Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

June 29, 2008

 

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac that we heard from the book of Genesis has inspired theologians, philosophers, painters and novelists throughout the centuries.  Perhaps you saw the Tiepolo exhibition several years ago at the Metropolitan museum.  A large painting shows Abraham with his arm flung back and a knife in his hand.  Isaac is lying on the altar with his neck exposed, and a fiery angel is restraining Abraham’s arm just at the point at which Abraham is about to plunge the knife into the body of his son.  The story had begun over thirty years before, when Abraham was called out of the city of Ur, which is now known as Baghdad.  He arrives in Palestine with his wife Sarah, and undergoes a series of adventures, including a brief sojourn in Egypt.  The couple, however, remains childless.  After ten years Abraham gives up hope and begets a child by his wife’s Egyptian maid, Hagar.  They name the child Ishmael.  God reappears to Abraham, and assures him that Sarah will have a child of her own.  Hagar and Ishmael are driven away into the wilderness, and twenty-five years after leaving Ur, Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah.  We rejoin their story when Isaac is a small boy, and God asks Abraham to sacrifice him on a mountaintop.

 

Such child sacrifice was not unusual in the time of Abraham.  It was frequently resorted to in Semitic pagan religions, and the Bible itself refers to such practices as being particularly condemned by God.  When a new city was founded, children were sacrificed on the foundations.  When a nation faced great danger from enemies or famine, children were sacrificed in the temple.  If the danger was particularly dire, it could only be averted by the sacrifice of the king’s son himself.   The Old Testament story has been interpreted in many ways throughout history.  The Muslims dispute the identity of the child who was taken up the mountain.  They believe that the child to be sacrificed was Ishmael – Abraham’s half-Egyptian first-born son.  Christians interpret the incident as prefiguring the story of Christ.  Abraham stands for God, who offered his only Son on the cross of Calvary.   The philosopher Keirkegaard used it to illustrate his point that religion and morality is not the same thing.  What is moral about a God who requires you to sacrifice your only son in a brutal act on a mountaintop?

What are we to make of this strange, frightening and yet moving story?  Here are a few contemporary ways in which we can find a way to make this three thousand year old tale our own.  First of all, the story is about obedience.  However extreme, unlikely, or impossible it may seem, Abraham was prepared to obey God’s clear command.  The same must go for us.  I am not convinced that this is the main lesson of the story – people have done some very offensive and bigoted things believing that they heard God’s voice and simply acted upon it.  Those who claimed to hear God’s clear call perpetrated terrible massacres during the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Their claim needs to be weighed against other important concerns.  Secondly, the story tells us that all good things are God’s gifts.  They are not ours by right.  Abraham was not commanded to sacrifice something that belonged to him alone.  He was asked to give back to God what God had given to him.  Every good thing we have comes ultimately from God  - our possessions, our health, our relationships, our freedoms, our loves and our passions.  We are reminded today that God may ask us at any time to give these things back to him, the Giver of all good things.  Thirdly, the story tells us that God provides what we need when we most need it.  The child was not sacrificed.  At the very last moment, the second before the blow was struck, the ram appeared in the thicket.  Sometimes God rescues us out of a predicament only at the very last and most terrifying moment when we are convinced that all is about to be lost. 

 

But here is the most important point.  The story is about sacrifice.  There is no getting around it.  It is for this reason that obedience, our gifts from God and God’s provision for our needs have to be set against the context of God’s supreme love.  God is deadly serious in what he asks of us.  He asks us to take up our cross and follow him to Calvary.  But when he has marched us up that horrible hill, he reveals to us that the sacrifice has already taken place.   We must be willing to give up everything to him.    Our shadow side is fearful, and refuses to risk everything on God’s promise to spare us.  Perfect love casts out that fear.  Abraham and Christ show us that all things shall be given to those who are willing to give everything away. 

 

NJM