The Binding of Isaac

A sermon for June 28, 2020 by Jamie Howison on Genesis 22:1-14

“After these things God tested Abraham.” That’s how this story—this oh-so-difficult story—begins. As we move through these stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel this summer we will often bump up against things that are odd and unsettling, but this one pushes us the hardest of all. We do well to recall Karl Barth’s insistence that the Bible holds what he called “a strange, new world”—that we should not expect the biblical landscape to conform narrowly to ours—but is that enough?

“God said, ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, 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.’”

Abraham, sacrifice your beloved son Isaac, the child of unlikely promise born to you and Sarah in your old age—the one through whom your heirs were to be born. Kill him as a burnt offering to me.

Why, we ask, would God possibly ask this of anyone? Is this true to the character of God? Or to those who are indifferent or even hostile to faith, the reaction is more like, “if that’s the God in whom you believe, I want none of it.”

Well, some people might too neatly reply, “that’s the God of the Old Testament, and we’re a New Testament, Gospel people.” Yes, surely we are a Gospel people, but there is only one God, and that God is gradually revealed and wrestled with for a couple of thousand years before the birth of Jesus, and these Hebrew scriptures are the only scriptures Jesus knew. Jesus knew this story.

So first let’s explore some of the ways in which Judaism has thought about this story. Where the Christian tradition has generally called this story “the testing of Abraham”, the Jewish tradition has called it the Akedah, or “the binding of Isaac.” That alone is significant, I think, as it suggests that the camera lens should be tightly focused on that moment when Abraham has bound his son Isaac and set him on top of the wood. The knife is raised… “and the Lord’s messenger called out to him from the heavens.” Abraham, Abraham, stop! You’ve proved that you fear—revere, obey—God. This is all that matters!

The Jewish biblical scholar and translator Robert Alter suggests that this is the moment that deeply connects this story to the one from the previous chapter, in which the slave woman Hagar is forced to leave the camp of Abraham and Sarah, taking with her Ishmael, the son she’d born with Abraham. The phrase, and the Lord’s messenger called out to him from the heavens, is, Alter reflects,

[The phrase is] nearly identical with the calling-out to Hagar in 21:17. In fact, a whole configuration of parallels between the two stories is invoked. Each of Abraham’s sons is threatened with death in the wilderness, one in the presence of his mother, the other in the presence of (and by the hand) of his father. In each case the angel intervenes at the critical moment, referring to the son fondly as na’ar, ‘lad’. At the center of the story, Abraham’s hand holds the knife, Hagar is enjoined to ‘hold her hand’ on the lad. In the end, each of the sons is promised to become the progenitor of a great people, the threat to Abraham’s continuity having been averted.

This might suggest that part of what is happening in the “binding of Isaac” is almost something of a response to the coldness with which Abraham had allowed Hagar and Ishmael to be cast out; that the one story completes and complements the other.

The scholar and translator Everett Fox, on the other hand, sees this story as being something of a culminating point in the life of Abraham, bringing full circle what had begun when Abraham and Sarah are first introduced in Genesis 12, with the command from God to, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Fox comments, “There he had been asked to give up the past (his father); here, the future (his son). Between the two events lies Abraham’s active life as a man of God, ancestor, and intercessor. After this God will never speak with him again.”

Did you hear that? “After this God will never speak with Abraham again.” And that’s true, for while Abraham will not die for another two and a half chapters in Genesis, God never again speaks with him. Or is that Abraham never again speaks with God? Again, in the rabbinical tradition there is a strand that says Abraham can never quite bear to again speak with God, given the binding of Isaac. There’s another strand that says Sarah—who dies quite soon after this story—dies of grief over the fact that Abraham was prepared to even consider killing Isaac.

Now the rabbis in that tradition are not saying that it was fact that Abraham was too hurt to again speak with God or that Sarah died of a broken heart. No, rather this is an interpretive tradition that loves the stories so much that it will return to them again and again and read them with great imagination—imagine what it would have been like to be Sarah or Abraham… imagine the emotions of these very human characters. Identify with them, empathize with them, enter the biblical stories with them… and what do you now know about yourself and your God?

And here’s something further from Everett Fox, that speaks to the knowledge of what it means to be human in this world created by God. The story, he writes,

The story is also the paradigmatic narrative of the entire book. The Patriarch passes the test, and we know that the fulfillment of the divine promise is assured. Yet there is an ominous note: love, which occurs here by name for the first time, leads almost to heartbreak. So it will be for the rest of Genesis.

“Love… leads almost to heartbreak. So it will be for the rest of Genesis.” So it is through all of the scriptures—witness Mary’s heartbreak over Jesus’ death, or Jesus’ own agony over pouring out his own love into a people who will turn on him—and so it is for us. Anytime any one of us chooses to love, we are risking heartbreak. That’s just true.

But the question remains: why would God lay such a heavy burden across the shoulders of Abraham? Take your beloved son and kill him as an offering to me. Why?

In the religious world in which these stories are set, the sacrifice of children to the gods was not unknown. We think of it as an appalling thing, and so we should. Abraham might have seen it as a horrific thing, but he was really just getting to know God. These are ancient stories from near the beginning of God’s revelation—God’s gradual unveiling—and God was meeting these most ancient forebears of ours in the language and cultural forms which they understood. They understood animal sacrifice and they even knew of child sacrifice. The deepest test for Abraham was to even consider doing that to Isaac, the consolation is that he doesn’t have to go through with it. The ram is provided, the story says, and “Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide.’”

There is a long tradition that suggests this story marks the definitive rejection of child sacrifice for what was to become the people of Israel, and there may well be truth in that. In both Leviticus and Deuteronomy such sacrifice is specifically prohibited; it “profanes the name of your God”, it says in Leviticus 18:21.

Of course animal sacrifice continues, and it continues right into the time of Jesus. Yet hundreds of years before Jesus prophets such as Isaiah had recognized that even animal sacrifice is not something that God wants or in any way needs, but rather it is something God has allowed or provided as the thing that people can actually do as a symbolic way of expressing their fidelity; something that made sense in the cultural world of that day, that part of the world. In the end, these prophets teach, what God wants is not blood but us; our love, our faithfulness, our integrity, our servanthood, one to another. As Micah famously wrote, what God requires is that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God.

Finally, though, a pressing question does remain. If God tested Abraham, does God test us? I mean, we like Abraham’s conclusion that God provides and we want to lean hard into that. But testing? And of the agonizing sort faced by Abraham?

Writing a millennium after the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac began to be set down in written form, St Paul takes up the question in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians. Note that Paul is standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before him, building on centuries and centuries of God’s ongoing revelation to the prophets, the psalmists, and others, and standing firmly within God’s defining revelation in Christ Jesus. And so Paul writes to that struggling, contentious and troubled little church community in Corinth, “God is faithful, and God will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:13) It would seem that in Paul’s view God does test us or allow us to be tested, and at the very same time “God provides”—there’s Abraham’s key insight again—God provides what we most need to actually grow through whatever we face. And you do know that this provision often comes through one another; through the support and kindness and servanthood that Christian discipleship insists we offer one to another. We bear one another’s burdens, and that’s God’s provision.

I do know something of that, absolutely. Not that that makes this story any easier, any less troubling. I am glad for the privilege to wrestle in stories such as this, informed by the explorations of the rabbinical tradition and standing St Paul at my side. I am glad to have to wrestle in them as they come up again and again in the lectionary. And in the end I do know that I can trust the character of our God.