Holy Cross Sunday                              

Genesis 21:1-3 & 22:1-14

God dealt with Sarah as was said, and did for Sarah as was had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to this son whom Sarah bore him.

After these things, God tested Abraham, saying to him, “Abraham!”

And, [Abraham] said, “Here I am.”

God 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. And, the two of them walked on together.

Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!”

And, [Abraham] said, “Here I am, my son.”

[Isaac] 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.”

And, 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 God called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”

And, [Abraham] said, “Here I am.”

[The angel] 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 “God will provide,” as it is said to this day, “On the mount of God, it shall be provided.”

Midrash

The story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac just might be the most difficult story in the Bible for me to wrap my head around. Never mind Revelation, which we just explored for six weeks, with the end of the world and all of the plagues and monsters, or the story of Job who loses everything, including all of his children, because of a bet between God and the Devil. This little story with Abraham and Isaac, which actually has a decently happy ending, is the one that really gives me pause, because I just don’t know what to do with it. What do we do with a story about father who’s willing to sacrifice his own son? And, what do we do with a God who would ask that of someone   ?

While I was doing some research to find out how scholars and theologians have dealt with this passage in the past, I came across the Jewish practice of Midrash. Having just learned about Midrash last week, I am by no means an expert, but from what I gathered, it differed significantly from the ways that I had been taught to interpret biblical passages. It seems to pick apart the text, or maybe dive into is a better way of saying that, by asking questions about everything. What are the motivations of the characters in the story? What is the significance of where the story is taking place? How does what is happening relate to previous events, or the events that come after? Why did the author choose to write it this way? Literally any question a person can think of in regards to the text is fair game for Midrash.

Of course, trying to answer the questions is part of it, but it really seems like the questions themselves are the more important part. Coming up with questions helps us to think through and process the text. Like other ways of interpretation, they force us to slow down and consider different parts of the text, to make sure that we look at it from multiple angles and that we don’t miss anything. And, what better way to deal with a difficult text like the one we have today, than to just ask a bunch of questions?

But first, let’s get a little more context for our story. Before Abraham was called Abraham, and Sarah was called Sarah, their names were Abram and Sarai. God told Abram to count the stars in the sky, because that’s how many descendants he would have, but Sarai was barren. Because she couldn’t have any children of her own, she gave her maid Hagar to Abram to have as a wife, and Hagar bore him a son, who was named Ishmael. God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, and Sarai’s name to Sarah, and said that a covenant would be established with the child that Abraham would have with Sarah. Abraham was about 100 years-old at that point, and Sarah was 90.

I’m going to skip over a lot here now; this is where the story of Sodom and Gamora take place, it’s all very exciting, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with what we’re talking about today, so we’re just going to jump to the part that concerns us. So, Sarah gives birth to Isaac, and one day, Sarah sees Ishmael picking on Isaac, and so she has Hagar and Ishmael sent away. Which brings us to today’s reading. For all intents and purposes, Abraham only had one son now, Isaac, and God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. According to the story that we have, Abraham doesn’t argue at all, and he set out the next morning to do as he was told. And, right as he’s about to kill his own son, an angel stops him, and tells him that he has passed the test, and miraculously, Abraham finds a ram to sacrifice instead.

So, in the tradition of Midrash, let’s ask some questions. Why did God decide to test Abraham in this way? Where was Sarah when all of this was happening? Did Abraham even tell Sarah what he was going to do? What did Abraham tell the two men who were with them about why they were going to Moriah? What was he planning on telling them about why he returned without Isaac? Why did the people who put the Bible together decide that this story should be part of the canon? And, why did the people who put the lectionary together decide to include this as part of the lectionary? What are we supposed to take from this? What are we supposed to learn?

I cannot believe that this story is something that actually happened. Maybe parts of it are true. It’s possible that something strange and frightening happened, and that this is the story that somehow got passed down through the generations to become part of the Bible that we have now, but I just don’t believe that God would ask this of someone. But, it is a story of its time, and the people who told it, the people who recorded it, they felt that it was a legitimate part of their ancestral heritage. Which, in a way, makes it a part of ours. So, we can’t ignore it. This story is part of our Bible; it’s part of our sacred scriptures. So, while we don’t have to take it literally, we do have to take it seriously. So, we have to ask, what is God trying to tell us through this story?

In the part of the world where this story comes from, child sacrifice was not unheard of. Child sacrifice is mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. Had it not been an issue, I feel like we could safely assume that it would not have been mentioned. Some scholars believe that the entire point of the Abraham and Isaac story is to condemn the practice of child sacrifice. We might wonder, in this day and age, if a message condemning this practice is even necessary. I mean, who’s arguing for child sacrifice, these days. But, it still might be a message that we need to hear. All around the world, children are sacrificed every day, as slaves, as commodities, as the unfortunate casualties of our resistance to gun control. Child labor might be currently outlawed in this country, but there are many places in the world where children are forced to work, instead of going to school. And, even here, there have been those who have stated that child labor might not be such a bad idea. Maybe we do need the reminder that children are not to be sacrificed.

This Abraham and Isaac story is a story about faith – faith that if we put our trust in God, everything will work out in the end. We do have to forget the fact that in this story, God is the one who created the problem in the first place. There are some who will say that since God was never going to go through with it, it never actually was a problem, but that only makes me feel the tiniest bit better. I just can’t imagine that God would ask this of someone, even if it was just a test and God was never going to let it go that far. Still, at the end of the day, God stopped Abraham from killing Isaac, and provided them with the necessary sacrifice, instead.

What I can imagine is a story like this becoming part of the ancestral history of the Jewish people to foretell of the coming of Christ. Two thousand years before Christ’s birth, we have a story of a father being asked to sacrifice his only son. And then, the sacrifice of the son is replaced with the sacrifice of a ram, a male sheep that was once a lamb. Jesus, the only begotten son of God, was sacrificed for us; the lamb of God, was sacrificed for us, and two thousand years before his birth, there was a story that became a part of our ancestral history, to help prepare us for it.

These stories are called types and shadows, and they can be found all over the Hebrew Bible: stories of sacrifice, stories of brave men and women, momentous events that foreshadow what’s to come. Isaac was a “type” of Jesus, as was the ram. And, the sacrifice was a “shadow” of the sacrifice that Jesus would eventually make. These types and shadows help to create patterns of understanding, ways of seeing the world, so that when Jesus finally did come, his story, his very being, would resonate with us, because we already knew the story. We already knew Jesus, because we had been hearing about and reading his types and shadows all of our lives.

There is a lot that we can learn from the story of Abraham and Isaac, of Sarah, and Hagar, and Ishmael. There’s a lot that we should learn, but maybe not the lesson that’s seems obvious. We don’t worship a trickster God. We don’t worship a cruel God. We worship a God of love and understanding. We worship a God who might ask us to make sacrifices, but will not demand, and who is willing to sacrifice themselves for our sake.

I sometimes think these trickier passages are included in the biblical canon to force us to think, to remember that we don’t have all of the answers, and sometimes we just need to trust that God has it all in hand. We have to have faith, just like Abraham had faith that doing what God asked him to do was the right thing. And, even if we don’t take that story at face value, the moral of the story is that everything will come out all right in the end, if we just have faith in God. So, be a people of faith, but remember that faith does not mean an absence of doubt, and it certainly does not mean an absence of questions.

Amen.

~ Rev. Charles Wei