There are few stories that are recalled by as many people as often as the one about Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Jews, Muslims, and Christians throughout the world regularly recall this story. Our Jewish neighbours often see Isaac as the main character in the story, and they believe that he willingly embraced what Abraham was doing. According to our Muslim neighbours, it was not Isaac, but Ishmael who was offered by Abraham. They trace their spiritual lineage through Ishmael. Some Christian interpreters have seen Jesus mirrored as one who was offered to God.
Sometimes our familiarity with this story hides from us just how wildly strange it is.
Imagine Bob (if your name happens to be Bob, please know that this is about some other Bob). Imagine our Bob as a good Christian. He is faithful and has penetrating spiritual insights when asked and does much to help the poor. Now imagine Bob coming to church and saying that he was going to kill his oldest child because God told him to. What would be your first reaction to our dear friend Bob? Would you say to yourself, “I wish I had faith like Bobs!”? Or, would you immediately call the RCMP?
This is a disturbing story, and because we do not want to be disturbed, we make this into a nice story about obeying God. But is it a good story to use to think about what obedience looks like? Does obeying God entail doing what we think is destructive and wrong?
During the Nuremberg Trials, which addressed the atrocities of the Holocaust, accused Nazi’s defended themselves by saying they were only doing what they were told… They were only being obedient. Obeying God can’t be like this, can it? Obedience a higher authority, even if it is God, does not shield us from the consequences of our actions. God requires that we take responsibility for what we do.
If this is not a story about obedience, is it one about loving God above all things?
I once had a conversation with a young mother, who took this story as a warning against loving her son too much. Sometimes she felt that she loved her son too much, and she feared that God, to make sure she loved him more than all else, would do something akin to what God did to Abraham. I told her that God wanted her to love her son and wildly and as madly as she can, and that this story was better understood in other terms. It was not about restraining our love for our children.
So, if this is not a story about loving God above all else, what is it about? What are we to do with this wild and dangerous story?
There is never going to be a final interpretation. I am not going to offer one here. We are given these tales to wrestle with, and in wrestling, sometimes we find out something true about ourselves and our world, and even our God.
Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, believes that, while God is never immoral or evil, this story tells of a way of thinking and being that transcends simple morality.
Some scholars of religion believe there was a tradition of child sacrifice in Israel, and through this story God’s rejects that sort of worship. From now on, children are not to be sacrificed – only animals.
I prefer a more literary approach – by looking at the storyline closely.
God promises Abraham land, and that his descendants will become a great people. But there are threats to the promise. One of the threats to the fulfillment of God’s promises is the fact that Abraham and Sarah are old, and their old age threatens their ability to have children.
Another threat is Abraham’s fear of others. Twice Abraham endangers the promises because he is afraid that others will kill him to take beautiful wife Sarah. To prevent this, he gets her to pretend he is her sister, endangering her and the promise.
The final and greatest threat to the promises of God come from God himself! God threatens the promises by asking Abraham to kill the promised son.
God, Elohim, askes Abraham to sacrifice his son. Elohim is a something of a generic word for God. The story takes on a new shape if we think of Elohim as the name one might use to speak of the God of religion. God and religion often go together, but sometimes they are stridently opposed to each other. Sometimes religion is a willing and able partner with God in the divine project in the world. But sometimes religion is God’s biggest opponent. Sometimes the God we imagine is so vastly different from the God that is, that the God we imagine becomes an enemy of the God who is. Sometimes, in the name of God, religion builds residential schools and slaughters children. Sometime in the name of God, religion rapes the land and colonizes the world. Sometimes in the name of God, religion takes the children – the hope of the future – and offers them on an altar of divine duty to be slaughtered.
In the name of religion, Abraham comes to the verge of destroying God’s work and plan.
But at the last moment, what stops him? It is not Elohim – the God of religion – who stops the slaughter. Rather, we are told, the “angel of the LORD” – the Angel of YHWH. This is a way of speaking about YHWH herself. YHWH stops what is about to happen.
YHWH is the revealed name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is the name of the God of covenant – the God of relationship. YHWH saves YHWH’s plan of life and goodness from Elohim, the God of religion’s destructive plans of death. God steps in and saves Abraham from the religion that operates in the divine name but has gone astray.
As a faithful Anglican and follower of the Christian tradition, I believe we must always be aware that our beloved tradition does not always automatically operate in the service of God – of YHWH. Goodness is never automatic for any of us two-legged ones. Evil is always a possibility, and using religion as an evil is always someone we have at our hands. Sometimes we use holiness and goodness as a pretext for the harm we cause. Sometimes our self-righteousness is as dangerous as a loaded gun.
The only way to avoid this is to embrace the spirit of God dearly in the depths of our beings in all humility. Even then, we can go wrong. Those who are certain they are right are the most at risk of using the good things that have been entrusted to them in service of harm.
I hope that we all may be quick to hear the love of God and the kind word of the gentle spirit. May we always be prepared to resist the forces of religion – our own especially – if ever they become servants of death.
Broken Oracles 