Jeremy Duncan: Does it not seem strange to anyone else here that Abraham would argue with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and yet so quickly resign himself to the death of his son? I don't think Abraham passes the test here. I think God is the one who has to step in and pass it for him. Today, though, we are still gonna finish off the story of Abraham and Sarah, and we're gonna do that with a pretty heavy tale. A story known as the binding of Isaac, sometimes called the Akkadah, which is the Hebrew word for binding.
But, of course, this is also a story where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his own child. Now, of course, there are lots of uncomfortable implications in that. Literally millennia of debate surrounding this part of the story. We are not gonna settle all of that today, but I do think there is a path through this passage that can lead us back to the heart of Christ. So big story.
Lots of ground to cover today. We will dispense with the recap. I got no jokes for you. We're gonna dive right in because it's heavy. I will say this though.
This series has been a lot of fun. If you have missed any of the steps along the way, you can check them out on our website. Go to commons.church/watch, and you can actually find our entire archive over twelve years there for you. But let's begin together in prayer. God of Abraham and Sarah, God who sees Hagar in her wilderness, God who meets us in the complicated parts of our story as well.
Today, we come to the end of another tale, would you open our hearts once again to your presence even here? Some of us arrive today joyful, others weary, some unsure of what we believe, and yet you are holding all of us in your confident grace. As we turn to a text that is difficult and unsettling, honest, give us the courage to stay present with it. The humility to listen to it, and the trust to believe that even here, even in the hardest stories, you are guiding us toward compassion, toward justice, and toward the Christ who reveals your true heart to us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen. Today is one of the most troubling stories anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures, the binding of Isaac. And we will cover the God who sees, the God who tests the fallout, and the second question we should probably ask. But if we're gonna talk about Isaac today, then we're gonna have to talk a little bit about Ishmael first. Because when Abraham and Sarah are told that they would bless the world and that Sarah will birth the story that will change the course of history, their first thoughts turn toward how they can engineer that destiny.
And so Sarah, fresh off a traumatic experience at the hands of her husband in Egypt, leaves Egypt presumably with a new servant named Hagar. She then proceeds to force that woman to sleep with her husband to produce the child she thinks she can't. It's all very messy, but also seems to be setting up some longer term stories. I'll refer to the work of a scholar, doctor Wilda Gaffney here. She argues that Hagar's tale creates an inverse parallel with the Israelite experience in Egypt that is coming in the next book of the Bible, Exodus.
So Sarah is mistreated by her husband in Egypt. Hagar the Egyptian is abused by the Israelite Sarah. Israelite will later be oppressed by Egypt. Hagar will escape from Sarah into the wilderness. Israel will escape from Egypt into their wilderness.
Hagar's story concludes as God guides her home to Egypt. Israel's story culminates as they escaped Egypt and are guided by God to the promised land. The story here is about, at some level, intergenerational trauma. How unresolved hurts get passed on, creating more damage for more people down the line when we don't deal with them. That's what the Bible is talking about when it talks about generational sin.
It's not magical curses. It's the unintended consequence for our actions. And what's important about this, the parallel story of Hagar and her son Ishmael is not that Abraham and Sarah get a pass because they're chosen by God. What they do to Hagar and Ishmael is wrong, and we shouldn't pretend that it isn't. The point of the story is that God is present in the midst of all of the mess of human failure just like that God is in our lives.
In fact, when Hagar first escapes Sarah in chapter 16, it's God who goes to find her. It's God who brings her home. And it's Hagar who is the first person anywhere in scripture to name God for us, which by the way is a pretty big deal in ancient Semitic cultures. Hagar says, you are the God who sees me for I've seen the one who looks at me. She gives this God the title Elroy, the God who sees.
And so later, when Isaac, the child of promise is born and Sarah then asks for Hagar and Ishmael to be sent out into the desert alone, presumably to die, it's God once again who follows after them. It's God who cares for Hagar. It's God who looks after Ishmael. It's God who steers them home to Egypt. And so, we have to be careful as readers today that when we read scripture and we see characters act in ways that we know are wrong, but we also know they're the main character in the story, we have to be careful not to justify their actions to ourselves.
It's okay to say that this is wrong. It's okay to see the ways that Sarah's mistreatment at the hands of her husband now blossom into her abuse of Hagar. It's okay to notice that Sarah's oppression of this woman is then paralleled in the oppression of her descendants at the hands of Egypt. What scripture is doing by narrating this story is not endorsing everything we read. What scripture is doing is telling the story.
It's moving the story forward. I mean, if scripture only ever followed the good guys, we would never get to Jesus, which for us as Christians is the whole point of the whole winding tale. And that reminder that narrating a tale is not necessarily affirming it, that is going to be important for us today as we travel with the second son Isaac. So, Sarah and Abraham finally have the son they've been promised. Hagar and Ishmael have their own story largely outside the pages of Genesis, but we are left with the assurance that God is watching and guiding them to safety.
And one day, God decides to test Abraham. Now, if you are familiar with the story already, what's gonna happen is that God is going to ask Abraham to murder his own son. And before we even get into that story, I wanna read you a quote from a pretty famous critic of the bible, a man named Richard Dawkins, who writes this about the tale. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetric power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense, I was only obeying orders.
Now, pretty sharp critique, at least that is until you realize that Jewish and Christian writers have been raising the same alarm wrestling with the exact same questions for more than two millennia now. So for all of our discomfort today as we engage the story, just know it finds us in good company as we wrestle with the binding of Isaac. So we'll start in Genesis chapter 21 verse one. Says this sometime later. How much later?
We don't know. Enough that Isaac has grown into a boy. But sometime later, God tested Abraham. God said to him, Abraham, and he replied, here I am. Then God said, take your son, your only son, whom you love Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah.
Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on the mountain, I will show you. Now, couple things here. First of all, there's a word missing here in our English translation, and it's the word please. Kind of odd, isn't it? God says, hey, Abraham, please take your son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac, and do this terrible thing.
That's a very polite way of asking for an atrocity. And in English, the please, in Hebrews, this little word, nah, gets dropped, I think, maybe for that reason. It just feels out of place to us. I happen to think it's a mistake to leave it out. First, because I think we have seen throughout the life of Abraham that this God is interested in more than just issuing commands.
God is interested in invitations and promises. God is interested in listening. God is intrigued to learn how Abraham would respond in certain situations. God is even curious how divine silence can shape a relationship that calls for a little space. I think we need to incorporate all of that into our imagination of our relationship to God.
Maybe God does say please to you sometimes. And honestly, what would that apart from this story, what would even that little possibility do to your conception of the dumb mind? If all you have ever imagined is God saying, do this, do that, what would happen if one day you heard God say, please? Hopefully, it wouldn't come along with a command like this, but this is also why I think this little word na is important to the story today. Because we've already seen God negotiate with Abraham.
We've already seen God patiently stand before Abraham waiting for his response. And then just last week, we saw Abraham push back against God. Why are we now so quick to depersonalize this moment between them here? Now, know it's a test. It's laid out pretty clearly here in verse one, but maybe we're already missing the intent of the evaluation.
Maybe there's more to this than just, yes, sir. Hold on to that. We'll find our way back. There's something else I wanna talk about here. There's this almost awkward, somewhat stilted, stuttering request that comes from God.
Take your son, your only son, the son whom you love, Isaac. Even in Hebrew, this reads quite awkwardly. And perhaps that's why there's a very famous Midrash from the rabbi Rashi who died in the year 11/00/2005. But he fills in the awkward pauses and imagines all of this as a conversation between Abraham and God. Take your son, says God.
Which son? Replies Abraham. Your only son, says God. Well, I do have two sons, says Abraham. Maybe you forgot about Ishmael.
No, says God. I remember him. In fact, I love him dearly. I'm looking after him right now. I'm talking about the son you love.
Well, I love both of them, says Abraham, as God stares back with raised eyebrow. So God responds, stop playing games here Abraham. It's Isaac we're talking about. Now, this kind of playful reading is interesting because I think it reminds us that sometimes what's not said is where the most important words lie in a story. Bobby did something like this earlier in the series.
We have this moment where Abraham's father, Terah, dies. And it's only in the aftermath, in his grief, that God speaks and calls him to somewhere new. Well, what if it wasn't just in the aftermath? What if God had been speaking to Abraham all along since his childhood? But what if his father, Terah, was an imposing figure, a bad dad, someone who took up too much space for a young Abraham to hear that divine calling.
Now, is that what happened? I don't know. You don't know. But does that possibility, that question perhaps open the story in new ways to allow us to see maybe our story reflected back to us here. I think it might.
And so what Rashi is doing here is taking a story that can feel very distant from anything in my life at least and bringing it a little closer to home. Have I ever played favorites? Have I ever been partial in ways that were damaging to the people around me? Have I ever been confronted with the consequence of that? What this exercise is doing is helping us to place this story in the context of what we've already read about Abraham.
Again, we've seen Abraham in dialogue with God. We've seen Abraham implore God to do what is right, and yet now perhaps confronted with his own malfeasance, the way he has not treated his sons fairly, Abraham seems to shrink from the responsibility to confront God. So early in the morning, Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. And when he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place that God had told him.
On the third day of the journey, Abraham looked up and saw that place in the distance. And so he said to his servants, stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go on. We will worship and then we'll come back to you. It could be here that Abraham just doesn't want to raise suspicions with his son. Could be that this is a Freudian slip of fading hope.
But we should notice here all of these we's. We will worship. We will come back. In Hebrew thought, that first common plural pronoun there is a subject of a lot of speculation. What is going through Abraham's head right now?
But the story just continues. Abraham took the wood from the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife, and the two of them went on together. Isaac though spoke up. He said to his father Abraham, father, yes, my son Abraham replied. And it's an interesting moment.
Gotta remember here, Abraham starts off the story as Abram, but when Abram has a son, he is renamed Abraham. That means father Abram. And, what that means is that what we read here in Hebrew is essentially, Isaac said to his father, my father Abram, father. Yes, said father Abram. This sentence is supposed to make you feel very uncomfortable.
You're on literary shaky footing right now because we know these are not the actions of a father. It's like the author is forcing you to slow down, to confront the implications of this moment. I think that's even driven home when Isaac then asks, the fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the offering? To which his father replies, God will provide the lamb, my son. And the two of them continued on together.
Now, again, I wanna pause here. This translation is fine. It gets the intent, but it's hiding something important. More literally, what Abraham says is that God will see. And that's the exact same phrase that was used when Abraham saw the place that God told him to go to, and then when he set off alone with Isaac on that last stage of the journey.
The intent here, I think, is that Abraham is saying, maybe even just to himself in this moment, God will see. That God will see the light. God will see that this is wrong. It's not just that God will provide. It's an expression of hope that God will ultimately change course.
The problem is Abraham keeps that to himself. And so, when they reached the place that God had told them about, Abram built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid them on the altar. And there's so much that's just left out here. I mean, is there a struggle, a fight?
Did Isaac even understand what was happening as he's being tied up? And yet without any of our questions answered for us, Abram reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him, Abraham, Abraham, I'm here, he replied. Do not lay a hand on the boy. Don't do anything.
I know that you fear God because you've not withheld your son from me, not even your only son. And Abraham looked up and there in the thicket, he saw a ram caught by its horns. So he went over and he sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead. So all is well that ends well. Am I right?
Well, no. I mean, sure, Isaac's life is spared, but can we honestly say the same about his relationship with his father? About his mental health after this experience? I mean, what kind of psychological trauma would this do to a kid knowing his father might murder you whenever his deity demands? That's not just idle speculation, by the way.
The rabbis have noted since antiquity that Abraham and Isaac never speak again anywhere in scripture. Isaac's last words directly to his father are, where is the lamb for the burnt offering? In fact, there's a story later in Genesis 24. Abraham is old now, perhaps estranged from his son, and so he calls in his most trusted servant to come and speak with him. He makes that servant promise to go and find his son Isaac a wife.
Is that because Abraham has no relationship with his son to speak of at that point? No access to offer any guidance to his son directly? It's all been too damaged and broken. Trust too painfully seared to ever properly reconcile. I don't know.
We can't say for sure. We're speculating here. I'll be honest though, this would be a tough one to forgive dad for. So what do we do with a story like this? Well, there's lots of different ways Christians and Jewish writers have over the years, but there are two ideas that have become important for me as I engage with this tale this week.
The first contextual, the second theological. And for that contextual piece, I have to go back to our conversation with Nahum Sarna from last week. You see, part of the problem with a God like this God in Genesis is that this God is unlike any of the other gods that were known at the time. This god was uncontained and inescapable. And that meant the scariest thing possible was to believe in this god, but to remain unconvinced of this god's goodness.
I mean, you could at least run away from those localized deities. You could change allegiances and find a bigger God to be on your side if things ever went bad. This God was different. And so Sodom was told to teach us that this God was not unpredictable, not a loose cannon. This God was far more gracious than we could possibly expect.
Still, what would God want in return for that grace? And by all accounts, in almost all ancient cultures, there was a practice of some form of religious sacrifice. So when times are good, you sacrificed as a sign of thanks. When things were bad, you sacrificed as a sign of repentance. When things got really good or perhaps when things got really bad, when the gods found themselves particularly unstable, the assumed solution was then to raise the stakes.
And in certain parts of the world, including parts of the ancient Near East, that meant you sacrifice not just what you love, but your very future. I think that's why when Abraham hears God say sacrifice your child, his first response isn't surprise. He knows this is what the gods demand. And that's the test, at least as Abraham hears it. Sacrifice what is most precious to you, the very promise God has gifted you.
Except every test has to come in two parts. Right? Like, there's a test of obedience. Will you do what God has asked? And sure, that's a big part of it, but there's also a test of hearing too.
Right? Like, did you understand what God actually wanted in the first place? That's a big part of the test. And I have to wonder here, what if what God wanted was a fight? There's an old Monty Python sketch.
This guy walks up to a table, and there's a sign on the table that says, $1 for a debate. The first man pays and sits down, and the two men just sit there staring at each other. And finally, the first man says, I paid you for a debate. And the man behind the desk says, no, you didn't. Yes, I did.
I just gave you the money. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes, I did.
And then finally, the man says, okay. I see what's going on here. This is not a debate. A debate is where you present an argument and I present a logical response, and then we wrestle through the implications. And the man behind the desk says, no.
Not. Now in true Monty Python fashion, this goes on for about thirty minutes back and forth by her. But what if the first part of the test is the yes or no section, the scantron component where God says, will you do what I ask? Yes or no? The second part of the test is the debate, the essay section where Abraham is supposed to argue with God just like he did when he's standing before God facing down Sodom.
What if Abraham is supposed to say, I would do anything you ask, but you you would not ask for this. Maybe to quote Abraham from last week, would not the judge of all the earth do what is right? Like, does it not seem strange to anyone else here that Abraham would argue with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and yet so quickly resign himself to the death of his son? I don't think Abraham passes the test here. I think God is the one who has to step in and pass it for him.
The God of Genesis is asking this question. It's not just about the lengths that Abraham will go to please this God. The question is about whether we, whether Abraham, whether any of us understand this God at all. And right now, I think it's clear that Abraham does not. Because even after everything he's experienced, Abraham still can't yet imagine a God that does not want to take from him what he loves the most.
And, I think that's a real problem even with our theology today. I mean, does God desire obedience? Yeah. Does God demand obedience above all else? I think God says, please.
Because, no, I don't think God demands obedience for the sake of obedience. I think God desires that we learn to listen to God, to hear the divine voice for our own good. And sometimes that means learning to push back against what we've been taught about God. Sometimes that means learning to defy expectations that have been put on us by others. Sometimes that means denying ourselves things that we really want because we've listened to God about the harm that what we want will do to us down the road.
Sometimes sometimes it means you and I, we have to be willing to allow God to shatter our very imagination of God. Here's what I find fascinating. Abraham knows this God is different. He has an imagination of how gracious this God can be, and he's ready to call on that imagination when it needs to be directed at someone else. He's there to argue for God to save Sodom.
And yet when that same conviction needs to be called on for himself, for his child, it's almost like Abraham reverts back to that old imagination of a petty, vindictive, temperamental gods of his father. All of a sudden, he's like the scolded child doing what he's told all over again, rather than the man who's met God, who knows in his heart what this God is like. See, I think this story was told so that when the Hebrews were tempted to revert back to old imaginations like the other nations, to believe that this God was just like all the rest, and maybe if things ever got bad enough, they could win favor by practicing the unthinkable. I think this story stood at the foundation of the Hebrew religion to say this God will never let that happen. And Abraham is brought to the precipice of his most despairing imagination of the gods precisely so that humanity would never return there.
And we know now that God never wanted sacrifice, child or otherwise. Right? That's why we have the prophets over and over saying things like, even though you bring me burnt offerings, I'm not gonna accept them. Instead, let justice flow like a river, righteousness like a never ending stream. That's Amos.
Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but my ears you have opened burnt offerings you do not require. That's the Psalms. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Knowledge of God, not burnt offerings. That's Hosea.
See, we know all of this now, but we gotta remember Abraham stands at the very beginning of the story. At a period of human history dominated by myth and memory of gods that represented the uncaring forces of storm and flood. Of course, the gods wanna take whatever you love the most. And so God's test is, do you understand who I am yet? And Abraham's answer is, not really.
In fact, I think you're gonna have to show up and show me. That's why ancient peoples told this story, not because Abraham was the hero, but because God was. This tale, as complex and complicated as it is, fundamentally shifted humanity's relationship to the divine. It permanently put stakes in the ground and said there are some lines that cannot be crossed. But not only that, this story sets the foundation for the rest of scripture as God slowly but surely, graciously, and patiently continually works to refine our imagination of the divine.
Stripping away our misconceptions, peeling back our biases until one day we come face to face with the goodness of God in the birth of an infant who will finally show us what peace actually looks like. See, there's the hard truth about this story. There are things that you and I believe about God right now that are wrong. And, they're wrong because they don't look like Jesus. And, one day in God's graciousness, they will be stripped away.
That's the test of our journey. To have all of our misconceptions, all of our preconceptions slowly fall away until we are left with grace and peace. God begins that story here. God continues that story throughout the scripture. Let's pray.
God for those places in our minds where we are still holding on to images of you that are framed by images of power we see in the world around us, or images of greed and jealousy that we feel inside of ourselves. And we project them onto you, and we think this is the way you interact with us rather than the grace and peace, the love that sits at the founding of the universe and calls us home. God, we ask that you would slowly test us so that those images could be stripped away, those biases peeled back until all we are left with is the image of your son. Path of peace through the world that welcomes us to step, to walk, to move, to be invited all the way back to your heart. God, we don't want to worship our image of you.
We want to know who you are. And, we invite you to change that today and tomorrow and the next. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray, amen. Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information.
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Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.