Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 8:31-39
Mark 8:31-38
Psalm 16 or 16:5-11
Terrifying, these readings. At the beginning, the knife and the fire; at the end, the Cross. Bookends of sheer terror. And in the middle, Psalm 16: "Protect me, O God." Protect me, indeed! The whole psalm is full of quiet confidence. "The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup." That refrain runs through the whole Old Testament; at least half a dozen times, in many different places, you can read either "The Lord is my portion" or "O Lord, you are my portion," reminding God whose God is. God has chosen me in love, and given me the right to claim God for my own beloved. That is why, when I was preparing for ordination, I had carved on a ring those very words, to wear for all my life. It is both a claim and a pledge of fidelity: we can dare to be faithful, dare to commit our lives, because we know with sure certainty that God is faithful to us.
So what's this thing about testing? The way the story tells it, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, the child of promise, the bearer of the covenant. It seems like a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition for Abraham: if he kills the child, the covenant is finished, and if he doesn't, will God annul the covenant because Abraham failed the test?
For me, this doesn't square with the God who is my portion, the God who comes to me in love and faithfulness. This story says to me that Abraham has not yet grown out of his idol-worshiping past, that he still has some very mistaken notions about who God is. The God who demands the sacrifice of an innocent child is not the same, surely, as the God whose own heart was broken open, broken to death, on a Cross for our sake. It amazes me, though, how many commentators on the Bible glorify this story as an example of total self-surrender to God, Abraham placing his life and his future in God's hands. Well, not exactly. It's Isaac's life and future that are first of all at stake here. The great philosopher Emmanuel Kant saw that: he condemned the act supposedly demanded of Abraham as completely contrary to the moral law. But the commentator I was reading (a good Roman Catholic priest, now dead) dismissed Kant's objection as just "Enlightenment humanism."
Humanists are, after all, favored whipping-boys (and girls) on the right-wing talk shows, as if concern for humanity were something shallow and silly. It doesn't go along with a culture of "toughness," in which we are supposed to bring up our sons to be "real men," and in which we find it noble to send them into danger, to kill or be killed. Mothers in general take a dim view of that, and you notice that in this story nobody asks Sarah what she thinks. I can just imagine the scene: "Well, hon, I know you went through quite an ordeal, bearing a son at age 90, but God says I have to cut his throat and burn him on the fire, so see you next week." In fact, this is one of the key events in creating a hugely dysfunctional family: if you follow the story in Genesis, you can see it happening. It goes on from where we left off: the text says that "Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba." So what happened to Isaac? It doesn't sound as if he went home with his father. The next chapter begins with Sarah's dying, and she doesn't die in Beer-sheba. And from the moment he asks his question about the ram for the sacrifice until he is a very old man, Isaac never says another word in the text. He mourns his mother; he is comforted by his wife, who apparently takes his mother's place in his life; he fathers two sons who spend most of their lives hating each other, and as you follow the story of Jacob and Esau, and then Jacob's sons, you see the dysfunction just growing and growing.
Something's not right here. Following Abraham up the mountain of sacrifice and following Jesus on the road to the cross produce two totally different kinds of lives. If we take Abraham as the prime example of how not to treat your children, we can set in contrast to him the late, great Fred Rogers. (Try to imagine Mr. Rogers sacrificing one of his two sons, and I think you'll get my drift.) For Fred Rogers, every child was a precious individual life to be nourished and built up, never torn down or degraded or "used" for some other purpose. Fred Rogers had the mind of Christ, as Paul would say.
Children were fascinated by Fred Rogers-and not only children, I think. How many of us, when times are really bad, have turned on the TV just to hear Mr. Rogers tell us that we are special and he likes us just the way we are? Isn't it true that we hope, in our heart of hearts, that God is like that?-and not sitting above us, testing us, ready to zap us if we don't measure up? And here's the really good news: God is more like Mr. Rogers than like the testing God we fearfully imagine.
So what shall we do with the story of Abraham and Isaac? Should we cut it out and throw it away?-and along with it a lot of other Bible stories that are filled with terror? No, I don't think so-though not each and every one of them is the right thing to read in times of stress. We need the word of God in Scripture, all of it, because in it we encounter the Word of God in flesh, Jesus Christ-not because there's some kind of line to be drawn from Abraham sacrificing Isaac to God sacrificing Jesus! That's not the point, not at all. It is because coming up against a story like this makes us stop, and take a breath, and enter into the struggle to come closer to the God who is so open to us, whose light is so bright that to our eyes it is only darkness. "We need to read the Bible around Christ," says Rowan Williams, "and read it, therefore, in the confidence that our own mishearing and misapprehending, our own confusions and uncertainties about the text and about the matter with which it deals, will be part of God's triumphant work in us. . . . At the end of the night we shall learn his name as he touches us, because we know that scripture turns upon Christ, in whom all texts are finally fulfilled, since there is in him no misapprehension, no distorting by sin of the gift of God."
Besides-I have to tell you this-we need this story about Abraham because sooner or later some of us, maybe most of us, maybe even all of us, are called upon to live it. It might be someone making a military career, dedicated and truly believing in the work to be done, who comes up against an order he can't obey, because of the Gospel. It might be someone climbing the corporate ladder, doing good work and making the world a better place while building a career-and then learning a terrible truth about the company that has to be revealed, for the good of everyone. It might be one of the ministers of the Church, cleric or lay person, who out of love for her or his congregation has to tell them Gospel truth about themselves. (I've met all these people; haven't you?) In these and a thousand other situations, people are called upon to reach out, and take the knife, and cut the throat of their hope for the future, the life they have dreamed of. They have to bury their dead hopes and embrace, instead, the Cross. And there is no consolation for them except in the Cross itself-for was there ever any tree in the forest that bore a fruit like that one?
Paul makes an astonishing promise in the text of the letter to the Romans that we read today: "neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Who is this God who loves us so much? Do we really want to be close to this God? Does it mean that God will be always watching us, waiting for us to go astray, testing us, punishing us if we fail? Does it mean that we will inevitably see the death of our hopes? (well, that could be more likely, if we are only thinking of our hopes in this world). Or can it be that Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, can show us, in the very act of wrestling with the darkness, the face of a God from whom we cannot bear to be parted? This is the God who does not demand our death, but instead invites us to life, a God whose whole self is poured out in love for us because God cannot bear to be parted from any one of us. A God who gives us into the care of one another, so that each of us may have the honor of sharing in God's care for those whom God so loves.
May this God of love, this God of hope and dear desire, Easter in us today and this year and always. Amen.