Fear And Trembling With Abraham and Isaac

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Fear And Trembling With Abraham and Isaac

Genesis 22:1-14
June 24, 2011

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he
said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you
love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering
on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of
his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt
offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had
shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far
away. Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey;
the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come
back to you.” Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his
son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them
walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said,
“Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is
the lamb for a burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God himself will provide the
lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.
When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an
altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him
on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and
took the knife to kill his son.

But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham,
Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the
boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you
have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked
up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took
the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham
called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the
mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

The story we have before is as beguiling and disturbing as one will ever find
in the Holy Writ, the Holy Scriptures, and one that many have argued makes
the case that the Scripture are far from holy, far from sacred. And one can
easily see why: if anyone else behaved as Abraham does in this story, if
anyone in the 21st century had claimed that God told them to kill their own
child, we would be horrified by such a claim, such a justification. There
wouldn’t be a dungeon, a jail, too deep for them to get lost in, in most of
our eyes. And yet, you so rarely see us Christians struggle with this story,
this iconic story of faith, in which Abraham is told to do that very thing, and
is later credited with deep faith by Paul and others. Perhaps we’re intimidated
by such praise by these early Christian writers in their effuse praise of
Abraham—I mean, who we are to question Paul’s word on what faith looks
like (Romans 4)?

And yet, we do a disservice to the story and the life of faith by not wrestling
with the shadow in this story, with the absurdity found within this text. The
interpretation of this text and every other biblical text never stops and so
the opinion of the ancients is never the ending word, the final say, and we
too have a right to say something about such a text, to join the
conversation about the meaning of this story. People have been doing it for
a long time, and one of the more important engagements with this text in
the last 200 hundred years was done by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard,
the well-known Danish thinker (1813-1855) in his book, Fear and Trembling.
In one section of that book, he imagines other possibilities for this story,
other directions the story might have gone, and thus he offers four
alternative reactions to God’s command to kill Isaac.

In the first version, you have Abraham telling Isaac what is about to happen,
and not surprisingly, Isaac begs for his life, though it does no good:
Abraham will not relent, but he does something interesting—he pretends that
he is the one who wants to kill Isaac, and not his God, who has actually
commanded him to do so, much to Abraham’s deep dismay. Abraham does
this in order to protect God’s honor, because it would be better that Isaac
believe that he was a monster, rather than having his son lose his faith in
Yahweh. In the second version Kierkegaard offers in his book, Abraham
goes to the mountain, kills a ram instead, and then returns home, and
because he could not forget that God had asked him to do such a monstrous
thing, his “eyes were darkened, and he saw joy no more,” (Kierkegaard, 12
Hong translation), devastated by this seemingly evil command by God to
murder his own son. The third imagining of this story has Abraham going to
Mount Moriah to beg God’s forgiveness for having even entertained the idea.
And, finally, Kierkegaard gives us a fourth possibility, in which Abraham takes
Isaac to the mountain, and starts to sacrifice him, but stops suddenly, and
when Isaac sees the drawn knife, he loses his faith instantly, unable to
believe in a God who would require such a thing of his father.

All of these possibilities are meant to engage us with this text, to make us
think about what is being asked of Abraham in this story, and what other
possible reactions he could have had to God’s command, rather than the one
we have in our text today. For Kierkegaard, the question he tries to answer
in his book is how to understand the idea that Abraham’s reaction to the
command by God is somehow the faithful response, rather than the
response of a mad man. And Kierkegaard reminds us that Abraham is no
tragic hero, doing the horrible, the barbaric for the sake of others, to save
others—Kierkegaard himself compares Abraham to other tragic heroes, who
often do the horrible for the sake of others, to rescue others: the Greek King
Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter to a god in order to appease an
angry god who has threatened his country. But that is not the case here:
there is simply a naked, unexplained command to sacrifice Isaac, for no
reason, no greater goal, as in the case of the Greek myth you just heard.
Agamemnon is considered a tragic hero, called to do the horrible thing for
the sake of others, but one cannot say that of Abraham—he is no tragic
hero, and he is not doing this act to save others.   He is simply doing it
because a voice he believes to be God’s voice has commanded him to do this
act. Abraham is willing to do this simply because God has asked him to do it,
and, also, surprisingly, he does not seem like he is willing to engage in a
conversation with God about this seemingly absurd, seemingly evil command,
unlike the time when Abraham engaged God on Sodom and Gomorrah,
eventually bargaining God down to small number of righteous people that
were needed to be found in order for the cities to be saved.

Garret Keizer relates a story that is relevant to our text today:

Sometime between World War II and the Second Vatican Council a small-
town church in northeastern Vermont was destroyed by fire. The
congregation immediately launched a vigorous fund raising campaign to
erect a new building. One of the members carried his canvassing so far as to
ask the local Roman Catholic priest for a donation. "Now, Harold," said the
priest, "you know I can't do a thing like that, give money to build a
Protestant church! But," he added, taking out his checkbook, "I'll give you
50 bucks to tear the old one down." The priest's distinction between what
he could and could not do amounts to little more than a transparent
equivocation; therein lies the charm of the story. Nevertheless, [the] priest
seems to be telling us: Refuse what you must, but offer what you can.-
Garret Keizer, "No can do," Christian Century, November 14, 2001, 8.

One wishes that Abraham had been a bit more like the priest in this story,
willing to do what one can, sacrifice an animal or a dozen animals, but
refusing to do what is not possible, cannot ever really possible for a good
father, which would be the killing of his own innocent son. But that is not
the case here, and no bargaining takes place, no give and take, no “refusing
what you must, but offering what you can”…and so we are left with the
shadows in this story, as brother Abraham winds his way up that mountain
with naïve, unsuspecting Isaac by his side.

For me, I cannot imagine going up that mountain, under those
circumstances. I think I would have taken a route that Kierkegaard didn’t
imagine for us: I would have probably fled with Isaac into some foreign
country, hoping I could outrun God. But not these two on this day: they go
up the mountain, up to Mount Moriah, to a seemingly maddening fate. Listen
to the only recorded exchange we have between Abraham and Isaac.
“Abraham took the wood for sacrifice and put it on his son Isaac’s shoulder,
while he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on
together, Isaac spoke. “Father!” he said. Abraham answered, “What is it,
my son?” Isaac said, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep
for sacrifice?” Abraham answered, “God will provide us with a sheep for
sacrifice, my son.” The two of them went on together…” An incredible
exchange, really. Some people say that Abraham was being deceptive, but I
don’t think he was—I think when he said those words, those loaded words,
“God will provide,” he was testifying to a truth that he firmly believed in, one
that Kierkegaard speaks of when he tries to dredge up some meaning out of
what seems like meaningless act.   You see, Abraham was an old man at this
point in his life and he had done his struggling for many years with this
mysterious God who called him and sought relationship with him. And so
when God calls him to commit this most horrifying act, to kill his son Isaac,
to seemingly put an end to the promise God had given him, embodied by this
child whose descendants would supposedly populate the earth like stars in
the heavens, he could somehow say a powerful word of faith, a word built
over time, a word built during relationship—“God will provide…surely, God will
be faithful.”

Now, anyone who knows the real story of Abraham, knows how often he has
failed to believe those words or lived those words, that God will somehow
and in some way provide. Abraham’s long, sometimes painful and
complicated relationship with God has been one where he always reserved
part of his life for himself, always taking care of himself, even at the expense
of his wife Sarah, whom he literally turn into a prostitute at times to keep
himself safe and sound. This is not a man who has a great track record
when it comes to completely trusting God and giving over his future to this
God. The people around him continued to pay the price for that choice, over
and over again. But at some point along the journey, Abraham got it and in
this moment, this most horrifying, absurd moment, he trusts God like he has
never trusted God before. Somehow, somehow, God will come through and
God will be faithful. Abraham is being asked to sacrifice his son, to kill his
beloved child, and yet, somewhere deep inside him, he knows that God is
faithful, that whatever happens on that mountain, God is faithful, God is
faithful.

I don’t know about you, but this story continues to amaze and horrify me,
both at the same time. I think it amazes and horrifies most people, if we don’
t pass over it too quickly, ignoring its shadows for the easy and simple
conclusion we are given in children’s Sunday School when reading this story.
It horrifies us because of what is asked of Abraham, but it also continues to
amaze us because it still speaks to us of what it means to be to be faithful,
about what it means to say, in the midst of losing everything, of losing all
that really matters, all because of an absurdity, what it means to say the
words of faith, “God will provide…” Even here, even at this moment, when
God is asking the impossible, the horrible, Abraham says to himself, “I KNOW
that GOD WILL PROVIDE.” Abraham has seen Sarah’s laughter, a laughter
born out of frustration and cynicism, turned into a joy that follows the birth
of a child. He knows that this God with whom he has a deep and abiding
relationship, that this is a God he can trust, and so the words that leave his
lips in response to Isaac’s question are words born out of trust….surely, my
son, God will provide.

And so Abraham and Isaac go to the mountain and he builds an altar, and
ties up his son, and reaches out for the knife…and then the silence is broken
with a desperate cry—“Abraham! Abraham!” There is a story in the Midrash,
which is a tradition of interpretation that the Jewish people have built over
many thousands of years, there is a story in the midrash that says that the
angels threw themselves between Isaac and Abraham’s knife. I think that
story reflects the desperation you hear in the words that stop this horrible
moment—“Abraham! Abraham!” The reprieve comes, the phone call from
the governor’s office to the jail, halting the execution, and he, Abraham does
not have to do the deed, does not have to go through with this horrific
command to kill an innocent one.   A ram is supplied instead, and the place is
renamed, appropriately so, “the Lord will provide.” Kierkegaard uses it as a
metaphor for faith, and the absurdity of believing what cannot believed, that
God will indeed do a thing, will make a way when there is no way, no way
out.

And yet, despite knowing this, knowing the point of this story to some
degree, which the narrator puts in big flashing neon, I do want us to be
cautious here with this story. It is a singular story, one that will never or
should ever be repeated in any other form—in another words, we should not
ever believe any other person who says to us that they have been
commanded by God to kill their children or anyone else, for that matter. And
this story has given us believers interpretive fits since the day it was told,
and one should approach it with kind of reverence and yet suspicion that
Kierkegaard himself approached it. Kierkegaard always believed that this
meditation, his Fear and Trembling, his book on this story would be the one
thing he would likely be remembered for and that is surely the case. Still, I
am not sure he is completely successful in reading this story, in interpreting
it, nor do I think he is successful in extracting the darkness from it, the bile,
the poison, from it, though I don’t know if he was trying to do the latter.
But that is alright…the life of deep faith is filled with more questions than
answers, something that the writer Dirk Dunfee wrote a decade or so ago in
the National Catholic Reporter. I leave you wish his wise, wise words on this
maddening, beguiling, horrifying, beautiful story:

If you're expecting me to resolve the Abraham and Isaac story for you, I
can only say that you're barking up the wrong tree. I don't have the answer.
Some people say that Abraham's wife, Sarah, was there all the time, hidden,
pushing the ram up the hill in order to save her child. It wouldn't surprise
me to find that a woman once again had saved the day, and once again had
been God's instrument - and had been left out of the story. I suspect that
the story says more about the way the ancient Israelites understood God
than it says about God himself or herself, but I don't know that. There may
not even be an answer, and maybe scripture is not a library of answers to
life's difficult questions. That's all right, and that doesn't mean we should
give up looking, or that we should give up trying to understand things that
seem by their very nature to defy understanding. Keep looking for the
answers, keep engaging God, and don't turn away from that which is
difficult. And certainly, friends, this is one of those things that is so
difficult…Amen.

-Dirk Dunfee, "Humans don't like confusion, but God waits for us in the
mess," National Catholic Reporter, March 17, 2000.