibly worship a God who would put a boy or a man through a nightmare like this. This God's a child abuser. Isaac lives, but don't tell me he's not harmed!
Not to mention every parent in or out of this room who has actually lost a child — what on earth is there for them in the binding of Isaac?
The great poet of the First World War, Wilfred Owen, versified it with a contemporary twist. He called it The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
One preacher suggests we have a huge blind spot about ourselves if we treat the Akeda as a primitive myth, or if we think condescendingly of Abraham as ethically undeveloped in comparison with ourselves, since we regularly sacrifice our innocent young to far lesser gods than that.
An Australian preacher imagined a version of the Akeda in which Abraham is so caught up in the frenzy of the moment that he doesn't hear the angel calling him to stop, and he plunges the knife again and again until the boy is dead, then he lights the fire, and smoke billows, and the sky turns dark and death triumphs, and then there's "silence except for the bleating of a lost and forgotten ram amid the bushes.". And it's only later, coming down the mountain, that the shock wears off and the grief hits him and drives him mad, beyond the reach of any comforter. And then a stranger comes along, a scarred and pale man, and sits down and listens to Abraham's account of what he's done, what he believed, how he grieves. And Abraham says to him, Who are you? And the stranger says: Isaac, but Abraham can see by his wounds that he's been crucified.
In the Middle Ages, when Christians were forcing them to choose between baptism and death, the Jews took strength from the binding of Isaac to hold on to their faith, their tradition, their identity, even if it meant death for themselves and their children. If Abraham could face that, they said, then we can face this. But some modern Jews condemn his blind faith and overwhelming obedience, and they ask how the binding of Isaac can help anyone to deal with the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, the most eloquent of all the survivors of the death camps, says that the 20th-century Akeda would end differently from the original: In the 20th-century version, Isaac comes back down the mountain alone; Abraham is never seen again, he dies because he is old, and Isaac loses him too soon. Isaac, named for laughter, is orphaned and never laughs again.
I hope it's obvious by now that there is no authoritative, definitive interpretation of the Akeda, and there never will be. How could there be? It's as complex and as ambiguous and as contradictory and as maddening and as tragic and as human life itself. It sugar-coats absolutely nothing about life or about faith or about God, and yet it shows us a life lived in faith, a life centered on God, and does so in a way that never fails to compel and to challenge us, no matter how old we get, no matter how many times we hear it.
There's something a story can do that no doctrine, no creed, no catechism, no teaching, no rule-making can do. Stories can change people by changing the way they experience the world and themselves. And that's why Jane and I will never let you forget that the Bible is first and last a storybook.
There is no definitive interpretation of the Akeda, but let me share just one more interpretation with you before I stop. It's based on the fact that we can't help wondering what was going on in the mind of Abraham — the story is totally silent about all that interior stuff, which is its genius; it sets our curiosity and our imaginations on fire, and off we go wondering about everything, which is exactly what we're supposed to do. So what was Abraham up to?
The story begins by saying God tested Abraham. Well, suppose that Abraham was testing God too. That would be brinkmanship to make the Cuban missile crisis look like a game of Old Maid. It's the ultimate guy thing. Which of the two is going to flinch? Who's going to blink first? God sets out to test Abraham, but Abraham has the gall to call God's bluff. "OK, God, you demand the sacrifice of my son Isaac. But Isaac is your son too! Your gift, your creation, your beloved, the ancestor of your chosen people. So I'll do exactly as you say, and we'll see if that's what you really want." And in the end it's God who backs down. And the children of Abraham remember the Akeda because it tells them that God remembers their children.
So this isn't about blind, passive obedience. Abraham dares. Abraham risks everything to play chicken with God, and he wins. He wins, even though it's not really a game at all, and he really and truly doesn't know whether God will call it off at the last second. Would you want to win like that? Do you want to live like that? I think you already do live like that. You may have thought not, because your God is a reasonable, calm, benevolent deity who does not do things like that. Well, even Abraham might not have kept faith with a God like that, but it doesn't matter. Abraham knew from the start that there was no such God. But he did know God. The real God, who speaks to us still through Abraham and Isaac.
Amen