A Truly Awful Story

( Lectionary for July 2, 2017)

One of the very first sermons I published for all to see used this text as its inspiration (see my first book, Preaching Old Testament, 1988). I had preached that sermon several times in various ecclesiastical settings and had without fail received very positive responses from many of the listeners. It is without doubt an extremely dramatic tale, climaxing with that terrifying knife suspended over the throat of the helpless Isaac, stopped in the nick of time by the divine angel who announces that now YHWH knows that Abraham really does “fear God” since he has “not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Gen. 22:12).

I vividly remember the time I preached this as a story sermon, that is merely telling it without comment, following the course the fabulously written account establishes. The location was a small town in south Texas. During the sermon itself, all the lights in the church went out and the sanctuary was plunged into darkness! Talk about dramatic! I did not use notes, so in many ways the unexpected gloom was more than perfect to create an ambiance of dread and spine-tingling expectation. I assure you that I did not plan the outage, but I was quite pleased that it had happened. However, some members of the congregation were somehow uncomfortable with the lack of light, so I watched–while continuing to preach and trying not to laugh—as two of the ushers crept back to a closet, extracted from that space a wedding candelabra, proceeded to light the thing with a rather loud lighter, and tried to move back toward the altar with the now- blazing light source, assuming that their bringing of the light to the front was less distracting than their clumsy footfalls on the tiled aisle! One parishioner after the service said to me, “I wanted so badly to trip them, but I was afraid that our church would burn down!”

In the darkness of that sanctuary, when Abraham raises his fateful knife, clearly ready to murder his son, the tension and horror were palpable. Employing all my limited stage skills, I had the congregation, as they say, “in the palm of my hand,” if that does not sound too grandiose.

But to what end? Though the sermon tried to portray what I think the text was doing, I began after that to question the use of this text at all for preaching. Its dangers now seemed to me palpable. The point of the text appears to be that Abraham, the towering patriarch of Israel, is tested by YHWH to discover whether or not he is worthy of the task for which he has been called, namely to be the founder of God’s uniquely chosen people. After all, up to now in the cycle of Abraham’s story, his actions have been far less than stellar. He has lied about Sarah, the matriarch of Israel twice; he has laughed in the face of YHWH’s promise for a great progeny; he has twice risked that promise by, first, sending his supposed only heir into the wilderness to die, and, second, sending that heir again to die at the request of the jealous Sarah. In neither case did he ask God to act differently; he simply acted mutely in two attempts to murder Ishmael.

In Gen. 22, it has been said that this is Abraham’s third attempt to kill a promised heir, but since this time the heir is Isaac, the child of laughter, he is quite directly and forcefully stopped by YHWH in the very act. Shalom Spiegel’s wonderful 1950 collection of rabbinic commentary on this scene, The Last Trial, details the deep engagement that the sages had, and continue to have, with this story. In many of the comments Spiegel catalogues, the rabbis are desperately concerned with what happened to Isaac after this traumatic event. They recognized immediately that Abraham left the mountain alone (Gen. 22:19!), and their rich imaginations wondered about the abandoned son, left on Moriah to ponder his father’s absurd and monstrous attempt to kill him. And their wondering led to my own. Is this story not redolent of child abuse? Might it also lead one to accuse YHWH of divine child abuse? What sort of God is it who denies a child to a vastly aged couple, then grants them the miracle of a son, and then demands that the father murder that very son? The intent of the story may be to highlight the extraordinary faith of Abraham, but the dark means by which the story presents that intent has become for me too dangerous to use in our modern days of violence within families, especially spousal and child abuse. How can I commend to my congregations a story of faith that suggests that child murder will demonstrate that faith most conclusively?

In short, I no longer use this text for preaching, despite its familiarity, and despite its long connection to the New Testament’s basic story of Jesus’s death as a supposed part of God’s plan for salvation, a notion I find frankly reprehensible itself. Kierkegaard had an memorable phrase he employed in an attempt to describe what was going in Gen. 22. It may be found in his anguished volume Fearand Trembling. The story, said the Danish philosopher, is an example of “the teleological suspension of the absolute.” If I understand the phrase, I suppose he means, “all bets are off.” What you thought you knew about God, what you have up to now learned about God, must be thrown out the window in the face of God’s quite absurd demand of Abraham to murder the child of the promise. Faith, then, he says, can be nothing less than a great leap across the void that inevitably separates what we think we know about God and what God actually is.

If the odd Dane be right, then I admit I want no part of such a God. Any God who would ask me to kill my son as some sort of test of my faith is not God but some twisted and evil demon. This text plainly horrifies me, and I wish to God it were not in the Bible at all. Preach it if you must, but hedge it round with all manner of caveats and apologies to blunt its foul force. Better yet, do not preach it at all.