Scripture: Genesis 22:1-17
Difficult
questions scare us. Seriously, we don’t like them. “What do you want for
dinner?” is a challenging enough question most days; don’t even consider asking
us anything deep and existential. Of course, since we don’t like these
questions it’s a bit annoying when they show up in places like the Bible,
because we like to think that we like the Bible. It’s convenient when the Bible
says nice things we can agree with, but it’s not so convenient when the Bible
actually challenges us with a situation, or a God, that we don’t like to
imagine.
Every one of us
faces difficult questions in our daily lives—questions that we mostly choose to
ignore, because they often hide in everyday situations. Here are a few:
Why don’t I do the things that I know I
should do?
What is it that worries me about the future?
Why am I so afraid of making mistakes?
Why do I matter?
When should I speak up and when should I be
silent?
What mistakes do I make over and over again?
And maybe most
importantly: Why am I a Minnesota Vikings fan?
The most complicated
of existential questions.
The Bible addresses
many of these difficult questions, sometimes offering a story, sometimes
offering an answer, and often times just leaving a question hanging, almost it
seems just to leave you frustrated enough to come back for more. Sometimes the
Bible makes us uncomfortable, but it’s in this discomfort that we discover
something about ourselves, about God, and about what it means to be human, that
we may have never considered before. Today’s reading is one of those occasions where uneasy questions lurk just below the surface.
The story of
Abraham and Isaac is one that is familiar to us from as far back as Sunday school.
God gives this incredible promise that Abraham is going to be the father of many generations despite his octogenarian wife and notable absence of
offspring. It’s an absurd promise—and really, I might add, an unnecessary one.
Why Abraham? Why Sarah? Why wait until they are so old? But never mind those
questions—they are only a subtext for what's ahead. When the promise is
realized finally in Isaac it seems like we are expected to let the questions
go, because this is clearly a story about a gracious God who gives unexpected,
impossible blessings above and beyond what we can imagine. That’s the story we are
told in Sunday school.
But, really,
that’s neither the beginning nor the end of the matter. The actual story is far
murkier. It involves a servant, Hagar, who bears Abraham a son out of Sarah and
Abraham’s desperation. It involves that son, Ishmael, and his
mother being cast off to fend for themselves, even as Ishmael is destined to become
the father of the Arab peoples, connecting the major ethnicities in the Middle East to one common ancestor. But even with Hagar
and Ishmael out of the picture the story heads into deeper and darker territory. Finally, this all culminates in Genesis 22 when God asks Abraham to take his son, Isaac, up to Mount Moriah
and sacrifice him upon the mountain, which—if you’re keeping score at home—is
kind of an unexpected move. This is, after all, the one son that God has
promised to Abraham and Sarah even in their old age; this is the son who is
supposed to be the heir to all these ancestors that God has promised. Killing
him would seem kind of counter-productive to this whole business of filling the
earth with Abraham’s descendents.
It’s frustrating
for us, because this story creates far more concerning questions than it
answers. Why would God ask Abraham to
sacrifice Isaac? Should Abraham have gone along with it or refused? What about
Isaac—how old was he and how did this color his relationship with his father? And
Sarah—why wasn’t she involved? Is it possible that this episode indirectly led
to her death which we hear about a few verses later?
These are seriously
uncomfortable questions, which makes it all the more important that we actually
deal with them. Thomas Jefferson, who was himself something of a philosopher
most of the time, cut out and burned anything that he didn’t like in the pages
of the Bible, which essentially meant that he was left with a Bible
specifically designed to tell him that his view of the world is perfect. For this, Jefferson has been lambasted through the ages, but the truth is that we pretty
much all read the Bible this way; we all like to skim the difficult questions
in order to get to the meat that we like.
However, ignoring difficult questions does not mean
that they are any less likely to come knocking at your door. We can either
pretend that difficult questions don’t exist and hope that we are never faced
with a situation where they come to life, or we can consider them now in the
hope that if, and when, senseless tragedy comes into our lives we have some
experience to dwell upon that will serve as our guide. I’m not saying that
pondering these questions will ever give you acceptable answers—I really doubt
that any amount of thinking will ever prepare you, for example, for the tragic
loss of somebody you love—but addressing difficult questions head on will
help you understand that God is with us not just in the most comfortable, good
moments of our lives but also in the really terrible situations that make no
sense. In fact, if the Bible is any indication, God shows up far more often
when things have gone terribly wrong.
Stranger still, sometimes God also
does things that don’t seem like the God that we imagine.
Imagine God
coming to you with an order to sacrifice your only child. You’ve been waiting
for this child for nearly a hundred years, so perhaps you might have a problem
with this idea. First, you might want God’s business card: Are you really God, or is this a trick of the devil? Yes, your voice sounds
like the god who gifted me this miracle child, but this is not the kind of message
that is typical of you, O God. I’m going to need a little more proof.
Even if you had
proof of this being the same God who gave you this child you would have to very
seriously consider whether this god is actually a god worth obeying. This has
been the modern argument of many commentators who have suggested that this story
is little more than divinely-ordered child abuse or, worse still, divine conspiracy
to murder. This is the kind of thing we imagine from cults; not Jews or Christians.
The temptation is to leave it at that. This is not scripture worth our time, thank
you very much. Let’s get back to Joseph and his brothers, Moses and Pharaoh,
and those other parts of the Old Testament we like.
But here’s the thing
about difficult questions: They gnaw at you. You can’t run away from the
questions; you can either deal with them now or wait until they catch up to you
when you are at your most vulnerable. Abraham is being asked to consider what
appears to be an impossible question: “Do you, Abraham, fear-and-revere God
more than you love your son—and through him, your great nation, great name, and
great prosperity—and more even than you desire the covenant with God?”[1] And
if Abraham is being asked to consider the impossible it stands to reason that
we are as well. What is it that we love the most? Is it our family, our great
name, our prosperity? Or is it God—the source and ground of it all?
This is more than
just a hypothetical. All of us are challenged to ask whether what we love the
most is family—something that for all intents and purposes we consider
“good”—or whether what we love the most is God. This question smacked Abraham in the face like a pale of cold water, but remarkably he passed the test. Forced
to look into one of the darkest parts of his soul, Abraham demonstrated that he
was the perfect father of nations who knows that it is God from whom all
blessings flow, while at the same time, in a strange way, God showed his
tremendous faith in Abraham by offering this test in the first place. If
Abraham would have refused, the covenant would be undermined and God would be
forced either to renege on his promise or admit his fault.
At the last second,
God saves Abraham from murdering Isaac, and it seems like this was all a colossal,
sadistic waste of time. But the very fact that this story so strikes a nerve is
proof enough that it is anything but; it is a story that challenges our basic
presuppositions about God and about what is really important. In Abraham’s
place I don’t know what I would do, I bet you don’t either, but the question is
on the table: What do you value most? We are, all of us, chosen people of God,
heirs to the promise; if God came to Abraham asking for the impossible he may
someday come to you or me. It will probably take a different form, but you may
one day face the question of what matters to you most, and it will be far more
than a hypothetical, which is why we are all challenged to sit with the doubt
and the fear and to consider the one who gave us the promise in the first
place.
This is no easy
task. Nobody said it would be. But it is when we sit with the questions that we
find the beginning of wisdom.
[1] Leon Katz, The Beginning of Wisdom, pp. 337
No comments:
Post a Comment