“Your Son, Your Only Son”
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
Genesis 22:1-14 and Psalm 13 | Jeremiah 28:5-9 and Psalm 89:1-4, 15-18 | Romans 6:12-23 | Matthew 10:40-42
What’s a poor preacher to do? A few weeks ago, we had Trinity Sunday, arguably the least favorite preaching opportunity of the church year. And now we have the mysterious story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac? This is like a skating program with consecutive quadruple axels, with a similar potential for pratfalls.
If you’re looking for a tidy explanation of this story, whether theological, philosophical, or ethical, please look elsewhere. Several standard theological principles – Divine Command Theory, God’s otherness, or God’s inscrutability –try to extract an ethical lesson from the story, if not to justify God’s behavior. Like most attempts at theodicy, though, none of them are particularly soul-nourishing. And when, in the 19th Century, Søren Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling, all he really proved, albeit brilliantly, is that there is no rational justification for Abraham’s actions. Hence,Fear and Trembling enjoys a reputation as a landmark text in existentialism, a testament to the absurdity of faith.
Perhaps a better approach is to recognize that the story raises any number of questions that have no easy answersbut that enable lively discussion, and conceivably a good sermon:
1. Why doesn’t Abraham argue with God? In Genesis 18, Abraham quarrels with God about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, bargaining God down to staying His hand if there are ten righteous people to be found. Why, then, is there not a peep of resistance at murdering his own son?
2. Why does God need to test Abraham again? (And does he pass the test?) In Jewish tradition, Abraham is thought to have already passed nine “tests of faith.” Most of us, I imagine, would have thought that the bit about circumcising himself and all the males in his household sufficed. Yet, this same Abraham abandoned his father in his old age, twice panders his wife to protect himself, and banishes his firstborn Ishmael to the desert. Is that why God wants to test him again? To put it another way, is Abraham’s willingness to murder his son heroic, or psychotic? Was God seeing how far Abraham would go, or whether he would go too far? That is, did he pass, or fail, the test?
3. Why does God call Isaac Abraham’s “only son?” Ishmael is still out there somewhere, although probably feeling a bit grateful for his disinheritance.
4. Why, after this, do we never again see Abraham and Isaac together? OK, this one makes for a very short sermon.
5. Aren’t the lectionary readings supposed to fit together? Isaac’s binding is a popular story for typological connections with the Gospel. Typically, those connections are drawn to the passion narratives. The association between the Akedah and today’s reading from the 10th Chapter of Matthew, however, escapes me. Aside from a parallel to the crucifixion, an interesting pairing would have been last week’s Gospel, Matthew 10: 24-39, in which Jesus talks of setting a man against his father, and having to love God even more than one’s family.[1]
But questions call for answers, and problems have solutions, and there seem to be no easy answers (or solutions) to the riddles this story presents. Can we, then, treat the story as what it is -- a mystery to be contemplated, rather than a problem to be solved? The mystery to me is, what was going on in the mind of God during the Akedah? Was God really testing Abraham? Or did he undergo a change of heart halfway through?
It’s not heretical to say that God changed His mind. That happens repeatedly in the Torah. Did God see what this task has done to Abraham -- turned him into a robot, lumbering up the mountain, preparing to kill his beloved son -- and say: “Enough! This is too horrible. You don’t have to do this!”? Was the ram in the thicket God’s Plan B? In ancient Hebrew manuscripts, verse 13 has a crucial addition not found in standard Christian translations: “And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and he saw, and lo! there was a ram, and after that it was caught in a tree by its horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” The ram seems to be a late arrival to the scene, checking in from the scorer’s table.
I wonder: are we witnessing a dark night, a crisis in God’s own soul? Perhaps God realizes that the day will come when He stands in Abraham’s shoes, helpless, as Jesus, His only Son, His beloved Son, dies an unjust, sacrificial death. In the moment, does God comes to appreciate the full horror of what He will have to endure one day? Atonement theology all the way back to Anselm of Canterbury holds that only Jesus, fully human and fully divine, could make an adequate sacrifice for the sins of the world. Maybe the story of the Akedah shows God realizing that only He, and no human, should be asked to surrender His beloved child, no matter the gain to the world. No wonder God goes silent that Friday, making Jesus feel forsaken. No wonder the curtain in the temple was torn. A sword pierces not just Mary’s soul, but God’s too.
Could compassion for Abraham have made God change his mind? Classical theism says that God is impassable, meaning that God not only does not but cannot suffer. The ability to suffer, the theory goes, would be a weakness in God, by making God vulnerable; and God has no weaknesses. But is empathy a weakness for God? Jurgen Moltmann argues, compellingly in my mind, that in the Holocaust era a God that suffers with us may be the only alternative to no God at all. Christians believe that God has personality. Psychology teaches us that the ability to suffer with others is part of a fully formed personality, and that the inability to feel compassion is a psychological disorder -- a weakness.
So, here’s a thread tying the lectionary together: Last month, we celebrated the reality of the tripartite God, bound together by love for one another. In last week’s Gospel, Jesus warns his followers that discipleship will call on them to dissolve familial bonds of affection. This week we witness God recognizing that this horrible event, this sundering of the ties with a beloved Son, will one day be required even of Him.
Next Lent, when we maintain our vigil with the Son in the tomb, let’s remember that we also sit shiva with the Father who lost His only Son. That would be a day to say a prayer for the Father, not just to Him. Better yet, any time we prayerfully share our pain with God, let’s take a moment to let Him share His pain with us.
[1] I’m not a big fan of typology, for two reasons. (1) Used without some careful thinking, it can be about half a step up from proof texting. (2) More seriously, it can deny the Hebrew Bible the dignity it deserves as the sacred and living history, law, and wisdom of the Jewish people, turning it into simply a prequel of sorts to the “real” scripture (the New Testament.)
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