Then He Raised The Knife

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 22:1-19

There are many debates amongst scholars about who wrote particular books or passages of the Bible, with some scholars looking for clues that might indicate that one of the authors may have been a woman.  I think that we can unquestionably solve the debate about today’s passage.  This story could have only been written by a man, simply for the fact, as my wife often says to me, the author is not giving enough information.  He is a masterful storyteller, there is no question about that, but even as a man at the end of this story I want to ask questions in order to get more information.  Was Abraham’s conversation with God really that short?  Did he not ask more questions?  What did Sarah say?  Did she even know?  What were the servants thinking when Abraham and Isaac went up on the mountain?  Did Isaac really just go along with no resistance?  Did Abraham have no doubts whatsoever about carrying out this request out?

So right at the start we are told two things. The first is that we are told this happened after these things had happened, although it’s not clear what these things actually are. Is it the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael and then making covenant with Abimelech? Or is farther back? Is it everything that has happened? We don’t really know. But after whatever these things are we are then told that God decides to test Abraham. And so we are now in the know as it were, as is God, but Abraham doesn’t know this is a test. For him this is deadly serious, because if he knew it was a test, then it wouldn’t actually be a test.  And honestly we might see everything that had happened in Abraham’s life up to this point as a test of his faith and his faithfulness. But, God shouts Abraham’s name for some reason, and Abraham answers “Here I am” an important phrase, and then God says “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, 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.”

Now, there is a lot going on in that statement, and also a lot missing, and so Rashi, in a Jewish Midrash, which are Biblical interpretations, seeks to fill in some of the blanks in this conversation, and so has God say, “take your son” and Abraham replies “which son?” and God says, “your only son.” “But I have two sons,” Abraham replies, which should remind us that Ishmael has been expelled, and so perhaps Abraham has already in fact sacrificed one son because of an unreasonable demand. God says “the one you love,” “I love both my sons” and so finally God says “Isaac” to clear up any confusion.

What this initial request should also remind us of is Abraham’s original call story in chapter 12, where God tells Abraham to go the land that God will show him. God could have just said, “Go to the land of the Canaanites,” but the generality of the instruction might be part of the test, and we have the same thing here, that God tells Abraham to take Isaac to the mountain in the land of Moriah that God will show him. That first request cuts Abraham off from his past, and this request will potentially cut him off from his future. But just like in chapter 12, Abraham gets up and goes with no words spoken by him. But, I think we should compare that against earlier actions by Abraham. When Abraham is told that God is going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham argues with God and tries to protect and defend those who are innocent or righteous in the town, but he doesn’t do that here. We are told that when Sarah demands that Ishmael and Hagar be banished, that he is distressed by the situation. But we are not told that here. This time, Abraham does not defend his own son, or even argue for Isaac’s life. Instead we are simply told that early the next morning he gets up and takes Isaac and two young men and they leave.

Now some have argued that perhaps Abraham had become too attached to Isaac, that he loved him too much, like there is such a thing with a child, but that he put more trust in him for the fulfillment of the promise than Abraham trusted in God. But there is no indication of that in the text. Nor is there indication that Abraham claims ownership of the promises made to him by God, as if they were his possessions. But, there is someone else who does do that, and that is Sarah. As we talked about last week, she wants to own the promise, and in some ways own God, which can be seen in her demands to Abraham. That perhaps Sarah is seen as the one with an unhealthy relationship with her son, and Abraham never refers to Isaac as his son, at least not yet, but Sarah does. And so there is another Midrash that says this test is not about whether Abraham loves Isaac too much, but whether Abraham will tell Sarah what he has been asked to do, or listen to her response. There is a reason why God asks this of Abraham and not of Sarah, because we know what her response would be.  And we know of Abraham’s relationship with Sarah, and her importance, because twice we are told that Abraham listened to the voice of his wife, just like we are told with Adam, which may have interfered with God’s plan. And so we should notice that Sarah is not just silent in this passage, she is not present at all.

And so Abraham takes his son and two other servants and they travel for three days until Abraham looks up and sees the mountain that God shows to Abraham, and he stops and leaves the two servants behind, telling them they are going to worship, and together the two of them walk on. We don’t know how old Isaac is in this story. Some speculate that he is still very young, others that he is a teenagers, some that he is in his 20s, some that he is 33, the same age as when Jesus died. But, Isaac is at least old enough to be able to carry wood and to ask questions, because he calls out to his father and Abraham’s response? “Here I am”, the same response that he gives to God, and Isaac asks where the lamb for the burnt offering is, and Abraham says that God will provide the lamb, and then we are once again told that the two of them walk on together. Does Abraham believe that, or is it simply something he is telling himself and Isaac? Does Isaac know what’s happening? Some have claimed that the repetition of the phrase that they walked together says that Isaac did know and was going to go along with it, and is thus a willing victim, but the text doesn’t actually say that.

They walk on together to the spot, and Abraham builds an altar and puts the wood around it, then binds Isaac, and in Judaism this story is known as the Akedah (ak-ee-duh), or the binding, and then he lays Isaac on top of the wood. Even though we know what’s going to happen because we know the end of the story, there is still the sense that we wonder not if Abraham will pass the test, but will Isaac survive?  Because Abraham takes the knife, and he raises it above Isaac, his son, his only son, whom he loves, prepared to kill him, and the knife glistens in the sun, Abraham poised to make the final plunge, and we want to yell out stop, which is what God does.  “Abraham, Abraham,” and Abraham says, “Here I am.”  And it doesn’t say it, but I imagine that Abraham drops the knife, and perhaps falls to his knees in relief, and he stops what he is doing before he looks up and sees the ram which is caught in the thicket. And Abraham takes the ram and offers it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.

Now the first easy interpretation of this story would be that this is a story saying that God does not demand or request child sacrifice, although that’s probably a stretch, and if that is the case, there might be better ways of telling that story. Now we do know that there was child sacrifice that was done, even by the Israelites, and Deuteronomy forbids the emulation of children, which is what the test calls for, meaning burning them to death, and in particular doing that as an offering to Moloch, who was a Canaanite god. But the Israelites also knew of God’s call for parents to “give” their firstborn son to God, but instead of a sacrifice, they were to make another offering, we see Mary and Joseph do this for Jesus in the temple. Then of course we have the exodus story when the first born son of all the Egyptians are killed, but the first born son of the Israelites are spared, why? Because they have sacrificed a lamb and spread the blood over the door posts and so the angel of death passes over. And so this passage is not as quite clear cut in that sense.

But, I think we also have to expand this story out and think of the ways in which we sacrifice our children all the time for worse things. We sacrifice our children on the altar or national pride or national power or national interest. It’s not the mature adults, and I use that term loosely, who make wars that end up dying in them, it’s our children. This week we recognized the 75th anniversary of the US dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, and we have probably more connection to that than any other city, other than Hiroshima, and we sacrificed the lives of the people in that city, just as the emperor of Japan did, for what we hoped would be the preservation of even more lives in the end, and argued that the ends justified the means. But it wasn’t just their lives that were sacrificed, I worked with someone whose uncle was on the crew of the Enola Gay, and when I asked him if he ever talked about it and what he said, he told me that he never knew his uncle because he became an alcoholic and killed himself because he couldn’t deal with what he had done. And there were scientists who died here in Los Alamos. And of course we sacrifice our children for even less significant causes.

The head football coach at LSU, who makes $6 million a year, said that we have to play football this year regardless, and of course his players make no money. And if you want to know the value of these players, or what their lives are worth, the University of Wisconsin and Penn State University have both said they will lose between $70-100 million if not football is played. That’s the value of these athletes’ lives. Russell Baker writing in the New York Times said, “Parents who make their children's lives hell in order to make the parents proud of themselves are a commonplace of American life.  Theater mothers push 6-year-olds to become Broadway stars. Tennis-crazed parents push them toward stardom at Wimbledon. Fathers far gone in dreams of basking in the glory which a World Series winner would bring the family often turn Little League baseball into a nightmare for sons.”  We see children sacrificed as pawns between warring adults in the midst of divorce.  We see children sacrificed on the altar of academic excellence, which definitely happens in this town, with the demand that children get the right grades so they can get into the right school, so they can get into the right profession, the profession we choose for them.  And we see them sacrificed as victims of sexual and physical violence, neglect and homelessness, child labor and poverty, and in the current arguments about immigration, let us not forget that these are children, real children, and not sacrifice them to either side of the issue.  The simple fact is, we sacrifice our children all the time in many different ways and too many different things, but we do so without a command from God, which takes us back to Abraham.

There has been lots of debate and speculation about this passage over the millennia, and there is a general consensus in the rabbinic writings that Abraham does not in fact pass this test, but instead he fails. He fails this test because he fails the ethical component of religion, which is that we are not only to love our God, but that we are to love our neighbor, just as Abraham has earlier done. Rabbi Donniel Hartman says that Abraham suffers here from what he calls God Intoxication, although we might call it moral blindness. That Abraham is so focused on the loving God part, that he completely ignores the loving other part, and so, in the end, fails at both. To help illustrate this, he tells the story of a Jewish Rabbi who is walking down the street of his town, when he hears the piercing cry of a baby coming from the home of one of his students. He rushes into the house and sees his student enraptured in prayer, and so he goes over and takes the baby into his arms, and calms her down and rocks her to sleep. When the student emerges from his prayers, he is surprised to see the rabbi there with his child, and asks what happened, and so the Rabbi explains, and the student says “I was so engrossed in my prayer that I did not hear her.” And the rabbi responds, “My dear student, if praying makes one deaf to the cries of a child, then there is something wrong with the prayer.”

In the introduction to his seminal work Fear and Trembling, which explores this story in great depth and from different angles, the philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard, says that he loved this story as a child, but that paradoxically as an adult he came to admire it more and more while at the same time understanding it less and less (III 61).  And that may be true with some of us as well, although many people want to avoid this passage, and yet I keep coming back to it again and again.  Other than the Christmas and Easter passages, I think I have preached on this passage more than any other, and I still don’t know what to say, and yet I still have so much to say.  I reject a literal reading of this passage because I reject that view of God and I reject that view of Abraham. 

Groucho Marx said that he didn’t want to belong to any organization that would have him as a member, and building off of that, the Jewish Scholar Burton Visotzky said that he doesn’t want to belong to any God that would require this. “If faith is being tested here, it’s a kind of faith I don’t want to subscribe to,” he says. And I would agree. If God was to ask me to sacrifice my daughters, I would say no, emphatically no. and yet I can see some of the ways I sacrifice my children as a pastor, in moving them to new churches, having them be pastor’s kids, which is hard, and also knowing that most PK’s either grow up to be pastors themselves or are estranged from the church, neither of which I want.

And there is something destructive that happens here. The only person who learns anything in this story is God, because, and this always upsets some people, God didn’t know what would happen. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann this test “is not a game with God; God genuinely does not know.” If God knew what would happen, or if Abraham did not have the option to say no, then it’s not truly a test. But more importantly we know that because God says, after stopping Abraham, now I know that you “fear God,” or are in “awe of God.” But, we should note that Isaac does not come down from the mountain with Abraham. Abraham comes down alone. And Isaac and Abraham are never together again either. In fact, in the story we hear next week of Abraham seeking a wife for Isaac, Isaac is found in the tent of his mother, not that of his father. And we also never have another interaction between Abraham and God. This is a violent story that breaks relationships, and we cannot overlook that or try to explain it away.

And I know that we could and maybe should talk about Jesus and the cross and sacrifice, but that’s a much different and longer story for a different day, and I want to stay with this story as it is, as it is presented. And that leaves me ultimately at a loss. Because if this is about blind faith, then I fail and I’m guessing most of you do as well. And if this is what God requires, then I too have to pass. And yet, and yet there’s still something there. I today’s gospel passage, Peter doesn’t get rebuked because he gets scared and sinks, I think he gets rebuked because he cries out to Jesus to save him, as if he didn’t believe that he would, that Jesus would allow him to sink. And in that I can find a message of faith in Abraham’s story about trust. Abraham doesn’t simply obey, but he obeys because he trusts God and he trusts in God’s promises, and while I cannot say I am 100% on that, it is one where I can grow, and we can all grow, that we don’t take leaps of safety, we take leaps of faith because we learn each and every day to trust God and to know that we don’t have to cry out to God to save us, because God is already there. Amen.