REFLECTION JUNE 28
Today’s reading from Genesis can be one of the more unsettling Biblical readings. Most of us don’t like the idea of God testing us to begin with, and we certainly don’t like the idea of God’s instruction to Abraham to sacrifice his son – even if it’s only a test. The fact that Abraham gets to the point of picking up the knife to kill Isaac is too close for comfort for most of us.
But when we move beyond these feelings, the reading actually offers some striking theological statements. These statements – in addition to the dramatic observations I just made - make this passage one of the best-known readings in Abraham’s journey of faith with our God. As I talked about last week, Abraham’s story lies at the root of three great religious traditions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So it’s definitely worth paying attention to what scripture reveals to us about our God through this story.
The very first thing we’re told is that “God tested Abraham.” We’re given a context at the beginning of this passage for what follows. Maybe that context is intended to give us some breathing space for the events. If so, I’m not sure it succeeds. The story is still, in one dimension, horrific for those of us who have been parents, and perhaps for everyone.
But this is a test - and a big one at that. Remember that God has miraculously provided Isaac to Abraham and Sarah, and God has promised that it’s through this son that God will provide a multitude of further offspring. Not just biological offspring, but spiritual offspring, a multitude of people who trust in the one God.
Given this reality, it’s not explainable to Abraham why God would now tell him to offer Isaac back to God as a sacrifice. And a very real sacrifice it would be: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love . . . .” As fathers do, Abraham loves his son Isaac, no doubt with a parent’s boundless love, the kind of love that would sacrificially offer one’s self in his place if given the opportunity. As we find out much later in the Biblical story through the person of Jesus, the divine son, God the Father knows this love from the inside.
However, what is being tested is not Abraham’s love for Isaac but Abraham’s complete loyalty to God. As it will be articulated later through both Moses and Jesus, God expects our complete, our absolute allegiance: “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Deut. 6:4; Mark 12:30) No one and no thing is allowed to come before God.
You might be reminded of our gospel reading from last week, in which Jesus tells his disciples, “ Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
Our Lord reminds us that the moment we begin placing our parent or our spouse or our child or our country or our work or our money or our favorite hobby above God is the moment we slip into idolatry – we begin to worship something other than the only true God. We must, like Abraham, be willing to sacrifice any other allegiance we hold within our hearts to our allegiance to God. And when we’re confronted with such a choice, as we are more often than we recognize, we might find ourselves being tested – by God or by life itself – in much the same way Abraham is tested in our reading.
This tension is sometimes apparent in people’s attitude toward the nation in which they live, and we Americans are no exception. Some of you will remember that saying, “America, love it or leave it.” Aside from not being the most grace-filled way to deal with each other at times of disagreement - it closes down conversation rather than invites it - this attitude also suggests that our country and its leaders can never be wrong, or sinfully blind because they are pursuing goals out of line with God’s, or simply mistaken.
However, we Christians know that isn’t true for any of us, our leaders included. We all are susceptible to placing other things above God and the sacrificial love that we are called into as creatures of God. And we are all accountable to God and God’s way of justice and love at all times. So we have a responsibility to hold our leadership as well as ourselves accountable to the ways of justice and love, a responsibility to speak out in the name of Christ when the way of God is not being followed.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer paid with his life for doing so in Germany during the Second World War. Most of us won’t be asked to make that kind of sacrifice, but Bonhoeffer was clearly willing to make it because his allegiance to God and the way of God was first in his life, as it is called to be for any of us who claim Jesus as Lord, those of us who are called to reflect the faith of Abraham in our lives whatever that might look like.
Because that is precisely what is at stake for Abraham: his faith in this amazing God he is coming to know through God’s self-revelation. Perhaps because God has pulled off Isaac’s existence in the first place, Abraham now responds to this test before him in complete and utter trust.
“Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Isaac asks his father. “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” Abraham does not try to take matters into his own hands, not by ignoring God, nor by arguing with God, nor by finding some way around God’s call, for example finding what Abraham himself conceives as a suitable replacement for the offering he is called to make.
Instead, Abraham listens to God and obeys God, trusting that - as God has provided in the past - God will again provide in order to further God’s purposes in Abraham’s life and in the life of the world. Abraham has come to know that in the most critical realities of life, God alone can provide - and God does provide. And Abraham has learned to place his allegiance to God above everything else.
It’s the choice Jesus is faced with in Gethsemane. In the face even of death, will he trust that his heavenly Father will be faithful to his promise and provide life? Like Jesus, we are faced with the same question: in the extreme realities of life and death, are we going to trust that God is faithful? And in the much smaller realities we face day in and day out?
It’s a decision that we must make in small and big ways each day we take breath. Just like our father Abraham. Just like our Lord Jesus Christ. Just like Mary his mother, and Joseph her spouse. Just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all the martyrs before and after him.
Will we, like them all, trust that God is faithful to us, faithful to the word of promise that God has made to the world that God so dearly, dearly loves?
And will we, in turn, be faithful to the giver of our life? Will we live our lives in such a way that our trust in God is evident to others, most specifically to God?
Will we place our allegiance to God above everyone and everything else? Will we follow Jesus, or will we worship some other god?