On accidentally thinking about the Akeda on Armistice Day (with apologies to Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Deeble)

A sermon given at St Michael’s, Armistice Day 2018

So, Abraham got up; he and took his donkey, and his servants, and enough wood for a burnt offering, and he set out again on a journey into the unknown, responding once more to the inscrutable command of a God he barely knew.

Half a lifetime ago, this God had spoken, summoning Abraham from his home and his household gods, with the promise of a land and a legacy, the legacy of a family that would reach into every corner of the earth with blessing.

And so Abraham had gone, staking his life and his family’s future on the words of this strange new God. And against all predictions and experience up to that point, against his own cowardice and impatience and contingency planning, against the unassailable fact of Abraham’s childless marriage, and against the backdrop of years passing in divine silence, this strange new God had proven himself faithful. Abraham and his wife Sarah had indeed borne a child, Isaac, the son of laughter. Isaac, flesh and blood proof of God’s laughter in the face of all voices insisting on scarcity and prudence, on cause and effect.

And then, after years of silence, the voice again. The voice of command, requiring that Abraham take the much-loved son of laughter and trade him in for tears.

The command leaves us as readers, as followers, in perplexity. Who is this God? The God who has been slowly unveiling himself as trustworthy and faithful — how can he now turn against the promise? How can he be good? And what is this strange, archetypal story doing in the Bible? Generations of commentators have wrestled with such questions, including such great names as Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard and Philip Fountain. Some Jewish commentary and midrash has given Satan a role in the story. Other commentary has seen Isaac as the true hero, imagining him as a grown man who could have fought back against Abraham, but who is instead willing to pay the ultimate price if he has to. Islamic tradition offers a variation on this, where it is Ishmael, Abraham’s illegitimate son, who becomes the hero of faith. Still others have argued that the story represents a conflict between gods, where Abraham must learn to reject the voice of the god who commands the sacrifice and embrace the voice of the faithful God who prevents it.[1]

These are by no means the only explanations on offer, and I am no expert here; you should talk to Phil afterwards. But if you are like me, you might see the appeal in readings that seek to cut through the tension, readings that give us moderns something to hold onto; each one helps to make the God of the text less alien, less strange.

And yet and yet … there is also a sense that any quest to make the story more palatable loses not just the drama and the poignancy of it, but through these something fundamental about faith in the living God. It’s clear when we read the whole Abraham saga that the faith asked of Abraham is about responding to an apparently impossible promise from a God whose ways we do not understand, and so involves a seemingly impossible demand. Any attempt to cut the strangeness of this story down to size therefore risks cutting God down to our size; and then it is no longer God that we are dealing with.

For make no mistake, the stakes in this story are high. God’s whole promise to Abraham, the whole vision of a world blessed through Abraham’s heir, is on the line here. If Isaac is killed, then Abraham’s story is back to square one.

Which is why it is a test. Is Abraham’s faith in the promised reward — land and legacy — or in the God of the promise? Because It’s possible that Abraham left his homeland purely based on the potential benefits, the potential rewards on offer. The thought of descendants numbered for the stars in the sky has its own appeal, especially in a patriarchal society where genealogy is everything. In this vision of the future, Abraham gets to be famous. What’s not to like?

But that’s not primarily why God calls him. God calls Abraham to know him. Do not be afraid Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward. That is the foundation, from which the rest follows.

However uneasy we feel about the ethics of Abraham’s test, however much we revolt against it, or a look for a way out, there’s no doubt of the result. Abraham passes the test. He has established beyond doubt that he is not in this for the fame or the brownie points. He is in this promise for God.

“Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

In our own much smaller way, it’s worth asking ourselves the same question. Why have I responded to this whisper in my heart? Why am I on this Christian journey? Am I in quest of an insurance policy for whatever lies beyond the grave? Am I in need of a family, a community, a cause to believe in? Do I hold on to Christianity because it gives me an ethical system in an age that flirts with nihilism? All good things. Yet God does not just give us a family, or an eternal hope, or an ethical system. God gives us his very self. God invites us to come to know him, even as we are fully known. Is my hope in God, am I hungry for him, inscrutable though I may find him? Or am I hungry only for the gifts that come from him?

That, I guess, is my first challenge today. And my second is this. Am I able to trust whom God reveals himself to be, against the prevailing misconceptions or downright lies of my culture? With each episode in his life, Abraham has been slowly discovering more about God. Particularly he has been learning about God’s trustworthiness. This is a God who does what he says he will do. Yet Abraham still does not know much about the character of this God. He’s trustworthy, but is he good? It’s notable that, when Abraham first receives the terrible summons to sacrifice his son, he does not dispute the command or argue back. Why? It could be because he truly believes that God will not require him to go through with the deed, and there is textual evidence to suggest this (v. 5, v. 8 — he tells the servants he’ll come back; he tells Isaac that God will provide). It’s how Hebrews seemed to read it. But it’s ambiguous whether he believes this, or whether he’s just trying to put Isaac off the scent. It can plausibly be suggested that Abraham doesn’t argue back because he is familiar with the concept of human sacrifice. Perhaps this new God with whom he has thrown in his lot, is one of those gods who demands the ultimate sacrifice from among his adherents. This was something known in Ancient Near Eastern religion, as is evident from warnings later in the Old Testament against sacrificing one’s children to the Canaanite god Moloch, (Leviticus 20.2; Deuteronomy 18.10). It is something known in cultures around the world. The Aztecs reputedly sacrificed 80,000 people as part of the ritual for building one of their great pyramids.[2] The gods can be like that, hungry without limit for human flesh.

But not this God. On Mt Moriah, with Abraham’s knife poised to do the terrible deed, the voice from heaven reveals for all time that Abraham’s God is not that kind of God. Others may gorge themselves on the flesh of children and slaves and virgins, and slake their endless this with human blood. But this God — inscrutable, beyond us, mysterious — will not. And his people are not to indulge that frenzy either. Do not lay a hand upon the boy. [Abraham learns that his God is indeed a God who provides.

So Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. And there on Mt Moriah, the traditional site of the Jerusalem Temple,[3] he took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his Son. And he called that place, JehovahJireh, the Lord will provide.

There are so many resonances in this rich and evocative story that it pushes Christians inevitably forward to think of that other sacrifice, on the hill outside Jerusalem’s walls. There God again proves himself to be the provider and underscores his judgement on the endless human thirst for bloody sacrifice. In the person of Jesus, the only Son, the Son who is loved, God himself is willing to die the death that puts an end to all sacrifice, the death of the ultimately innocent victim that says no more to the frenzy and blood lust of our race. God himself provides a way. Do we that revelation of God? Do we let it define our lives?

By curious coincidence, for it was not design, we are hearing this story on Armistice Day, the day commemorating 100 years since the end of World War I. World War I was perhaps the occasion par excellence in which self-declared Christian people failed to understand the radical power of their own foundational story. The propaganda machines in Britain and Germany alike bent over backwards to fashion God in the national image, to declare that God was on their side, and to urge young men to make the ultimate sacrifice[4] — as if God himself in the person of the beloved Son had not already made the ultimate sacrifice, had not provided a way beyond the endless ritual slaughter of its youth. Hindsight is a beautiful thing, but it seems clear in retrospect that Moloch was the main beneficiary of the slaughter.

Not everyone missed the terrible irony. The poet Wilfred Owen, who died one week before the war ended, (one week!), picked up our story to protest the idolatry and paganism of his supposedly Christian age, unwilling to let iself be shaped in obedience to the God who provides.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,

And took the fire with him, and a knife.

And as they sojourned both of them together,

Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,

Behold the preparations, fire and iron,

But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,

and builded parapets and trenches there,

And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.

When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,

Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,

Neither do anything to him. Behold,

A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

That’s a pretty sobering and extreme example. But it confirms for us what’s at stake in Abraham’s story. How easy our race finds it to join the demand for blood sacrifice and scapegoats, and how hard we find it to trust that God will provide; how reluctant we are to let God’s own self-revelation in the provision of Christ shape our understanding, our imaginations, our choices for good or ill.

Abraham, as we’ve been hearing these past 4 weeks, was just a wandering Aramean, morally flawed, imperfect. But his willingness to put his trust in the living God allowed God to take hold of the agenda, and so to bless the world by transforming the imagination of the human race and our understanding of who God is, offering us a way out of the darkness of ignorance and violence and endless sacrifice. Will we take it?

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that 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.

[1] http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/proper_8a.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#cite_ref-81

[3] And you could point to 2 Chronicles 3.1 for further support, though Walton argues against it (p. 510).

[4] See numerous war memorials in New Zealand; see also Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (2006) , Chapter10.