Sermon for Sunday, July 2, 2023 || Proper 8A || Genesis 22:1-14

I looked at my sermon archive, and I haven’t preached on the story of Abraham and Isaac since my first year at St. Mark’s. This story is among the strangest and most uncomfortable stories in the Bible. It’s easy to ignore this story, to skip over it, or trim it from the Bible because it doesn’t seem to fit our vision of God. But the truth of the matter is that this story is there; every Bible includes Genesis Chapter 22. So the question for us is how do we encounter this story that makes us recoil and squirm in our seats.

Well, I don’t want you to set your expectations too high about this sermon, because there’s a good chance that by the time I’m done talking this morning, you’ll still be recoiling and squirming in your seats. But I have to say – nine years ago, when I first attempted to preach about this passage, I found myself reading and re-reading it and discovering some beautiful truth in the midst of the disturbing story.

When I first preached on this passage, my kids were less than a month away from being born. I had the ultrasound picture of my son’s face next to me on the desk while writing that sermon. But I wasn’t a father yet. I was imagining fatherhood from the fretful vantage point of someone who would soon become one, whether he was ready or not.

Abraham waited most of his long life to become a father. God had promised him years and years before that many nations would spring from his descendants – so many descendants as to rival the number of stars in the sky. Abraham trusted God’s promise, but over time the promise seemed less and less likely to be fulfilled. So Abraham took matters into his own hands and had a child with Hagar, a woman enslaved by Abraham’s wife Sarah. Finally, Abraham had offspring of his own –Ishmael – a son to love, an heir! A decade or so went by and God remembered Sarah and she too bore a son, Isaac, in her old age. Sarah did not want Ishmael to inherit along with Isaac, so she persuaded Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away.

And so Abraham lost his first child – not to death or sacrifice – but to the petty jealousy of an imagination stunted by scarcity. Now, Isaac, a boy freshly weaned, is the only child left to him. More years go by, enough years for Isaac to grow big enough to carry a large bundle of wood on his back. In fact, it was probably about as many years as have gone by since the last time I preached on this passage. My children will turn nine soon. And reading this story of Abraham and Isaac from the less fretful vantage point of a seasoned parent, albeit one who is still learning to be a father, I am amazed that my attraction to this story remains. I still find it equal parts beautiful and disturbing.

Two lessons from the ancient rabbis help me frame my understanding of this story. One is a midrash – that’s a prayerful extrapolation – of the opening conversation between God and Abraham: “[God] said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” [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.”

The midrash goes like this:

“[God] said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” [God] said, “Take your son…”
Abraham interrupts: “I have two sons.”
God clarifies: “The son you love.”
Abraham says, “I love both my sons.”
God clarifies again: “Your son Isaac.”

This midrash helps me enter the mind and heart of Abraham, who still loves the son he lost to jealousy, as well as the son who would fulfill God’s promise of descendents. Abraham’s love for his children is at odds with his desire to be faithful to God. “Wait,” Abraham might have said, “You want me to kill the child who hasn’t had a chance to fulfill your promise yet! That doesn’t make any sense!”

And this is where the second lesson from the rabbis comes in. We Christians have a tendency to name this story, imprecisely, the “sacrifice of Isaac.” Over history, however, Jewish scholars consistently call this story the “binding of Isaac.” In the end, he’s not sacrificed – that’s the point these scholars emphasize. Isaac allows himself to be bound – remember, he’s old enough to carry wood on his back, so he could run away from an old man with a rope if he wanted to. But Isaac allows himself to be bound, which shows that Isaac has the same faith in Abraham as Abraham has in God. 

So in this story, we have three examples of extreme faithfulness: God’s faithfulness in providing the ram for the sacrifice; Abraham’s faithfulness in his willingness to sacrifice that which is most precious to him; and Isaac’s faithfulness in believing his father’s hope that God will, indeed, do some providing. Of course, we cannot minimize the grisly nature of the test God sets before Abraham. Trauma-inducing events should never be set before people as a demand to prove faith, especially in the context of the church’s witness. 

But even as we wrestle with this traumatic story, we can remember its place in the wider tale the book of Genesis is telling. The story of Abraham and his family is a story of people awakening to the reality of a new understanding of God. Abraham and Sarah made the revolutionary step of recognizing one, singular God, a God who provides wherever they happen to be, an omnipresent God who isn’t tied to a particular place or geographical feature. They also recognized that God, the True God, did not demand human sacrifice. There were other religions in their region that practiced the horrible ritual of burning their own children alive to satisfy their gods. But when God asks Abraham to do the same, God then stops the sacrifice from happening. God provides the ram as a lesson for Abraham and all his descendants that God does not desire ritualized murder. Over the breadth of his story, Abraham learns that God is One, that God is everywhere, and that God desires life, the fullness of life, not ritualized death.

In Christian interpretation, this story is often paired with Jesus’ crucifixion. God did not withhold even God’s own child, just as Abraham did not withhold his son Isaac. This demonstrates again God’s extreme faithfulness to God’s creation, but it does not turn God into one of those bloodthirsty little-g gods who desire human sacrifice. God did not need Jesus to die to balance some sort of cosmic blood debt, no matter some of the more popular explanations of what we call the ‘atonement.’ Rather, Jesus is like Isaac. Jesus chose not to run away from his impending death, just like Isaac chose to be bound. Jesus knew that running away would be an abandonment of his mission, an abandonment of all those oppressed people with whom he stood in solidarity. So Jesus stayed the course and suffered death on the cross because of his extreme faithfulness to his mission. And because God is in the business of keeping all of God’s promises, Jesus rose again on the third day and continues to be in relationship with us now and in the life to come.

We serve One God, who is everywhere, and who yearns for us to embrace the abundant life that God’s grace provides. As we wrestle with stories like the binding of Isaac, I pray that we may hear God call to us, this God who loves us as God’s own children. And we may respond faithfully as Abraham did, saying, “Here I am.”

---

Photo by Thomas Jarrand on Unsplash.