Painting Credit | Sacrifice of Isaac by Titian, 1544
A Homily for the St. Michael – San Miguel Episcopal Church in Newberg, Oregon.
Lessons from the Lectionary Readings for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
The temptation when faced with today’s collection of readings is to focus on only one. We may choose to go with the apparently safe words of Jesus over the violence of Isaac’s story. Or we may choose to wrestle with Abraham and Isaac, and perhaps ameliorate the violence of Isaac’s near death with the words of the Gospel.
Both options risk silencing the real difficulties present in these passages. After all, what exactly is a prophet’s reward that Jesus suggests? Rejection and even death?
And what is the reward of the righteous? As Paul reminds us again and again in Romans, Abraham is the archetypal human model of faith that is righteousness. And is Abraham’s reward for a lifetime of faithfulness God’s command to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son he loves? Or is the reward the generations that follow, and that only follow after Abraham has quite literally put his hope for those generations on a very real altar and held an all-too-sharp knife in his raised hand?
Centuries of reading that render the Abraham and Isaac story a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death while assuring us of a happy ending where God provides a ram blind us to the nuances of the story, a story that is even more provocative in what it leaves unsaid or merely suggests than in God’s shocking demand of Abraham. So let’s consider this story briefly together….
Our passage begins with God telling Abraham to take his son, his only son, the son that he loves, and offer him. Rabbinical commentators underscore the allusive nature of this three-part command. God’s “your son” begs the question which one, since there was Ishmael before Isaac. Likewise “your only son” recalls the reality that only one son is left at home since Abraham had followed both Sarah’s plan for Hagar to bear a child on her behalf and the demand to send Ishmael away. And finally, “the one you love” must be Isaac, but that also casts a shadow on Abraham as a parent, loving one child and not the other.
As the story continues, Abraham and Isaac travel for three days to Mt. Moriah. Leaving their servants behind at camp, Abraham binds the wood to Isaac’s back but carries the fire and knife himself. The threat of these few details—wood, fire, and knife—underscore the threat to Isaac’s life. They are images of ritual sacrifice, of blood and death to appease a mysterious God. Did Isaac, in asking “where is the lamb?,” already sense the fate awaiting him at the top of the mountain?
And then they arrive at the place of sacrifice and Abraham builds the altar. Isaac’s absence from the act of building the altar is intriguing. Did Abraham send him to search for a suitable animal, as much to distance the boy from the place of his execution as in hope for something else? And then Abraham binds his son Isaac.
The text says so little that as attentive readers we can’t help but wonder, did Isaac understand what was happening? Did he jump on the altar to join in his father’s faithfulness or did he resist, pleading for his life? The last image we see of Isaac in this narrative is when Abraham’s hand is poised with the knife to slay Isaac.
It is at this point the story seems to take its happy turn. An angel calls out and commands Abraham not to lay a hand on the boy, a ram becomes entangled in the bushes, and all is well. Or is it?
Abraham has already laid a hand on Isaac—he’s bound Isaac and laid him on the altar. And while the angel further instructs Abraham not to “do anything” to Isaac, this command is too little, too late. Isaac’s life may be saved, but the trauma of nearly being ritually slaughtered by one’s father as an offering to a largely unknown god undoubtedly does something to Isaac. For the rest of the section, Isaac is missing from the narrative. Abraham goes down the mountain alone, and returns home alone. The next time we see Isaac he is living in the same place where we last saw Hagar and Ishmael. And we only see Abraham and Isaac together again in chapter 25, after Abraham has died…when Isaac and Ishmael go together to bury their father.
What shall we say, then, about our Gospel reading, when Jesus talks about the prophet’s reward or the righteous person’s reward? What is such a reward in light of the trauma of Isaac’s story? What is the reward of Abraham’s story, given the undoubtable grief and trauma Abraham bore, first by sending Ishmael away and then by an act of faithfulness that left Isaac estranged from himself and Sarah? And what were the ramifications of this sacrificial act for Abraham’s relationships to Sarah? What exactly is the prophet or righteous person’s reward?
It would be tempting to walk away from such a God, from such faithfulness and righteousness that places fealty to God over care for one’s family, mental health, even the sanctity of human life. But then, walking away from these demanding passages offers no guarantees. We can do everything right as parents—love our children and provide for them, encourage and teach them, care for them and forgive them—and still find ourselves estranged from our children for reasons we cannot begin to comprehend. Given the uncertainties of parenting and human relationships, what is the real risk of a devastating faithfulness like Abraham’s?
Jesus’ last image of reward in the Gospel reading—of giving water to a little one—draws our attention to the impossibility of walking away. To not receive the prophet or the righteous, to not follow the arduous path of faithfulness is to not give water to a thirsty child. To walk away from Abraham’s call to faithfulness is to fail to provide for a child’s most basic needs. And we can’t imagine the thirsty child without being recalled again to Genesis 21 where Hagar sits dejected in the desert, listening to the cries of her son who is dying from thirst. In that moment of abandonment and thirst, God sees and provides water for the mother and child, just as God later provides a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead of his son.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Paul confidently instructs his readers to bind themselves as offerings to God and not the sinful ways of the pagan world in Romans. Paul knows that no matter how bleak the situation, this is not a world in which there is no ram. No matter how dire the situation, God will see and provide…but not exactly based on our own faithfulness or righteousness. Throughout Romans, Paul talks about our righteousness being grounded in the faithfulness of Jesus. And Jesus talks about the reward coming, not just to the prophet, or righteous person, or the one who gives a child a drink, but to those who receive the prophet or the righteous person, too. Similarly, rabbinical commentators explain that at Passover, God sees the blood on the doorframe and remembers Isaac on the altar and Abraham’s faithful hand raised holding the knife…and God saves Israel. Given this pattern, it makes sense why a first-century rabbi writing to the church in Rome emphasizes over and over that we are made righteous because God sees the blood of the messiah and remembers the faithfulness of Jesus…and through the faithfulness of Jesus, God will save God’s people.
And in this dance between faithfulness and righteousness, memory and salvation, we begin to see the mystery of faith. Somehow—in the binding of Isaac, in Paul’s letter to the Roman church, and in the Gospel reading—someone else’s faithfulness becomes our righteousness, our reward. And if that’s true, then our faithfulness might also become someone else’s righteousness. Our faithfulness, even in offering a drink of water to a thirsty child, might also work to bring about justice and peace for others.
grace & peace,
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