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"The Akedah"
Jim Hamilton
June 29, 2008
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
In the hundredth year of Abraham’s life, against all
odds, odds enough to make Sarah laugh at God, Sarah and Abraham
had a son. Sarah turned her laughter of disbelief into laughter
of joy, she said:
God has blessed me with laughter
And all who get the news will laugh at me!
Whoever would have suggested to Abraham
That Sarah would one day nurse a baby!
Yet here I am! I’ve given the old man a son!
Now the old man, Abraham, operated under some odd, some might
say (including me) questionable, ethics through the stories
preceding this one. For example, whenever he went traveling
he would claim that his wife was his sister, marry her to royalty
(she was apparently irresistibly attractive) and then when they
found out that they had married someone else’s wife would
give him gifts to persuade them both to leave quietly without
sharing the embarrassing news with others. Another example,
he had a son named Ishmael with his wife’s Egyptian servant,
Hagar, whom he obviously also loved, but then turned them both
out into the wilderness to die, not once but twice, at the request
of a jealous Sarah.
I think it is because of, and not in spite of, these faults
that I am fond of Abraham. God has a way of taking the tentative,
the timid, the boorish, the outcasts and transforming them into
great people, or in this case a great nation.
Now, Abraham was also a fair man. He looked after his nephew
Lot, saving him both from God’s wrath and a conquering
army. He was greatly respected by all the rulers and nobility
in the lands where he lived. Sarah and Abraham were generous
with strangers, which was lucky because God sometimes stopped
by for lunch. In many ways, Sarah and Abraham fit the perfect
mold for the sort of person God works through, flawed…but
promising.
I hope that I can aspire to be seen by God in the same way,
flawed…but promising.
Yet, there is nothing in Abraham’s character, no sin
great enough, for me to easily accept the story from today’s
Torah reading. It starts by saying that God tested Abraham.
Now remember, this is placed chronologically after the covenant
that God made with Abraham. He was promised an heir in the original
covenant. Now Abraham has that son, that miracle heir. A boy
he named laughter, Isaac. Abraham is enjoying the beginning
of a covenant with God. Then there is this hiccup, this terrible
request from God. Is God potentially renegotiating this covenantal
relationship? Is that possible? Isn’t that unfair?
This story causes heated debate among biblical scholars. It
is in our nature to dismiss it away somehow, pass right over
it without inspection or outright contest its validity because
it challenges us with a God that seems capricious, inconstant,
and volatile. I was given a choice to not even have it as one
of our readings for today. It is not a story easily preached
on. I will take ownership for this myself; it hurts me to hear
this story about my God asking a father to turn a knife on his
son to test him. How can a God of violence that commands an
old man to cut and burn his only son on an altar be the same
God as our loving Jesus?
We have also been taught to see the connection; Jesus is the
ram in the thicket, the substitution. Or, Jesus is the boy,
blameless and carrying the wood that will eventually be used
to kill him. But, this is a dangerous way of framing the story.
First of all, this story is singularly important for two other
faith traditions, without the atonement theology of Jesus to
complete its power. I find that to be a challenge of sorts,
for Christians to grapple with the import of this story without
quickly presuming it is only foreshadowing of the Christ event.
Second, correlating it to a passage in the “more palatable”
New Testament only transplants this sadistic angry sky god image
into the story of redemption instead of addressing the problems
implicit in this particular story. Third, it is important to
see that the creators of the New Testament were well steeped
in the stories of the Torah. It would have been important for
them to make correlations in the telling of the story of Jesus.
So, instead of seeing the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the
story of Jesus, it is more accurate to understand the story
of Jesus as emphasizing aspects of the Abramic tradition to
show it as being a continuation of that original covenant.
The long and the short of it is, I have a tough time with this
text. Even if it is a story emphasizing the need for Israel
to depend on God’s mercy in the face of adversity, which
is likely how the imprisoned and dispersed Jewish nation would
have read this through the ages, I still can’t get over
the imagery, the cruelty. A son and a father walking side by
side, the boy holding a bundle of wood and his father with rope,
a knife and a torch, trudge to an altar fully intending to commit
an unspeakable act.
The way I have begun to make peace with this story is through
examining the character of both God and Abraham. In one of the
stories preceding this one, Abraham argues for God to save the
city of Sodom. God is intending to wipe it out, the good people
with the bad. And Abraham starts to bargain with God, using
God’s claim as just as argument with God. Abraham at one
point admits his own cheekiness in doing this, since he is but
dust and ashes and God is God. In the end, Abraham gets God
to commit to saving the city if even ten righteous people are
living there. It is a strange little story that establishes
interesting character traits for both God and Abraham. Abraham
is not afraid of God enough not to contradict or barter. And,
God is not above being persuaded to change as long as it is
fitting with God’s character (notice that this is different
from being changeable).
Compare that exchange with the one in the story for today.
God says, “Abraham,” and Abraham simply says, “Here
I am.” That is all that Abraham says to God before following
God’s command, no ‘ifs, ands, or buts.’ Notably,
when Isaac and Abraham are walking to the altar, Isaac says,
“Father,” and Abraham responds, “Here I am,
son.” Presence, Abraham is present. There is little else
you can ascertain about Abraham’s mood from the text.
He is not arguing with God, as before. He was brave when fighting
for evil strangers, but he doesn’t even ask a clarifying
question when he is asked to be the agent of God’s will
in killing his own innocent son. He says to Isaac that God will
provide the lamb for sacrifice. But it is hard to tell if he
is anticipating an intervention, one that we the reader see
no evidence or promise of, or that he is actually acknowledging
that God has provided Isaac as that lamb, the gift that God
can give or take. That is one way to see it.
I, however, when reading this in the context of the stories
preceding it, am beginning to see it slightly differently. Abraham
has always been a wheeler and dealer. He is cavalier with his
wife’s honor, his concubine’s life and his first
born son’s future (Ishmael). But, there is an appreciable
change in why he is doing this particular act. God is testing
him, true. But, I also see that he is testing God. Abraham circumcised
his son at four days old, a new and strange request from God,
showing that Abraham is committed to this covenant. And now
God is asking him to kill the child that is the fulfillment
of the covenant. I am sure that Abraham is struck with the irony
of this act. Killing Isaac is both a testing of the covenant
with God and dissolution of that same covenant. This is one
of those moments in the Bible, in the history of God’s
relationship with us, where the whole nature of good and evil
hangs in the balance. In that split second that Abraham raises
his knife to kill his son, the promised gift of God, Abraham
is putting the utmost of faith in the fact that God’s
nature is just and good. He is poised to do the barbaric in
God’s name, trusting that the real will of a merciful
God will be revealed. It is the same sort of testing that he
did with God when he bartered for the souls of Sodom. The end
result is a reveal of a merciful God, a God that cares for the
meek, not a vengeful and capricious God.
I still contend that the device used here is horrifying. Perhaps
this story, when placed in its intended context, would seem
less shocking. The fact is, there is record of child sacrifice
in ancient religious ceremony. Not that we should assume that
it was a ‘normal’ event in that time period, or
the period of those who would read the story. But, in a culture
of sacrifice the initial revulsion wouldn’t be as great
as it is for us. In using the device of human sacrifice, and
then the bait and switch at the end, God could be intentionally
separating Godself out from the neighboring gods. But then how
do we read this story. If you are the survivor of child abuse
or spouse abuse, how could you read this without identifying
God as abusive? In a culture that values children for more than
their generative capability, how can we forgive Abraham? In
an age of gender equality, how can we accept that Sarah was
left out of this decision, or that her plea for mercy was redacted
right out of the text?
I sit uneasily with this story.
Now, even though we don’t want to quickly and tidily
pass over these tough passages, we do have the benefit of Christ’s
ministry to guide our interpretation. Jesus says, in the lead
in to today’s gospel, “If you don’t go all
the way with me, through thick and thin, you don’t deserve
me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll
never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look
to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.” Are you
willing to forget about yourself, whatever hope of self control
you cling to and give it to God? I am scared by this idea, I
freely admit. The horrible tableau of Abraham about to murder
his own child flashes through my mind. Do I trust God enough
to lay myself bare before God? How can we ultimately resolve
our worry that God is secretively capricious and vindictive?
Maybe that is the challenge, to know with unwavering certainty
that God will protect and provide for you, even when every cue,
even the seeming absence of God, points to the alternative.
I invite you to pray about this in your coming week. Talk to
someone about it. Wrestle with these hard ideas. I will do the
same, look into your (flawed…but promising) life and see
what part of you may need to be forgotten to find yourself and
God.
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