June 26, 2011

Proper 8: Genesis 22:1-14

Much as I would like to focus this sermon on the Gospel reading with its call to hospitality and service, that would be to ignore – as one metaphorically confused friend once put it – the elephant on the table.  The arresting and disturbing story of Abraham and Isaac refuses to be sidelined, clamoring at us with its larger than life and darker than death storyline.  An abusive father, a vulnerable son, an absent mother, and a God who orchestrates horrors – how are we to make theological or emotional sense of this?  Where can we find meaning in the middle of this mess?

One essential part of the key to unlocking the story lies in understanding the social milieu in which it was originally told.  This was not a society where social workers stood ready to protect the rights of the child, but one in which child sacrifice was well known, and to some extent accepted as part of the religious scene.  The concept of sacrificing a child to achieve a ‘greater good’ such as divine favor would not have been alien to those who first heard this tale.  They may have been more moved by the fact that Abraham was giving up his only hope at a legitimate line of descendants than by the cruelty to Isaac.  The shock of this story originally lay in its ending rather than its beginning – in the fact that the sacrifice was stopped rather than in the fact that it was demanded in the first place.

For us hearing the story today the shock is in its opening – that God could demand such a sacrifice of Abraham, and hold Isaac’s life as worth nothing compared to the proof of Abraham’s faith.  Some scholars have got around their theological discomfort with this picture of God – and also around the problem of the discrepancy between what God asks for at the beginning and the end of the tale – by suggesting that we are actually hearing the voices of two different gods.  There is some textual support for this in that the Hebrew word used for God in the early verses is ‘Elohim’ while it is ‘Yahweh’ who speaks at the end.  However we usually accept these different ways of naming the same divinity so it may be pushing the text to read it as two different divine voices.

What we can perhaps read in the text with more scholarly validity is that we are hearing two different understandings of God and of the divine relationship with humanity.  In fact one of the most helpful ways for contemporary Christians to read the story may be as a parable of a profound change in our human religious understanding.  Not, let me hasten to add, a change from a Jewish to a Christian view, which would obviously be wildly anachronistic, but a change within Judaism itself: a shift away from identification with the religious practices of the times to a truer understanding of the nature and requirements of the God of Israel.

So we move in these few verses from an understanding of God as one who demands human sacrifice as proof of devotion to an understanding of God as the one who stays the knife from killing.  This is how the theologian Gil Baillie puts it in his book Violence Unveiled:

What we must try to see in the story of Abraham’s non-sacrifice of Isaac is that Abraham’s faith consisted not of almost doing what he didn’t do, but of not doing what he almost did, and not doing it in fidelity to the God in whose name his contemporaries thought it should be done.

In other words, the evidence of Abraham’s faith is not that he was willing to sacrifice his son but that he was able to understand that this was not what God wanted him to do.  His faith allowed him to take the counter-cultural step of moving away from child sacrifice to a new understanding of the divine-human relationship.  A relationship founded not on appeasement and bloodshed but on compassionate love and a passion for justice.

This new relationship is one which reaches its fullest expression on the cross.  In this act of divine self-giving we see the opposite of a God who demands that his followers reveal their devotion in bloodshed and the sacrifice of what is dearest to their hearts.  Instead we see a God who opens himself to vulnerability and finitude, who takes death into the heart of the divine being, out of love for erring vulnerable humanity.  A God who does not consider any human life to be expendable and puts particular value on the most vulnerable, especially children.

It is a shame, therefore, that the old culturally specific understanding of God that we find at the beginning of the Abraham and Isaac story has been allowed to influence the way that the meaning of the cross has been interpreted.  God has been portrayed as playing the part of Abraham – offering his Son to be killed and indeed completing the act because there was no alternative available.  But this is a theologically unacceptable reading.  It does not make sense to interpret God’s action through the lens of a religious practice that the same God has already revealed to be profoundly wrong.  It makes no sense to honor Abraham for not killing his son while honoring God for doing exactly that.

So much of our theology seems to take it for granted that God sent his Son to be killed.  But this is a double misinterpretation.  Firstly, the Father did not send the Son – the Son, an equal person of the Trinity chose the vulnerability of the incarnation.  Secondly, the crucifixion was not God’s doing.  It was the act of people who still did not understand that violence was against the nature of God: the act of people who had learned that killing their children in the name of religion was an abomination, but had not yet learned that killing their enemies in that name was also a blasphemy against the very nature of God.

Before we get too judgmental or, worse, into anti-Semitism, let us consider where we are ourselves with another 2,000 years of experience of the nature of God under our belts.  None of us who are in our right minds would dream of sacrificing our children to prove our faith, but very many of us would allow children in the third world to sacrifice their childhoods in the sweatshops that provide our cheap clothes.  Most of us would speak out strongly against any military action or aggression towards those who disagree with us on matters of faith, but we are still able to turn a blind eye towards practices of torture that we believe protect our own security.  We still have a long way to come in living out our understanding that God is to be seen in the offering of a cup of water to a thirsty child.  We still revert back to defensive protection of our own needs rather than the vulnerability of love that we see on the cross.  It is taking us a long, long time to learn who God truly is, and who God calls us to be.

Abraham did not kill Isaac.  God did not kill his Son.  These are both theologically important statements that we need to allow to shape our religious understanding – and our religious actions.  We still live in a world defined by violence but, like Abraham, we need to make a counter-cultural choice for life rather than death.  We, like Abraham, need to hear the voice of a God who says no to killing and who calls us to service to the vulnerable and oppressed.  We, like Abraham, need to show the people around us that there is another way to live, defined not by fear and appeasement but by love.  And at this table where we meet Christ again under the forms of bread and wine we are given the grace to live by this love, known in Abraham, in Jesus, and, we pray, through us.  Amen.