"What Is Our Best Sacrifice" (Abraham and Isaac)

            11/25/12                     Genesis 22:1-19                    Grace UMC

We have just celebrated Thanksgiving as a nation.  It is a time of year when, as we think of things we are thankful for, we often think of sacrifice.  We remember that there have been countless people who have sacrificed their lives so that we might be free in this country.  We also remember that our parents sacrificed and did without so that we might not have to.  As Christians, we often think about sacrifice in terms of what Christ did for us.  In Christ, we see that we do not only have other human beings who have sacrificed for us, but that even the God of the universe has allowed himself to be sacrificed for our sakes.  It is a sacrifice that does not only free us on the outside but brings us freedom in the depths of our humanity.

One of the most fascinating stories in the whole Bible to me is the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham is called to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the land of Moriah.  This story has been the focus of significant attention by those outside of the church in recent years.  Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist and committed atheist had the following to say, referring to the story of Abraham and Isaac.  "And not scorning the three delightful children who result— who are everything to me and who are my only chance of a human glimpse of a second life, let alone an immortal one, I’ll tell you something: if I was told to sacrifice them to prove my devotion to God, if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do and admire the man who said, “Yes, I’ll [kill] my kid to show my love of God,” I’d say, “No, f[orget] you.”"  Actually, his language is somewhat stronger than that.

This is not a recent concern.  Going all the way back to the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, the profoundly significant philosopher who casts a shadow even over our lives today, said this. "Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: ‘That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from visible heaven."  What is certain for Kant is the moral code.  It is higher than God and is able to stand in judgment over what God may or may not say or do.

Another interesting point of view surrounding this passage comes from Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and committed Christian.  He was deeply aware of the fact that, even though we consider Abraham a hero of the faith, if anyone else were to do what Abraham was prepared to do, we would not consider them a hero of the faith but a murderer.  What Kierkegaard wanted to know is why we don't think of Abraham as a murderer.  This is, of course what Hitchens and Kant were getting at in their own way, but whereas they came to the conclusion that, in fact, we ought to think of Abraham, as well as the God who set all this into motion, as murderers, Kierkegaard was gripped by faith in a way that would not allow him to rest content with that conclusion but wanted to press deeper.

So the first thing I want to do is to make it clear that if you have ever read the story of Abraham and Isaac with fear and trembling (the name of Kierkegaard's book on the passage) or with disgust or dismay, you are not alone.  There have been many who have found it to be profoundly disturbing.  If you have never read the passage and wondered whether that says some things about God that we might not want to hear, at the very least you should be aware of the fact that others have thought so and it is passages like this that those outside of the church often turn to in order to make Christians look foolish because, at least if looked at from the right angle, it can certainly seem that God is somewhat barbaric.

Now, I have never met a Christian who believed that this is the best way to read the passage.  In spite of all the barbarism that seems to be there, we are too strongly persuaded by Christ to believe that God is truly bloodthirsty and wanting child sacrifice.  But if that is the case, how should we read the passage?

By far, the most common way the story of Abraham and Isaac is talked about in the church is to say that the real point is not that God wants child sacrifice, since looking at the whole of the biblical tradition makes it clear that he doesn't, but that Abraham was prepared to give up the best that he had for God so we also should be prepared to give our best to God.  It is a common interpretation, but is that really what the story is about?

Kierkegaard uses the story of the rich young ruler that Jesus told to give up all he had in order to follow him to shed light on this kind of interpretation.  He argues that the rich young ruler would not have become like Abraham, even if he gave up the best that he had.  He says, "What is left out...is the anguish: for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations.  Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they [still] want to talk about Abraham.  So they talk and in the course of conversation they interchange the words 'Isaac' and 'best.'  Everything goes excellently.  Should someone in the audience be suffering from insomnia [that is, actually awake and listening attentively to the sermon], however, there is likely to be the most appalling, most profound, tragic-comic misunderstanding.  He goes home, he wants to do just like Abraham; for the son is certainly the best thing he has.  Should that [preacher] hear word of this, he might go to the man, summon all his clerical authority, and shout:  ‘Loathsome man, dregs of society, what devil has so possessed you that you wanted to murder your own son?’  And this [preacher], who had felt no signs of heat or perspiration while preaching about Abraham, would be surprised at the righteous wrath with which he fulminates against that poor man; he would be pleased with himself, for never had he spoken with such pungency and fervor before…If the same [preacher] had some slight excess of wit to spare he would surely lose it were the sinner to reply coolly and with dignity:  ‘It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday.’  How could a [preacher] get such an idea into his head?  And yet he did so, and the mistake was only that he hadn’t known what he was saying.”

If we read the story of Abraham and Isaac and say, "Abraham was willing to give up the best he had, Isaac, and so we should be willing to give up the best that we have," how can we possibly avoid the implication that we ought to be willing to give up our children, since that is the example?  If that conclusion disturbs us we must either reject God, reject the passage, or push deeper to see if it is possible that we have misunderstood the text.  Given those three options, I think it is best to choose to push deeper.

This is all the more clearly the right choice when we remember that God is consistently telling his people that he absolutely does not want child sacrifice.  The issue is deeper than we might think, but I believe that it will become clear that the God portrayed in this story is not bloodthirsty but is better and more gracious than we ever dreamed.

The question we have to ask is why Abraham was willing to do this at all?  Perhaps it is nothing more than what the writer of Hebrews says, "By faith, Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac.  He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, of whom he had been told, ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.’  He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead – and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”  It may have been that, but I think that it there is more to it.  Though this story is the closest Israel ever got to affirming child sacrifice, it was a common practice elsewhere in the Ancient Near East.  The followers of the Ammonite god, Molech, for example, practiced child sacrifice regularly, precisely because it was an offering of the best that they had.  Ancient tribes in South America played games not altogether unlike our modern game of basketball and sacrificed, not the losing but the winning team, again precisely because it was an offering of their best.

There is a certain logic to these practices that horrify us today.  If God demands from us total commitment, does that not trump even our commitments to our family?  In spite of the fact that this way of reasoning has been so common throughout history, it has been conspicuously absent in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Why is that?  The reason is that the obligation for total obedience to God does not just mean that we need to surrender our devotion to everything else when compared to our devotion to God.  It also means that we need to surrender the right to decide for ourselves what the best that we have to offer is.  We don't get to decide for ourselves what God wants, but we need to listen to him to hear what he has to say about the matter.

As frightening as the whole story can be and as often as God and Abraham get criticized for doing what they do, we must never forget one absolutely crucial point:  Isaac is not actually killed.  He survives the whole situation.  If the interpretation that says that Abraham's willingness to offer Isaac was nothing more than a willingness to offer his best is correct, can we not assume that the conclusion of the story tells us that that willingness is enough, that God will never actually require our best from us?  If that is so, then we can make a show about our willingness to give everything up while comforted by the fact that God will never actually demand it of us.  However, I don't think this is the case, I think there is something much more profound at work here.

Even though he was tied down to the wood and the knife was raised, Isaac did not die, but something did.  Blood was shed and something was offered to God, but it was not Isaac, the beloved child of Abraham.  It was a ram whose horns were caught in the thicket.  What do we read actually happened?  "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.'"  The sacrifice of the ram is incredibly significant, above and beyond what a sacrifice of a ram would have meant in any other context.  The ram was not just offered, but was offered instead of Isaac, it was offered in his place.

This is where the interpretation of Isaac as Abraham's best has something to contribute.  At the end of the day, what was the sacrifice that God wanted?  Abraham was willing to offer what he would call his best.  His son was bound and he had lifted the knife to kill him, but God would not allow it.  Instead of allowing Abraham to follow through, he gave him a substitute.  That means that God in a very real sense did not want Abraham's best; in point of fact, God wanted a sacrifice that was better than Abraham's best.

Now, you might be wondering, "How is a ram a better sacrifice than Isaac?  After all, Abraham probably owned many rams, but only had one beloved son."  And yet, God didn't tell Abraham to stop, go back home, get one of his rams, and then bring it back.  Instead, God provided his own lamb.  Even if we might think that a ram is insignificant compared to a human child, the reason why it was a better sacrifice is not because of the value in the eyes of Abraham or any other human being.  It was a better sacrifice because it came from God.

I wonder if, sometimes, we think about sacrifice the way we often do because we like it.  If we either choose or are forced to make a significant sacrifice, there is that bit inside of us that feels pretty good about it in the sense that we feel that nobody can ever say to us, "You never had to sacrifice."  When we sacrifice, we can prove to ourselves that our devotion isn't just made up of words, but that it makes some kind of difference in our lives.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is extremely offensive, but not because of how we would ordinarily think.  It is not offensive because a bloodthirsty God commanded a man to sacrifice his beloved child.  It is offensive because, at the end of the day, God does not accept it, but provides a sacrifice in his place.  God knows that Abraham will go through with the sacrifice; after all, in any other culture at the time, it would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  But right when he is about to follow through, God stops him.  This is an act of mercy, but it is more than that.  It is a declaration that God doesn't want child sacrifice, doesn't want Abraham to give what he thinks is his best.  It is a sacrifice unwanted by God and so, in point of fact, it is not the best Abraham has to offer, regardless of what he might think.  The best sacrifice is the one that God gives in place of what we think is our best.

It is an offensive story because it makes it seem that God's ways are cheap, that it is too easy to be one of God's people.  This should come as no surprise to us, since that is precisely what people have said, both in the early days of the church and today, but is it really true?  Is it too easy?  It means a wholesale renunciation of doing things our own way, of admitting that sin impacts everything we do, everything we are, and everything we think, including our notion of what are the best things to offer as a sacrifice to God.  To follow God means to allow our own sense of justice and righteousness to be challenged and realize that the ways of God are not just different than ours, but deeper, richer, and fundamentally better than our ways.  It means that we need to give up our right to judge, not only the actions of others but even our own actions, and allow God to have his way.

The story of Abraham and Isaac is also tremendously humbling.  It tells us that we cannot make an appropriate sacrifice on our own terms.  We must open our hands in faith, emptied of all our supposed righteousness and goodness, and receive the sacrifice that God has to give in place of the best that we could ever give.  It is scandalous, it is an attack on humanity because it says that God is justified in insisting on what he gives instead of what we give, but it is oh so very liberating, because God has already made the sacrifice.  He has given us his Son.  It is a sacrifice that is absolutely free because it offered without price but it is desperately costly because it calls us into question to the roots of our being.  We cannot accept the sacrifice without it challenging us to our core, but it is a challenge to be freed from sin, to be empowered by the Spirit and live in a better way than our world has to offer.  It is a sacrifice that changes everything and it is better than any sacrifice we could ever have dreamed up.  Rejoice, for God is not waiting until you make the perfect sacrifice, only for you to trust in the one he has made on your behalf and in your place.  Let us pray.

AMEN