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This is a blog that covered three years of the Revised Common Lectionary. Go ahead and search for a topic or scripture. I pray it helps in your experience with the relentless return of the Sabbath.

I Draw the Line at Human Sacrifice 

9/10/2013

5 Comments

 
Genesis 21:1-3; 22:1-14

The Birth of Isaac - The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him.

The Command to Sacrifice Isaac - After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He 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.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together.

 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’
PictureA coloring page - Really???
Let me put my cards on the table - I've been preaching weekly for 8 years and I've never preached this text. Another card I've got is - I've been pastoring for 20 years and I have had dozens of conversations about this text with folks. This text is absurd at best; it's disturbing and unconscionable at worst. What kind of God tests someone by asking for a human father to sacrifice his only son? What kind of horrific father was Abraham anyway? And Isaac? What became of him after this psychologically damaging event in his life? And don't get me started about Sarah. Where was she?

We're still reading, interpreting and commenting on this text as if the literal story must teach us a moral lesson. We're still reading, interpreting and commenting on this text as if the presenting story teaches us something about God, about humans, about family values.

The only sermons I've ever heard about this text leave us with the obvious Christian theological lesson - Abraham sacrificing Isaac is a foretelling of God sacrificing Jesus. I can't preach it this way for two reasons. First, I typically honor the Hebrew scriptures by keeping them true to themselves without inserting the Christian scriptures and their meaning. Second, I have a problem with violent atonement. The idea that God would require a human sacrifice is - foul.

When Abraham had the thought that God wanted him to sacrifice his son, why didn't he recognize it as foul? And when Sarah heard about it, why didn't she tell someone that her husband had gone mad. And then why didn't she pack her and Isaac's bags and run away? When Isaac realized his dad was going to do him harm, why didn't he overpower his father and since he didn't, can we assume that he'd been abused by his father for so long that he had lost his voice?

If you're still reading - you may be quite irritated by my lack of respect to the patriarch. I'm asking these questions because I find them to be lacking in the discussion. Instead of shaking our head in disgust and picking at the text in the critical manner we usually do, we approach the text with our preconceived notions. We have already decided that God is good and it taints our ability to see this text for what it is. Abraham is our patriarch; he too must have been a faithful person (after all Hebrews 11 says so). As a result, we overlook reasonable perspectives of this hideous story. We have already accepted that women and children have no say and so we perpetuate the hidden, abused, ignored, discarded voices in the scriptures.

When you read this story, whose voice are you listening to?

5 Comments
Carole
9/14/2013 03:10:54 am

I remember as a child talking to my grandmother about just what you wrote there. Her response was that God was testing Abraham . . . and I remember my 8 yr old heart burning with hurt at the whole story. I did ask God about this and I didn't understand at all. Nonetheless, I was taken to church activities and continued my relationship with God. I put this on the back burner like I have many things that i don't understand about God. It was not until I was in my mid 20s when I picked up my uncle's bible and read his note in the margin "God spared Abraham the pain of doing this but He did not spare Himself as He freely gave His own Son in payment for our sins. God was determined to have a covenant with Abraham so what does He do? He walks the covenant with Himself! So goes the Christian life - anything that God wants to do, we need to get out of the way and allow Him to do. Abraham's story is a picture of future events. Blood is required for sin. It should hurt. My reaction as a child was accurate. We should be violently upset! Ultimate lesson: there is nothing God won't do to be in relationship with His creation.

Reply
Jim
6/26/2014 03:49:41 am

First, God did not allow Isaac to die, nor does God expect Isaac to die. Second, Abraham was a sacrifice from the beginning: a worshipper of the Moon in a religion that routinely sacrificed young men to keep the seasons going, sacrificing Sarai to Pharaoh to save his own neck (it was God who saved Sarai), and at the behest of Sarai, sacrificing his then "only son" to keep Sarai happy. So sacrifice was in his blood.
Anyway you slice it it was already in Abraham's mind that sacrifice would be possibly necessary to insure the future. Do we not even in this day see "sacrifice" as necessary for great gain? Else why do we so casually insist that "freedom isn't free" with the implication that someone must die for us that we may be free?
God capitalizes on the bent toward sacrifice. This brings to the fore other notions that eventually supersede that of human sacrifice: the sneaking notion that God will provide some other way of dealing with this, the foggy hope that God is powerful enough and will raise the dead, the loving relationship between father and son implied in Abraham's attentiveness to Isaac equal to that of his attentiveness to God, which attentiveness makes him ready to hear the reprieve even with an uplifted knife-brandishing hand.
God is invested in the outcome also. Has the Lord found a suitable companion upon which can be shouldered the promise of blessing to the world? If Abraham loses, God loses. Both may recover, but the delay would change the trajectory of blessing through time.
Perhaps Abraham, because of his upbringing, still wonders whether this God is one who demands appeasement after all. God answers that with a resounding, "Do not harm the child!"

Reply
Beth
6/26/2014 07:02:29 am

Thanks for reading Jim. Your thoughts are wonderfully counter cultural in that if the other cultures were used to sacrifice in this way, God draws the line in opposition to it. God is showing Godself different than what the culture thought at the time.

Reply
Jim
6/26/2014 08:11:54 am

Thanks. I think it is counter-cultural for us, too. It says our sacrifices are not necessary to procure a future with God. God initiates the promise and goes all in to fulfill it. If this has any implications for the cross of Jesus it is not in the sacrifice of human beings. Remember God spared Isaac.
But when God says, "I have sworn by myself" we get a glimpse of God entering in our affairs with the divine self, not exempting self from the insults and aggression wreaked on humanity by those who are not attentive as Abraham, who plunge in the knife without pause. Nor does God retaliate, but turns even human evil on its head and offers forgiveness and power to live into the promise God made Abraham. It is not violence from God that atones us, but with God receiving human violence, human violence itself discovered its futility, just as Abraham's belief system did. God in both cases actively challenged human violent methodology.

Beth
6/27/2014 03:11:06 am

Yes! I'm thinking of the book non-violent atonement. This passage in provides a great opportunity to teach violent atonement as something that God didn't want/ didn't need. I think bringing in the cross and the theology of sacrifice at a time other than Holy Week would be a great gift to your congregation!

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