Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac: Summer Evensong: 5th August 2007 – Genesis 20.1-15; and 22.1-19 at Datchworth: Revd. Dr. Canon Alan Winton.

The first thing I would want to say about our readings this evening is this: ‘Don’t try this at home’. There are those who seem to want to live in a world where faith is simply a matter of doing what the Bible says, that we simply read off instructions, as it were, and follow them. There are parts of the Bible that can be read that way, although fewer than you might imagine, but the book of Genesis is not, on the whole, one of them. The authority that the Bible has in our lives needs to be discerned in a rather more thoughtful way when we read the stories of the Patriarchs. There are aspects of their behaviour that should inspire us, that we might try to emulate, but equally aspects that will appal us, that we certainly shouldn’t try to follow, and when it comes to reading off from their stories what are the purposes of God in our lives then we’ll also find that this is a matter that requires serious thought and reflection. Clearly there are truths about God contained in these stories, but discerning them requires some work on our part –the authority of the Bible as God’s Word isn’t always such as to hit you in the face the moment you read it.

So what were God and Abraham up to in this shocking narrative?

It has to be said that this is a passage that has for centuries occupied many of the greatest biblical scholars and theologians and continues to do so today. It has been interpreted and re-interpreted and will continue to be so: it is a dark yet powerful passage and rather eludes the definitive interpretation that would simply pin down its meaning once and for all. The Jewish Rabbis found it a source of endless fascination, and in rabbinic literature it is known as the aqedah, which means binding: and it’s always struck me as a much better description of the passage, because it is actually about the binding of Isaac and definitely not the sacrifice of Isaac, although in some rabbinic traditions Isaac does in fact end up dead, but that’s another story.

What is difficult about reading this passage is that our cultural sensitivities are so different from those of the period in which this passage was probably written, let alone the period in which it was set. We are hugely sensitized to the problems of child abuse and reading this passage we feel we are sailing pretty close to the wind. We feel like the passage is taking us down a path we don’t wish to follow, even if we know that the final outcome is not going to be a violent one.

But we certainly shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel smug and self-satisfied in the face of this shocking story. We don’t have to travel back very far in our own country’s history to realise that what we accept today as important moral principles in the treatment of children represent an incredibly recent consensus – there may not be anyone in church this evening who was actually forced up a chimney as a child, but some may have been required to leave school at 14 to get a job, and I’m sure we would take a very dim view of any politician who suggested that policy today. And, of course, the fair trade movement continues to challenge us to recognise and act upon the fact that many of the cheap products we enjoy in this country today come to us as a result of child labour, another form of child abuse, in other parts of the world. We certainly don’t live comfortably in a world from which child abuse has been eradicated, so we shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel too morally superior.

But what we do need is a little historical imagination if we are to be able to read this story and see what it might be saying to us, and not simply dismiss it as beneath contempt. And I suppose on one level this passage can be read as a very clear argument within the Jewish tradition against child sacrifice. Animal sacrifice was a key feature of religion in the ancient world, and child sacrifice was also not unknown, and this passage clearly asserts unambiguously and graphically that God does not require the sacrifice of a child. It endorses the notion of animal sacrifice, the ram that is retrieved from the bushes, but makes it clear that God would not require the sacrifice of a child.

Such a moral or ethical reading of the story of Isaac is attractive, and I can imagine many a teacher of ethics has used this particular story of Isaac to illustrate one of the great ethical dilemmas, namely, whether it is ever acceptable to use another human being as a means to an end, to use them wholly for a purpose that is not in any way about promoting their own wellbeing. Clearly Isaac is very much a pawn here in some sort of transaction between God and Abraham, and both could be accused of using Isaac with cruelty, one to test faith and the other to prove faith. Does this passage give some sort of approval to using other people in this way? This is not an idle matter for us to consider for aside from obvious questions raised in warfare about the acceptability of what some people call ‘collateral damage’, necessary civilian casualties, in the pursuit of a greater good, there are many questions around in our culture today that also hinge on this point. For instance, the discussion recently in the news about saviour siblings, where a new child is conceived in order to provide vital genetic material to save a sick older sibling, also revolves around the question of whether it is ever morally acceptable to use another person primarily as a means to an end, however exalted that end may be. The story of Isaac would certainly help stimulate such a discussion, but I am not sure whether it would help you answer it, and it was certainly not written with these questions in mind. Although moral issues reverberate all around this passage, morality is not the driving force behind its inclusion in the book of Genesis.

We have to remind ourselves that what we have before us is a story, a narrative, and if it was simply a matter of forbidding child sacrifice, or giving guidance on something like the morality of saviour siblings then there would have been easier and more straightforward ways of doing this.  What we are dealing with here is a human story of faith, it is told with great force and artistry, and it comes within a longer story, the story that runs through these first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, the story of God’s calling and creating a people for himself. And it is to this larger narrative that we must look to understand what is going on here between God and Abraham, why such a bizarre incident should come about.
As we learned a couple of weeks ago, Abraham’s story begins with God’s call to him to leave his home and his roots and his security, to go on a journey with God on the basis of a fantastic promise that God will make him the father of a nation and through him all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. In many ways, the theme of the Pentateuch centres on the question of whether God’s amazing promise will actually be fulfilled.

Now we’ve seen how the promise was at first almost entirely unbelievable, there was doubt as to whether the promise would ever get off the ground – fine to talk of the father of a great nation, but from where Abraham and Sarah stood, the idea of a child in their old age seemed impossible. And so we had the story of the three men who visited Abraham suggesting that Sarah would bear him a son, and being greeted with her wholly understandable laughter.

Our two readings this evening are stories about the further journey of the promise, as it finds itself in grave peril. The first one has Abraham acting in a very fearful and cowardly way. He knows that the fulfilment of God’s promise lies with Sarah being available to bear him a son, and so Abraham starts to worry, not unfortunately about Sarah’s safety, which might at least have earned him some credit for his gentlemanly concern, no, he worries that people will look upon his beautiful wife and kill him. And so we have in fact two stories of the couple entering a city and Abraham feeling the need to pass his wife of as his sister, much to her discomfort.

Abraham has shown faith of a kind in leaving his home to go on this journey with God, but as soon as he faces a dangerous situation, when he considers the promise to be in peril, he seems to forget God and takes his own dubious steps at self-preservation. But God bails out Abraham, his and Sarah’s lives are preserved, and the promise continues its
precarious journey.

Now the second reading, the story of what we shall call the binding of Isaac, takes this theme of the promise in grave peril one step further. And it is very much a double-edged story. On the one hand, Abraham’s faith is being tested, will he or won’t he trust God and do as he is told even though it seems to put the life of Isaac, in whom the promise resides, in danger? On the other hand, God’s faithfulness is being tested, will he or won’t he take away the son on whom the promise to Abraham rests? It is a story that hangs, forgive the pun, on a knife edge. Will Abraham be faithful: will God be faithful?
Part of the story’s force is that it is told with such simplicity and artistry: the sentences are short and precise, God commands without explanation and Abraham complies. It is a tense and dreadful narrative, and the tension and dread are only relieved when the angel cries out to Abraham and tells him not to follow through with the plan, and Isaac is set free from his binding.  God now knows that Abraham is faithful, and Abraham also knows that God is to be trusted – but what a way to find this out, it has been a real heart in the mouth situation!

We are also, like Abraham, children of the promise, if we set out in faith to follow Jesus. It is the same God and the same promise, that God will journey with us, that he will give us a future and a blessing and through us will bring blessing to others. Like Abraham, we will go through times when the journey becomes frightening and difficult, we will go through times when our faith is tested and when we will wonder whether God is really to be trusted, as all that we hoped for in him seems to hang in the balance.  It may be in something like a deep friendship or even our marriage, when we encounter a time when the things that we had hoped for, the things that we thought we’d been promised seem to be absent and unavailable to us. Will we have the courage to trust God that what was promised us will be given if we persist and hold on? It may be in our work, our sense of vocation, how we have understood God’s call upon our lives. The path we had set out on seems blocked or too difficult and we cannot see the way ahead, we cannot see ourselves finding the fulfilment we had hoped for: will we have the courage to go on trusting God to be true to his promise even though all we can do for the moment is go on blindly? It may be through illness, our own, or the ill-health of someone we love, where we struggle to see how God’s promise of life in all its fullness can be delivered. Are we able to go on believing that beyond the darkness there will once more be light?

The journey of life and of faith can be hard for us, as it was for Abraham, and what these amazing stories of the Patriarchs teach us is that God will stay true to us, and in spite of the lapses on our part that will probably occur along the way, we must also stay true to God. If however we are content to live comfortable lives never believing much or expecting much of God, if we are content to stay put and never open ourselves to God’s call, what he might ask us to do, or where he might ask us to go, then these stories may not have any real hold upon us. But for those prepared to respond to God’s call, to pursue the challenge of faith he sets us in life, to go to new places and do new things, to risk loving and being loved, to step out in faith, then Abraham’s up and down journey in pursuit of God’s promise can illuminate our journey and these strange and often dark and perplexing stories can truly be food for our souls. Amen.