There are some passages in scripture to which it is difficult to say “This is the word of the Lord,” and even more so, “thanks be to God.”
Our passage this morning from Genesis, the last in this series on the life of Abraham, often called “the binding of Isaac,” is certainly one of them. This is a horrifying story—there’s simply no way around it. It feels so ancient, so far removed even from the world of the rest of scripture. It’s disturbing, as we imagine this scene which unfolds so dramatically and painfully and, most of all, plainly, before us. We’re given few details, leaving us to fill in gaps with our own imaginations, as generations of readers have.
The ancient rabbis imagined how Abraham must have questioned this divine command. Surely he must have bargained for his son’s life at least as hard as he had for the city of Sodom just a few chapters before.
Take your son, they imagined God saying.
I have two sons, Abraham replies.
Your only son, God says.
This is the only son of his mother, and this other one is the only son of his mother.
The one you love.
I love them both.
Isaac.1
I.
The Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote that this story rendered him sleepless as he imagined the scene and all that must have happened around it.2 The agony and shock with which Abraham must have received these words from God. What was his sleep like that night in between the call and the journey? Did he sleep? And what of the drama of their long walk together to the mountain, a drama that builds with the repetition, “So the two of them walked on together.” The tension in their exchange along the way when the young boy Isaac asks where the lamb is for the offering, and Abraham answers plainly and, it turns out, truthfully, “God will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
I imagine the scene when Abraham bound his son. Was there a struggle, or did the son trust his father enough to lie still? And what would this experience have done to Isaac? Could he ever look at his father the same way again? Should he? Is it a coincidence that Abraham and Isaac never speak to each other again in scripture after that day on the mountain of the Lord? Could Isaac ever look at God the same way? Could this be why, as some have pointed out, Isaac, even as an old man, never speaks of God as being a God of love, only a God of fear?3
And what of Sarah—where is the mother in this scene? In fact, this is a good question for so many of the stories in the Bible involving fathers and their sons: where are the mothers?! The rabbis wondered if it wasn’t more than a coincidence that immediately after this story, we’re told of Sarah’s death. Could this all have been too much for her to take?4
All these questions hover around the story, and of course, we’ll never know the answers. But they aren’t even the most pressing questions this story raises. Those have to do with God. This ancient story presents us with a vision of God that’s hard for our ears to hear and minds to grasp. Is this how the God we know operates? Does God really test us in this way?
II.
We proceed with caution here because the church at different times, in its quest for certainty, has taken the holy questions of scripture and flattened them into declarations of absolute truth. So let me say from the start that my best reading of scripture tells me God does not cause tragedy and calamity to come upon us. God does not give us, nor does God plan for us, particular trials and hardships. And yet we know that trials and hardships are an inevitable part of life, and we receive these events and seasons as tests of our faith. And so it takes a bit of faith, in a sense, to hold up our understanding of how God moves in the world against certain passages of scripture, where our ancient forebearers understood things differently.
This is where the chapter begins: “After these things God tested Abraham.” The idea that God tests us, as people of God, is a well-developed biblical theme.5 We find it throughout the Hebrew Bible and, at times, in the New Testament. A hint of it is even preserved in the Lord’s Prayer we recited together just a few minutes ago, near the end, when we pray that God would “lead us not into temptation,” which seems to mean, “keep us from getting into situations where our faith will be tested, where we will be forced to choose or resist or decide.” The prayer, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, is that we won’t be “found out.”6
But often in scripture, this testing comes in less explicit terms, and not always in seasons of clear hardship. Very early on, the book of Acts and the writings of Paul tell us the church was tested by the question of who would be eligible to join this new movement of the Spirit that would come to be the church. Was the church just for the children of Israel, or were Gentiles included in this new covenant, too? Was it possible for the Holy Spirit to truly move in that way, contrary to tradition and scripture as they understood it? And would they follow? Would they stay intact through this season of controversy and disagreement? This was very much a test of faith.
There are many times in the New Testament when the early church was forced to decide how much to accommodate an increasingly adversarial world. How would they respond to persecution? Would they give up and wither away, or would they continue to trust that God was with them “when they passed through the fire,” literally? Later in the church’s history, they would be tempted and tested by a world that was becoming increasingly accommodating to them, when Roman swords and shields suddenly bore crosses, and the church could wield the power of an empire. What would this mean for the followers of the Prince of Peace? This is a test not foreign to us today, as the lines between our American and Christian identities are often made to be so fuzzy, to the detriment of both.
Often the hardest tests of our faith as a people come in seasons that are not outwardly calamitous, but when things seem to be going well, and we may be tempted to believe we’ve made it on our own. Or when we would equate worldly success with spiritual blessing—this can be a tremendous test of faith.
In the world of the Bible, we can wonder if the tests we face are of God when they force us to decide in whom we’ll finally put our trust. Testing, in this way, is inevitable when you live by principle and conviction.
III.
But equally important to this story is the claim that the God who tests is also the God who provides. The God who tested Abraham with the call to sacrifice what was most valuable to him is the same God who ultimately provided an alternative in the ram in the thicket. And when it comes down to it, to claim that God alone provides is about as scandalous as the claim that God tests.7 Is it truly God who provides for us, or is it something else? Is it our own hard work, or just dumb luck or chance?
And what of those times when we have not felt particularly provided for? Or this world with so much suffering and pain? Why has God not provided more to so many?
These are hard questions without sufficient answers. But they force us to ask what it would mean to truly live from a trust that God is working to provide for us and all people. And not just our essential needs—our daily bread, our safety, shelter from the heat, and all the rest of it. Not just the stuff that keeps us alive. But all the other things that allow us to truly live?
Do we believe there is a purpose in our lives that God is subtly, quietly urging us toward? Does God have something, deep in God’s own heart, deep in God’s imagination, for us? And what would it mean for us to live as if God did?
It may be that the real test, in this story and in our lives, is whether or not we will see what God provides.
The first words of God to Abraham, back in chapter 12 of Genesis, are the command to “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” And now here, some 10 chapters later, the call comes again, “…go to the land of Moriah…[to] one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Two commands to go and see what God will show him.
Sight is an image in this arc of Abraham’s family that we encountered last week with Hagar and Ishmael, when the angel comes to their aid in the wilderness, and Hagar sees a well of water to keep them alive. Here, Abraham sees the mountain in the distance. Isaac sees there is no lamb, and of course, most importantly, in the moment of crisis, Abraham sees the ram caught in the thicket by its horns—and what about this ram? How did it just appear? Or had it been there all along, and Abraham only saw it when he did? In the Mishnah, this ancient collection of sayings and proverbs within Judaism, there is a list of miraculous things from scripture that God created on the last day of creation (at sundown just before the Sabbath, it says)—things like the rainbow for Noah, manna for the Exodus, the staff Moses would use to part the seas, and then “the ram for our father, Abraham.”8
The rabbis saw this ram as a mystery of creation. I don’t know that they would claim that the ram itself was as old as creation, walking the earth for those eons before that moment on Moriah. But I do think they would say that woven into creation is the promise that God will provide, that rams will appear when we need them, if we would lift up our eyes.
This association even hides within the word “provide.” It comes from the Latin pro-videre and literally means “to see before.” So to say that God provides is to say that God sees. God sees something that we do not. God sees a way forward, God sees an alternative, God sees the safe refuge just around the bend, God sees the light at the end of the treatments, God sees the life that’s on the other side of loss. God sees the morning that’s always on the other side of the night, its beauty so often in proportion to the dark. To say that God provides is to say that God sees what we do not, or at least what we do not yet. And the hope that travels closely with this trust is that in God’s time, we, too, will see.
IV.
For all in this story that is almost unbearable to look at, isn’t this what we would ask for in our own lives: that when the darkness closes in, when the grief and the loss seem so overwhelming, when we wonder what purpose or meaning there is in the present moment, that we would be granted the gift of new sight? A new understanding, a new knowledge, or even a new peace in the face of what we cannot understand.
This is finally what it means to live as people of faith: to be a people who trust that God sees what we do not. A people who trust that rams, in all their many forms, do appear. To trust that this provision has been woven into the very fabric of creation, in ways we don’t fully understand in the moment, but perhaps one day will. And on our better days, and with good travel companions to journey with, to decide that is enough.
______________________
1 As found in Ellen Davis, Getting Involved With God: Rediscovering the Old Testament, 55
2 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
3 For the life of me, I can’t remember where this was pointed out to me!
4 Just one of several Midrash the death of Sarah, catalogued here: http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/sarah-and-the-akedah/
5 I’m indebted here to Walter Brueggemann for teasing this out in his commentary on Genesis.
6 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Preaching and Teaching (Louisville: John Knox, 1982) 190-191
7 Bruggemann, again.
8 Pirkei Avot, 5:6, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.5.6?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en