The Sacrifice of Abraham

I’m not one to delve a lot into Bible readings as blog post topics. But Sunday’s reading in our lectionary is an exception because it’s a really difficult reading to understand from a modern, civilized perspective. Feel free to skip onto something else if this sort of thing is not your cuppa.

The story of the Sacrifice of Abraham is perhaps one of the best known “disturbing” stories in the Old Testament (not the most disturbing, to be sure, but pretty difficult to interpret in a warm and fuzzy fashion). For those unfamiliar with the story, Abraham — who’s just been promised by God that from his sole legitimate descendant (the miraculously late-in-his-life Isaac) will spring a great nation — is told to take Isaac up to a mountaintop and offer him up as a sacrifice to God.

Abraham doesn’t (as it’s recorded) flinch, and proceeds to carry out the command. He has Isaac all ready to be killed and burnt when God (or a messenger thereof) tells him, “Just kidding, you’ve proven yourself to me,” like something out of a gangster movie, and then provides a ram for the real sacrifice.

No further record of Abraham or Isaac’s subsequent discussions of the matter survives.

The story is creepy in the extreme, calling to mind religious lunatic parents killing their kids “because God told me to.” Yet it plays a central role in the liturgical cycle, calling to mind as it does God (the Father) offering up his own son (Jesus) for the whole world.

But …

I mean, damn. To be deadly honest, were God to appear to me and say, “Hey, Dave, take your daughter, your only child, the one you love, and go and offer her as a burnt offering to me,” I’d … either figure I was going nuts, or that I was being Tempted by Someone Quite Other Than God.

Ah, but if I were convinced of the Speaker’s bona fides? That this was, in fact, God talking to me?

Sorry. No great nation would issue from me. I just couldn’t do it.

Now, obviously, this is a tale that’s had exegecists and apologists working overtime for centuries. There are lots of explanations and interpretations and metaphors and all of that sort of thing.

So, for example, there’s the whole “This foreshadows God giving up his Son” thing with Jesus. Except, to my mind, at least, the two things are not fundamentally the same. The Mystery of the Trinity aside, God giving of a part of Himself to take human flesh to die as a sacrifice for all mankind is … well, at best, its analogous to someone giving up their own life. And that’s a great, profound theme that can be further played out in Scripture (e.g., the Gospel for this last Sunday, Mark 8:31-38).

But sacrifice of oneself is very different from sacrifice of another, the famous John 3:16 notwithstanding. A voluntary self-sacrifice for others is noble. Offering up someone else as a sacrifice is creepy (and the God/Father/Jesus example gets away with it because, aside from it having a cachet of tradition, it’s really God offering Himself up, right?).

That also is the case with the focus of the story on Abraham. Abraham is given as the protagonist — God approaches him, the sacrifice is his, the resolution is his, the praise is his. Isaac just kind of trundles along, nearly silent. Abraham gets lauded by the Messenger of God for being willing to make the sacrifice (and, to be sure, it would have been a painful sacrifice for him). But the Messenger doesn’t say boo to Isaac, who was (we presume) willing to die.

Still, makes you wonder what sort of conversations father and son had on the way back home. And what they told Sarah.

Now the message may also be that death, per se, is not something to be feared. Isaac’s sacrifice thus pales compared to Abraham because, well, the father would have survived the son, grieving and bereft. Sort of the ultimate “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” And that theme runs through the Epistle in our lectionary this past Sunday (Romans 8:31-39, to bring in the last Bible verse I’ll throw at you), which basically says that no matter what happens, even death, God’s love for us abides and we cannot be separated from it. Death becomes but a minor issue, far from the worst thing that could happen.

But … still … that’s one’s personal perspective. My not fearing death, or even welcoming it in order to serve others, doesn’t mean that I can presume the same about you, and it doesn’t mean that I can take your life because the Voice in my head told me to. That’s not a leap of faith, that’s a psychosis.

Which is why I’d have a hard time believing such a Voice. Killing my daughter would fly in the face of everything I know about God and what God wants of me (and her). It makes me question the accuracy or even the occurrence of the account provided in Genesis (but, then, I don’t have a bugaboo about Biblical Inerrancy) just because of that. The Sacrifice of Abraham only makes sense in a mythic standpoint, as a metaphor the Father’s sending of the Son, not as a real tale, or one commanded by God in just that way.

Now some folks point out that human sacrifice, especially as a high ritual or Most Important Occasion kind of thing, was not unheard of in that neck of the world in those days. The same can be said for any number of other unpleasant things that occur in the Old Testament — killing and adultery and polygamy and war and rape and slaughter of various stripes, much of which is, in that book, ostensibly sanctioned (when not directly commanded) by God. But “well, everyone else is doing it” hardly seems to be a moral answer. Indeed, the only answers seem to be that (a) what’s recorded is not God’s command (i.e., He was used for a convenient excuse); (b) the justification or good of what we see is beyond our understanding, or (c) God (at least that of the Old Testament) is a cosmic sadist who’d command (among other things) his top representative on Earth to kill his own son just to test his loyalty.

I vote for (a), because (b) is too great a leap of faith in this case, and (c) is, well, just too scary.

There is, I suppose, a fourth alternative (d), that Isaac, presented with this situation, willingly acquiesced. He’s certainly in the dark until they get to the sacrificial location (“Hey, um, Dad? We have wood and fire, but where’s the lamb that’s going to be killed?”). After that Isaac is silent, so guessing that he willingly went along with this may be a leap. Abraham does “bind” Isaac before putting him on top of the wood and making ready with the knife, so it’s a bit of a leap to figure that it’s all okay (age of informed consent aside) because Isaac gave the go-ahead.

I dunno. It may seem overly convenient to simply say, “Well, that doesn’t fit my idea of who God is and what God would command, so it must not be legit,” and that disclaimer certainly allows for a lot of abuse and letting of oneself off the hook in terms of doing other things that are right but difficult. But I simply cannot get my arms around God even hinting that it’s copacetic to perform human sacrifice for him, even if it’s meant “only” as a trick, nor in someone who believes in the God I do, someone identified as the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, simply saluting and acting upon such a (perceived) order.