SUNDAY 26 JUNE 2005
Genesis 22: 1-14; Matthew 10: 40-42
The story of God testing Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his only son and heir, only to countermand the instruction at the very last moment, comes to us out of the mists of time. It is presented as the supreme test of Abraham??s obedience, a test which Abraham passes with flying colours. Whatever the people thought, who passed the story on from generation to generation for a thousand years or more before it was eventually written down, the story presents us with a particularly repugnant picture of God.
If this were a story from this twenty-first century of the Common Era, it would indeed be a repugnant picture of God. We have in our mind??s eye the portrait of God that we gain through Jesus. The God we see through Jesus is a very different God from this portrayal of a demanding God who requires the aged and faithful servant of God to offer up as a sacrifice the very gift that had been given him by God ?± the son through whose descendants the name of Abraham would be blessed for countless generations. Even the fact that God stopped the sacrifice taking place in the very nick of time brings us no nearer to the God of Jesus. It simply leaves us, in our twenty-first century minds, with an uncomfortable picture of a cosmic sadist and trickster.
But we make a mistake if we read the story only with twenty-first century scruples. Somehow, to grasp its significance ?± and it is indeed significant ?± we have to think ourselves into the hearts and minds of those who faithfully transmitted the story by word of mouth for a thousand years until around three thousand years ago, and those who heard the story after it had been written down by a nameless writer from the northern kingdom, Israel, and then later edited into the sagas of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel that appear in the book of Genesis.
Gerhard von Rad, one of the twentieth century??s most prominent Old Testament scholars, claims that from generation to generation the Hebrew people passed this story on and later read and retold this story for one principal reason ?± that is, they identified themselves with Isaac. They were Isaac, they had been laid on God??s altar in order to be given back to God, and they were then given back their life by God alone. "That is to say," writes von Rad, "(Israel) could base its existence in history not on its own legal titles as other nations did, but only on the will of Him who in the freedom of his grace permitted Isaac to live." (1)
The test for Abraham was whether he was faithful to God for God??s own sake, or whether what mattered most to him was the gift of a son and therefore the gift of descendants. Does one love God because of what God has given or will give, or does one love God simply for God??s own sake? There is a prayer attributed to the father-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed which goes like this: O my God, if I worship you from fear of hell, send me to hell. If I worship you from hope of heaven, exclude me from heaven. But if I worship you for your own sake, do not withhold from me your eternal beauty."
In the ancient Hebrew mind, Abraham demonstrated without doubt his primary faithfulness to God, even though to our twenty-first century minds the idea of a father being willing to kill his own child to prove a religious point is nothing short of repulsive. For those who had told and retold the story, it was precisely because Abraham had been prepared to give back to God the gift of a son and heir that had originally been given to him, that Isaac??s life was gifted back. Because of this gifting back of life to Isaac, Israel existed as the descendants of Isaac, and therefore of the supremely faithful Abraham, and this was a matter of sheer grace, of sheer unearned, unmerited gift based upon nothing at all other than God??s passion for them. The, to us, repellent notion of divine test and human obedience becomes a backdrop to the greater claim of divine grace which lay behind Israel??s very existence.
It may also be that the story of Israel??s conviction that their existence was a gift of grace to them somehow became tied in with the early development of their distinctive faith which stood apart from cultic practices including child sacrifice prevailing in Canaan around 1900 or 2000 years before the Common Era. Child sacrifice was a not uncommon practice in the religions of the ancient Middle East, and many scholars believe that the story of a ram being substituted for Isaac as the sacrificial offering represents an early Hebrew rejection of the practice. That may at least be part of the backdrop to Israel??s understanding of its origins in the gift of life to their semi-mythical ancestor, Isaac.
A significant aspect of the narrative is the role it played in identifying and perpetuating the memory of a particular place where the bond between God and God??s people is experienced as most close. Taking the Celtic notion of a "thin place" as a place where the divide between the divine and the human is at its most least, the place of Isaac??s almost sacrifice is considered to be the ?´thinnest?? place of all on earth. It is here, once again, that ancient story becomes 2005 current affairs.
At the beginning of the narrative, Abraham is told to go to the land of Moriah and to perform the sacrifice on a mountain that would be shown to him. There is only one other reference in the Hebrew scriptures to Moriah, and that is a reference to a particular mountain ?± that is ?´mountain?? in the way we speak of "Mounts" Hobson and Eden and Victoria, rather than Mounts Taranaki or Ruapehu.
This mountain, or hill, named Moriah is the one on which the Jerusalem temple was built. The rock that forms the peak of Mt Moriah is, in Hebrew tradition, the rock on which Isaac was to have been sacrificed. Moreover, in Hebrew tradition that same rock is known as the ?´navel of the world??, because it is said to be the first part of the earth to be formed in God??s act of creating the earth. Above that rock was built the Holy of Holies in Solomon??s temple and again the Holy of Holies in the second temple built after the return from exile and which Herod the Great centuries later turned into one of the architectural wonders of the Roman world until it was destroyed in 70 CE. It was ?± and is ?± for the Jewish people the ?´thinnest?? place, the holiest place on earth. And for most of the last two thousand years they have been able to get no closer to it than the western wall of the gigantic platform on which Herod??s temple was built, because for Muslims, this rock is the third holiest place on earth after Mecca and Medina. Above it now stands the Dome of the Rock, for it was from this same rock that Muslim tradition believes the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. To put it in a time perspective, this site has been sacred to Muslims for as long as Anglo-Saxons have lived in Britain.
Once again, we see ancient story and modern international relations colliding. The future custody of that rock ?± for there are already ultra orthodox Jewish plans to rebuild the Temple, supported by extreme fundamentalist Christians ?± the future custody of that rock could determine the fate of nations in this twenty-first century. While current attention gets focussed on other issues in the Middle East, such as the attempt to build a democratic Iraq, and the imminent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip and some other parts of occupied Palestine, the constant underlying issue is Jerusalem. Who controls Jerusalem, and even more who controls what Jews and Christians call "Temple Mount" and Muslims call "The Noble Sanctuary" is not merely a matter of a squabble between religions. It is a deeply passionate issue which has the potential to ignite the whole of the Middle East and drag the rest of the world into it with consequences so awful they don??t bear thinking about.
The World War One poet Wilfred Owen, serving as a British officer in the trenches in France and witnessing the daily slaughter of young men until he himself was killed only seven days before the Armistice, wrote a poem based upon the Abraham / Isaac story.
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, "My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?"
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretch?ăd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, "Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him."
But the old man would not do so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. (2)
Twenty-first century moral scruples might wish to dismiss the story of Abraham??s preparedness to sacrifice Isaac as primitive religiosity of little relevance to we who are of a far more sophisticated age. Yet there are plenty of old men who would be willing to offer the lives not of any Ram of Pride but of their sons and grandsons as the sacrifice for possession of a rock in a city that has been viciously fought over something like seventy times in its three thousand year existence. What really was Abraham??s test? Was it whether or not he could obey what he perceived to be the command of his God? Or was it to learn that he was not listening clearly to his God, and that God does not require such sacrifices.
Of course, it is a very old story from the earliest beginnings of the Hebrew faith, and so that faith had not developed to the understanding of, say, the prophet Micah some fourteen hundred years later who could say that what God requires is not sacrifice even of animals, but to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with God. And it was a very long way, two thousand years away, from the God of Jesus. But still, two thousand years after Jesus, now, there are those who believe their God requires bloody sacrifice, not on an altar of stone, but in the arena of warfare. All over a piece of real estate and a chunk of rock.
I have focussed on the First Testament reading for today in preaching, and not on the theme of ?´Support Sunday?? and the very important work Presbyterian Support (Northern) engages in, because I was reluctant to break the current lectionary flow of pivotal, meaning-making stories from the origins of Hebrew faith, and Christian faith, and to some extent of Muslim faith as well. These stories we are reading week by week at the moment remind us of some foundations to the understanding that somehow, through an act of sheer grace, we have been designated the people of God. But not just we Christians; Jews and Muslims as well. We are all the people of the one God. A prayer we will use later points out what this means. We are chosen not for special privilege, but for special responsibility.
At their very best, when reflecting on the sheer grace of God that gave a son to Abraham and life to that son, Isaac, when reflecting that their existence as a people was a matter of sheer grace, the Jewish people have understood the special responsibility and not the privilege of having been chosen. And so have Christians, at their best. And so have Muslims. But the temptation to believe in the sacrifice of others for some ancient principle or some cherished privilege is never far away.
It is almost a daily temptation, inviting a daily response ?± a response of recognising special responsibility rather than special privilege. And part of that is the other focus of today??s service ?± making a difference to people through loving care and acts of justice, such as through the work of Presbyterian Support (Northern).
1. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis, SCM Press Ltd, London, p240
2. Found in Liturgy of Life, Donald Hilton, National Christian Education Council, Birmingham, 1991, p201