These observations about Genesis 22:1-14 have informed Elsa’s preaching. This is not a sermon manuscript. Please call the Church Office at 799-3361 for an audio recording.
When Christians read this terrifying text, we tend to emphasize the test. Our hearts resonate with Abraham’s predicament. And so, we zero in to ask: Would our faith lead us to behave in the same way as Abraham? We seldom ask what this says about God. In the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Neusner emphasizes that this story isn’t something that happened long ago to Abraham to prove some point about God. Instead, “the point of the story cannot be located in the context of Genesis but in the context, only, of the holy and eternal life of Israel, God’s people.” While there are as many Jewish perspectives as there are Christian, the emphasis for this rabbi is on the sacrifice of Isaac. Rabbi Neusner uplifts a Isaac’s vantage point so that the question is: Where do we find Isaac today? Ancient Talmudic scholars have posited that Isaac desired this sacrifice. It was foreshadowed in an argument with his brother. In one commentary, Isaac even asks Abraham to tie the bindings tighter so that the offering is given properly. In the tradition handed down to us from Genesis, we can only imagine Isaac’s perspective. In Genesis, Isaac speaks once when he calls out to his father — which we could choose to hear as a plea, a protest, an exclamation or a greeting.
We hear from Isaac after the “two of them walked on together.” Abraham and Isaac left the other young men behind. As father and son, they went on to Mount Moriah on their own. We know that God knew as well as Abraham that Isaac was his only son (after Abraham heeded Sarah’s orders to banish his other son Ishmael into the wilderness) and that God knew that Abraham loved Isaac. We know that in these 14 verses, steadfast Abraham repeats the phrase “Here I am” 3 times – first to reply to God’s call, next to reply this his son Isaac and finally when God interrupts the sacrifice Abraham is about to perform. Each time, Abraham repeats the same phrase with the exact same word for both God and Isaac. Each time, Abraham uses the word hineini. Hebrew scholar Norman J. Cohen points out that using this same word for both God and his son is a reminder of how we are supposed to respond to the divine in the world.
And so I return to the question: Where do we find Isaac today? Norman J. Cohen pushes me into the awareness of the harm caused to Isaac in this story. The Revised Common Lectionary concludes with the insight that “The LORD will provide.” It excludes the promise that is made to Abraham. It omits that Abraham returns to Beersheba with the young men that he and Isaac had left behind when the “two of them walked on together.” The RCL misses the fact the Isaac doesn’t go with them. Isaac doesn’t appear again in his father’s presence until his mother dies. Abraham doesn’t cease care and concern for his son. He goes about finding a wife for his only heir but Isaac spends all of those years after that day on Mount Moriah far from his father’s presence.
I wonder if Isaac doesn’t reveal to us that strange place where God and the world meet. God doesn’t speak to Isaac. Nor does Isaac speak to God. Both God and Isaac communicate through Abraham who hears God and answers “Here I am” every time. In this account, it seems that Isaac doesn’t get to experience the divine except through his father. And yet, he represents a tradition of the world. At that time, the Israelites practiced child sacrifice so that “Every first-born that ‘opens the womb,’ whether human or animal, was to be set apart for the LORD (Exodus 13:1-2; cf., Exodus 22:29).”
However, his father makes that choice. That’s when Isaac appeals to his father (and perhaps even to God), “Father!” Abraham replies as I imagine God would: Here I am. At this point, I can’t help but hear Isaac insist that this ritual – this burnt offering, this child sacrifice, this effort to win God’s favor – doesn’t reflect the world Isaac knows. After all, this isn’t the God that Isaac knows. Since he was born, I imagine that his mother Sarah told her only child how he got his name, Isaac, meaning to make laugh. I imagine Sarah curled her son into her lap and told him how she laughed at God when God said she’d have a baby at 90 years old. Wouldn’t Isaac have relished in this tale? Wouldn’t he have begged to hear it again and again? Wouldn’t this story have illustrated to him that our world barely knows God? Wouldn’t he have considered this same question when he learned his half brother was banished into the wilderness? It seems to me that Isaac’s faith in God would have insisted that God is bigger than our human determination to make everything fit?
Instead, I imagine that Isaac discovered something that Abraham couldn’t quite grasp. Bound upon that altar upon a pile of wood, I imagine he heard God gasp even more loudly than his father. Isaac never should have been on that altar. Not in that way, but I believe that Isaac understood God better than Abraham could. I don’t think that he had to be in that particular posture to understand this so clearly, but it seems that’s where it happened. And so, Isaac had to walk away from his father as any child grows from the ways of their parents. He had to go another way because he chose the world in a way that Abraham didn’t. He had test it out himself – to see if God could really make laughter as his name promised. I imagine that Isaac unbound himself from that pile of wood, walked down the mountain, and thought aloud like Philip Simmons in his book Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life:
To choose the world is to return to where we began, to follow love to its source, to rest in that ground of our being that has no beginning and no ending. Moved by love of the world, we venture all to enter the sacred circle, to cross the threshold of the invisible, to draw closer to God. When at last we find ourselves there, inside the world’s holy heart, we discover we have been there all along. Born of the world, we give birth to the world in every moment. Beloved of the world, we are every moment in its embrace. Choosing the world, we discover in the end that the world has already chosen us.
As Philip Simmons concludes his chapter, I want to believe that Isaac chose to love the imperfection of the whole world as much as he loved God.