Sunday’s first and second scripture readings raise difficult questions. What kind of God would ask Abraham to take his son up into the heights and sacrifice him (Genesis 22)? What kind of God does not withhold God’s own son but gives him up for all of us (Romans 8.32)? Can this God be the same one who transfigures Jesus on the mountain in such a dazzling way that the disciples want to remain there forever to bask in the loveliness?
Scholars have at least three ways to explain the story of Abraham and Isaac. First, some explain that stories from this ancient period are not historical. The stories are not written as history to record facts and events accurately. Rather this story that originated in oral traditions and comes down generations to us is not history but a tale with a moral.
The moral is that obedience results in great blessing. The question of what kind of God requires such sacrifice drops out of the picture.
Second, some interpret the meaning of the story to suggest that Abraham got God’s message wrong. At the critical moment God stays Abraham’s hand and says to him in effect, “I really appreciate what you were willing to do, but this is not what I want. Don’t kill Isaac. There is a ram in the bushes. Sacrifice the ram instead.” In this view Abraham realizes that God is compassionate and does not desire human sacrifice.
The third view dismisses the God of the Abraham story. People who hold this view contend that a God of vengeance and violence simply is not consistent with their own experience of God and with ways God is imaged in other places in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures. In fact, we must get beyond this way of imaging God, which has done immense damage in both religious and political spheres all over the earth.
Abraham offers Isaac.
God put Abraham to the test. He called to him, “Abraham!” “Ready!” he replied. Then God said: “Take your son, Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.”
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. Then he reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son.
But the Lord’s messenger called to him from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham!” “Yes, Lord,” he answered. “Do not lay your hand on the boy,” said the messenger. “Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.”
As Abraham looked about, he spied a ram caught by its horns in the thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it up as a holocaust in place of his son.
Again the Lord’s messenger called to Abraham from heaven and said: “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you acted as you did in not withholding from me your beloved son, I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore; your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing — all this because you obeyed my command.”
Genesis 22.1-2, 9, 10-13, 15-18
- How do you view the Abraham and Isaac story? How do you interpret its meaning?
- What do you feel God expects of you?