Many folks have a hard time with stories in the Bible in
which God seems to be the opposite of what we want our heroes and heroines, let
alone, our Deity to be. Sometimes God appears to be a trickster, capricious,
and monumentally unfair. We tend not to find such a God either trustworthy or
inspiring. So when we come upon a text like the story of Abraham’s
near-sacrifice of Isaac, revolt is in the air. It is one of those stories that
one has to take pains to explain God’s actions on display. How could a just and
loving God jerk around a good old fellow like Abraham with such a horrible,
repulsive plan as to commit infanticide? And with that, a great many folks
check out of the play completely.
Too bad, really. This story is less about God than about the
wiles of the human heart. In fact, I’d say that any story about God is
inseparable from the stuff of the human heart—for the only way we can know
anything about God is by reading the tea leaves of experience. So if we begin
not exactly as the text does, with God saying something outrageous to Abraham,
but rather with the human relationship of a father and a son, we might more
readily see what the story is driving at.
The twenty-second chapter of Genesis is about ten chapters
into a story about an old man who was distinguished not by his morality but by
his faith. And faith had nothing to do, as indeed it rarely does, with religious
performance, but rather with a capacity to trust.
Abraham picks up stakes and leaves his native land deep in the area near
the Persian Gulf and moves northwest up the Euphrates River valley to a place
called Haran, somewhere in present-day Syria. From there he moves southward
towards the Mediterranean coast. Abraham is old. His wife Sarah is barren. One
day three strangers come along and talk with Abraham, announcing that sometime
the following spring Sarah will bear a child. The child is to be named Isaac, a sort of joke
riffing on the fact that Sarah, eavesdropping on the conversation, giggles when
she hears that after all these years after menopause and no baby she is, as she puts it, going to "have pleasure."
To this aged couple Isaac is beyond special. He is the seal
of divine promise, the proof of God’s faithfulness, the fulfillment of hope,
the dream child bringing laughter to life. Who would not dote on such a boy? We
know from other stories in this saga that Abraham is incredibly generous and no
stranger to sacrificing and offering. It is a part not only of his culture but
his nature. So we might imagine that as the boy grows, Abraham begins to ponder
whether maybe he doesn’t love the boy a little too much, or a lot too much. He
has another son, Ishmael, whose mother is or was Sarah’s slave, Hagar. By
comparison, Ishmael holds nothing to compare with Isaac. Abraham is no fool. His
relatively recent acquaintance with “God Most High” is bound up with the idea
that absolutely nothing comes between him and that God. And yet—here is the
boy. Could it be that Abraham becomes possessed of the notion that somehow
Isaac has to go? See the neighboring cult of Moloch, where child sacrifice is
regularly practiced? Maybe they have it right. The feeling becomes daily more
powerful. Abraham becomes convinced that what is in his gut is nothing less
than the movement of what you and I might call Holy Spirit. Take the boy to the
land of Moriah and sacrifice him there, far away from the inevitable
devastation of his grief-crazed mother. Abraham is bound and determined.
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| Caravaggio, "Sacrifice of Isaac" |
Abraham is bound. He is sure that he is doing the right
thing. You know what it is like because you have been Abraham. You have been
utterly convinced that you knew what you were doing. Maybe it was the time that
you quit your job, or said yes to a marriage proposal, or decided you had to
move, or turned down an offer that was most attractive. Something deep inside
moved you to believe you were right. And you might have been! But right or
wrong, you were bound. It was as if on some level you were being moved by
forces beyond your control.
The irony is that it is exactly that state that frequently
makes possible the alliance between the soul and its Maker that will change not
only you but others around you and perhaps quite literally the world you live
in. It is the ability, or more precisely the gift, of letting go of your
conscious willing need—your dearest love, your fondest hopes, your Isaac—and
march off into the land of Moriah which is all misty and foggy in the early
morning when only a hunch tells you that you’re on the right track. So you take
your Isaac by the hand and walk up the mountain. It is anything but easy, but
you know in your heart that you’re doing what you have to do.
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| Rembrandt "Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac" |
But Abraham’s isn’t the only way of being bound. Isaac is a vulnerable
child, not an adult. He instinctively trusts his dad. He wonders what’s going
on, and feels in the pit of his stomach something’s amiss. He senses the
tension in the older man. “Here’s the wood. Here’s the fire. Where’s the lamb?”
They get to the place, a great stone table. Suddenly Isaac understands. Does he
scream? Plead? Convulse with tears, begging as I did when I was a child about
to get a whipping. “No, Sir, please, please, please don’t….” Blindfolded,
bound, the splinters of the logs stab his young flesh.
You know what it’s like to be Isaac because chances are you
have been bound like Isaac. Bound to someone’s agenda. Bound by somebody
stronger, bound by circumstances you had no way of changing, bound by habits
you honestly couldn’t quit, bound by forces well beyond yourself, but in a
different way from the bound and determined Abraham. Isaac is a victim, handed
over to suffering and in just a hair’s breadth of being handed over to death.
When we look at the story like this, though we might not be
able to match it up exactly with our personal experience, we can see that what
is playing out is a well known dynamic in human history. Yet something happens
that changes everything. At the moment when the knife is drawn and the shaky
old hand is ready to come down with the fatal blow, time stops. Maybe it is a
moment of insight. Abraham! Abraham! What are you thinking? Hold on! This is
not what God wants. Not death, Abraham, but life! And as the knife falls
clattering on stone, Abraham must think something like, “Oh my God! Oh my God! How
could I have been so wrong, so stupid? I just didn’t understand. I thought I
was following the deepest voice within me. Now I see that I was way off base.”
That, you may argue, is not how the story goes. But it is
how my story goes. Sometimes when I have been most certain that I was doing
exactly the right thing in the right way I have come to see that I had it all
wrong. One such time happened when I was
rector of my first parish. We had a
youth retreat. One of the kids invited a
friend to come along. His name was
Ian. He was Jewish. A cute kid, he was a spark of light in the
group, and obviously liked being among us.
On Sunday morning I foresaw what was coming. We were going to celebrate a eucharist and,
as a priest who wanted to do everything just right, I knew I couldn’t share the
Body and Blood of Christ with an unbaptized person. So I pulled Ian aside and told him what was
about to happen. I explained why I
wouldn’t be able to share the communion with him, and asked him if he
understood. He said he did. Well, he didn’t understand what I was saying
and was probably too embarrassed to admit so.
When I was distributing communion around the circle, Ian reached out his
young Jewish hands and I reached up and gave him a blessing instead of the
bread. He blushed scarlet. At the end of communion he made a bee
line out of the circle. I went to him and tried to explain. He was polite. Polite and devastated. He never came back. If I had the chance to relive my ministry I’d
make a bee line to that moment and change it.
I look back and say about that “Abraham” moment, “How could I have been
so stupid?” So now what do I do? Wail on
myself? Or take a deep breath, realize that I was and am simply human, and come
to my senses by the grace of the one whom I really do at bottom love profoundly
and want to serve?
I once knew a woman who had an Isaac moment. She sat in her
bathtub, razor blade in hand, ready to slit her wrists. She was bound, you see,
to depression, which is a cruel master. One might say that it was not she so
much as the inner darkness that possessed her that held the blade ready to do
the deed. And at that moment came a voice. “Whose woods these are I think I
know, his house is in the village though…” She began remembering Robert Frost’s
poem and got down to the last lines, “But I have promises to keep, and miles to
go before I sleep, and ….” She could not for the life of her remember the last
line. Finally, she laid down the blade, got out of the tub, dried herself off,
and went in search of the poem. “Do you know,” she wrote to me, “that voice of
Frost’s saved me?” Tell me that is not Providence. “On the mount of the Lord it
shall be provided.” Right there in the land of Moriah, a bath tub, a bound
woman, and a voice.
But then there’s a lamb—a ram, really, but let’s call it a
lamb—waiting in a thicket, mute, ready for the moment when nothing but a lamb
will do. And you know the name of that Lamb. He is the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of
God that liberates both those who are bound and determined and those who are bound
in helplessness. He himself has been bound as he was when he set his face
towards Jerusalem, his own Moriah, bound and determined to get there where he
would be bound in another way, mounted on and tied to wood.
In these days when we are thinking about and celebrating
liberation and freedom, we would do well to remember that more is in play than
our national story. Moving not only in the global sphere of human affairs but
in lives like mine and yours and Abraham’s and Isaac’s is a mysterious Stranger
who at once likes us bound to his service but at the same time teaches us that
that service is perfect freedom. When at times we have it all wrong, he is
there to stay our hand calling us back to our senses. And when we are most
helpless, there he is, waiting for the chance to set the captives free, even to
the point of becoming a captive himself.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017
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