How Can I Believe In This God?

Genesis 22:1-14

June 29, 2008, Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Our reading today from Genesis is probably one of the most well known, one of the most interpreted, and definitely the most disturbing passage in the whole of the Bible. So much so that I realized I had not preached on it, as far as I can tell, in my 27 years of ministry. So, much to my dismay, I decided it was time for me to deal with it.

One of the things that plays up the difficulty of this story is that it has its own name. In scholarly circles it is known as The Akedah, meaning the binding, for the binding of Isaac. No other story in the Bible has a name for it like the Akedah.

What makes the Akedah so difficult is that it portrays God and Abraham in such an unfavorable light. God looks almost demonic in asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, who, by the way, had been given to Abraham and Sarah by God; the son that God told Abraham would be the gateway to descendents as numerous as the stars. It paints Abraham in an unfavorable light in that Abraham is seen almost as an old man who had lost his marbles, quite literally. This is a story that I dearly would love to have heard in its original form, before it went through the oral tradition and then was written down. I have a hunch it would make more sense than it does now.

So how do we make sense of the Akedah now, or do we just say it is an aberration in the Bible – so that I really should not be talking about it today, or is there a message for us today in it?

In his book Fear and Trembling (1843), one of the most well known attempts to understand this passage, the Danish writer Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) writes an entire book on this story. Kierkegaard recalls how he heard this Bible story as a child, and how the older he got the more his admiration and enthusiasm for the story grew, while the less and less he understood it. Kierkegaard looks at this story from Abraham's point of view, and shudders as he contemplates how Abraham might have thought, felt, and acted. He imagines four different scenarios.

In his first version Isaac lunges at Abraham's legs and begs for his life. When he looks at his father Abraham's face, his "gaze was wild, his whole being was sheer terror." Abraham rebukes Isaac and screams, "Do you think it is God's command? No it is my desire." Abraham then prays softly, "Lord God in heaven, I thank you; it is better that he believes me a monster than that he should lose faith in you." Here Abraham "protects" God by blaming himself for the atrocious command. At least this way, he reasons, Isaac won't construe God as a monster.

In version number 2 Abraham and Isaac journey in total silence. At Moriah Abraham builds the altar and wields the knife, then at the last minute God provides a ram in Isaac's place. In fact, this is how the Genesis narrative unfolds. But Kierkegaard adds to the story by imagining the consequences. Abraham obeyed and Isaac was saved, but Abraham was deeply traumatized and psychologically scarred for the remainder of his life. "He could not forget that God had ordered him to do this. . . . His eyes were darkened and he saw joy no more." In this scenario we wonder about the lifelong consequences to Abraham's faith, not to mention his very humanity. In his act of faith did he lose his faith? It is interesting to note that there is no more dialogue between God and Abraham in the Bible after this.

In the 3rd scenario Kierkegaard highlights Abraham's tragic regret, agony and incomprehension at having committed an unthinkable murder. What could he have been thinking to kill his own son? Abraham "threw himself down on his face, he prayed to God to forgive him his sin, that he had been willing to sacrifice Isaac, that the father had forgotten his duty to his son." Surely it is the universal, ethical duty for parents to love their children and not to murder them?! Kierkegaard imagines Abraham concluding that he was wrong to believe that God had told him to murder Isaac. How could he have ever imagined that he had heard such a command from God?

Kierkegaard’s 4th scenario is very different. In this rendition, Abraham suffers a failure of nerve, an explicit act of disobedience, or conversely a return to his senses and sensibility. In this imagined scenario, Abraham believes the command of God but he fails to act. He cannot bring himself to slay Isaac, and as a consequence Isaac loses his faith. "Not a word of this is ever said in the world, and Isaac never talked to anyone about what he had seen, and Abraham did not suspect that anyone had seen."

Now you see why I would love to have heard the original version of the story. This is a story that in many ways defies any clear-cut interpretation. And when anyone tries to give it one they are not dealing with all the questions that are inherent in the story. Some of the questions are: does God really test us? We say Lord do not put us to the test in the Lord’s prayer, do we believe that God does? Didn’t Abraham have two sons? Yet in this story he acts as if Isaac was his only son. Earlier in Genesis Abraham argued with God for saving Sodom and Gomorrah – why would he not argue for the life of his own son – the one God had given him? Could it be possible that God values child sacrifice, or blood sacrifice? And finally, is it okay to kill people if God tells you to do it, or in the name of God, or for the glory of God? Another question is where is Sarah in this story? How does she feel about what is happening – or does she even know about it before or after the fact? All of these questions are in this story and cry out for answers. Is it any wonder that in the early days of the church there were those that said the God of the Old Testament is a different God than the New Testament? They did not include the Old Testament in their Bible.

One of things we have to keep in mind is the context of the story in terms of history. In many ancient religions the way to appease the Gods was to give the gods something you do not wish to part with. Child sacrifice was a reality among ancient religions. We know this because in Leviticus 18:21 God tells Moses “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God.” It is quite possible, and indeed many scholars think that this passage was a sign of God’s disfavor with child sacrifice. Now some may say, “Well, of course God does not favor it,” but remember we live in a different day and with different values. What I find interesting is that while possibly condemning child sacrifice the Akedah is seen by some to contribute to child abuse.

Psychoanalyst Alice Miller claims that Genesis 22 may have contributed to an atmosphere that makes it possible to justify the abuse of children. She grounds her reflections on some thirty artistic representations of this story. In two of Rembrandt’s paintings, for example, Abraham faces the heavens rather than Isaac, as if in blind obedience to God and oblivious to what he is about to do to his son. His hands cover Isaac’s face, preventing him from seeing or crying out. Not only is Isaac silenced, she says (not actually true), one sees only his torso; his personal features are obscured. Isaac “has been turned into an object. He has been dehumanized by being made a sacrifice; he no longer has a right to ask questions and will scarcely even be able to articulate them to himself, for there is no room in him for anything besides fear.” There is the sense that children are property that we can use in our worship of God. They become objects of appeasement for whoever needs to be appeased, God or ourselves. Think about how people say “children are to be seen and not heard.” They are testaments to our ability to procreate, and to extending our family line in history, and thus we have the job of molding them. I recall a supposed joke I heard once, “Why did Abraham almost sacrifice Isaac when he was 12? Because if he waited till he was thirteen it would not have been a sacrifice.” (If you don’t get it – good for you, but think of teenagers.) But then maybe this is the beginning of a possible explanation of what this story can mean for us today.

If we think of what Isaac meant to Sarah and Abraham – he was the most important thing in their lives – he was the apple of their eye. In a sermon on this passage Sarah Buteux writes:

Phyllis Trible, a professor at Union Seminary, whose name may be familiar to those of you who watched the PBS program about Genesis with Bill Moyers, says that the literary key to this text is found in the words, “Take your son, take your only son whom you love, Isaac,” for these words, in a story that is known for its sparseness, belabor just how precious Isaac is to Abraham.

There is a Jewish Midrash, or interpretation, that touches on this as well, and also serves to explain why Isaac is referred to as an “only son.” …In the Midrash, this sentence that Trible points to, is actually seen as one side of a conversation between God and Abraham. So the line, "Take your son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac..." when coupled with Abraham's response to Yahweh sounds something more like:

God: Abraham, take your son...

Abraham: Which son?

Your only son.

I have two sons.

The one whom you love.

But Yahweh I love both of my sons

Isaac!!!

Oh, I was afraid you meant that one.”

Jewish scholars write that the Akedah is about turning our children into idols. We must break our idolization of them; kill that idolization we have of them. But the difficulty is that interpretation is about us, it is not about Isaac, and yet in the Akedah Isaac is the one who is made to suffer. Some will say that Abraham suffered too, and yes you’d be right, but not to the extent that Isaac suffered. But if this is about idolizing our children, then it also challenges us to consider all the things we put before God. It is about wrongly placing more trust in the gift than the giver. In pushing Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and then stopping him God seems to be telling Abraham, as Buteux writes, “God reminds him that his son is a gift, but the future is not in Isaac’s hands. It is in God’s hands.” We cannot trust things we love here on earth for our sense of wellbeing. All of our earthly treasures will be consumed by moths and rust, whereas God, the one who gives, will still be. That is what I take from this story as imperfect as it is. I don’t know if it is the reason it is in the Bible, but it works for me, given the fact that this story is so horrible to even comprehend. I just wish I could have heard the original story, that I could have been first in the line in this game of “gossip” and not at the end.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters