Sermon Tidbits
Some of the sermon I wrote today
In the Jewish tradition, the story of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac is known as the Aqeda which in Hebrew means “binding.” This is called The Binding of Isaac story because Abraham takes Isaac up a mountain and binds him, ties him up in order to make a blood sacrifice of his son, not his only son as the scripture reads, because Abraham had another child with Hagar. His name was was Ishmael. But, Isaac is loved by his father Abraham and his mother, Sarah. They had prayed for him for many years. The reason Abraham had Ishmael was at Sarah’s urging because she had not been able to conceive a child. In their old age, Sarah became pregnant. Isaac was the child through whom God promised generations upon generations of descendants.
“Some time later” the scripture tells us that God called Abraham to sacrifice that very child.
Now, we could skip over to the end and only talk about the ways in which God provides the ram caught in the thicket. We could skip over to the Gospel and compare this story to the one of the innocent Jesus being sacrificed in our place. We could pretend this is an easy story to read and that it makes perfect sense.
It is not. And, it does not. I’ve been given a new perspective. In the ancient world, blood sacrifice was a common practice in worship. Not only animal sacrifice, but human sacrifice as well. Any movie that contains human sacrifice in modern times is considered horror, but there was a time in human history, that people truly believed that the gods required human sacrifice in order to be appeased. These sacrifices were often children, the innocents.
So, in context, it isn’t all that crazy for Abraham to feel called to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Traveling three days, taking supplies for a fire and altar, being obedient to his own faith would have made perfect sense.
The writer of Genesis really turns the knife for us readers when Isaac asks on the trip, “Hey Dad, I noticed we had everything else but where is the sheep that we will kill?
There are scholars and others who interpret Abraham’s response, “God will provide the sheep,” as evidence that Abraham trusted all along that he wouldn’t have to kill his son. These scholars will also point to Abraham’s telling the two servants who came with them on the trip, “Wait here while we go and worship and WE will come back,” as more evidence that God was never going to allow the boy to die and Abraham knew it.
I happen to believe that is a cop-out. It makes the story a little more tidy. It makes the circumstances a little easier to swallow.
But, all we know from the text itself is that God said, “Kill him,” Abraham said, “Okay,” then a messenger of God said, “Hold up. Stop. Don’t do that.”
I recently read some scholarship on this passage that suggests that the Binding of Isaac is really a story about how God put an end to human sacrifice. As hard as the story is to take, maybe the truth behind it all is one about a God who continued to see humans who believed God required such violence. Maybe, just maybe the story of Abraham almost sacrificing his son is a story of the evolution of the human relationship with God so that no child ever has to be sacrificed again.
