homily
preached at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bellingham, WA
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| Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac |
When I was
in seminary, I had the distinct pleasure of translating
the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac from Hebrew into some semblance of
English. The first thing I noticed when translating it is the lack of emotional
language in the passage. We don’t hear how anybody feels; we only hear what
they do.
Emotion may
be the single most important commonality of all human life in every place and
time. I have learned in recent years that my ability to name and express my
emotions in appropriate ways has everything to do with my ability to make good
decisions regarding my relationships with others. To look at it from the other
direction, our relative inability to feel—especially, the widespread cultural
expectation that men should not express emotions in sensitive ways—may be one
of the greatest evils we face. How many killings could be avoided if people,
especially men, were able to say to themselves, “Hey, I’m angry,” before
reacting to that anger? How many divorces could be avoided if couples knew
right from the start how to express their emotions respectfully to each other,
trusting that those emotions would be received with care and love?
During the
summer of seminary when I interned in a retirement community, my mentor said,
“Men don’t usually tell you how they’re feeling. You have to listen deeply for
the emotion underneath. So let them tell their stories, and whatever you do,
don’t hinder those stories. Let them finish. Receive their stories with love
and care, and within them, you’ll hear and understand the feelings they have
never been taught how to name.”
So we
needn’t be surprised to find so little emotion in this story of Abraham and
Isaac, and, for that matter, throughout much of the Bible. Perhaps lack of expressed
emotion is an unthinking byproduct of the fact that the Bible was probably all written
by men—or maybe it’s by design. Maybe by removing the characters’ emotions from
the story, we are better able to place ourselves into it. How would you feel if
God told you, in no uncertain terms, to kill your child … your only child …
whom you love? (I’ve always wondered how Sarah felt, or if Abraham ever told
her what had happened, even afterward.) But Abraham doesn’t react with emotion.
He just obeys.
The
classical understanding of Abraham’s obedience is that his faith in God is so
strong, he never has any doubts that this will turn out OK. If Isaac is
miraculously spared, it will be OK. If Isaac is killed, somehow, God will make
that OK, too. But with all due respect to centuries of tradition that maintains
this view, I think its helpfulness in our own culture is a bit limited. What
father could possibly do this? What good father wouldn’t rage against God, or
just flat-out refuse to honor the commandment? Doesn’t Abraham at least owe his
son a strong emotional reaction?
Likewise,
rabbis and priests throughout the ages have taught about Isaac’s supreme act of
obedience, as evidenced by his apparent lack of reaction to being bound as a
potential sacrifice. Either he is a remarkably self-aware youth who doesn’t
mind that God wants him dead, or he is a grown man who still doesn’t seem
inclined to use his adult strength to fight off his hundred-year-old father.
The story doesn’t tell us that Isaac was compliant, or that Abraham somehow
overpowered him. It only says that Abraham bound him. What are we to make of this?
No emotion.
No emotion anywhere. And yet … when we receive this story with care and love
and hear it through to completion, this story is dripping with emotion. God
says, “Take now your son … your only son … whom you love … Isaac.” This is the
child of promise, the child who demonstrates God’s love for the human race in
the divine promise to make from Abraham a people who will be a blessing to the
entire world. Isaac is the only thread binding Abraham to all of us today.
Isaac is of crucial importance to the fate of the entire world.
After
identifying in no uncertain terms the object of the story, God says something
very strange to Abraham. Our translation has God telling Abraham to “go,” but
that’s a great example of the English language not being built to convey the
proper meaning of a Hebrew word. God actually tells Abraham, “Lech lech’a,”
which we could render literally as, “Go you,” or “Get you going,” or even, “Go
yourself.” It’s a verb tense called ethical dative. We find it in English in Shakespeare’s
Taming of the Shrew in the phrase, “Knock me at this gate,” and we
understand instinctively that Petruchio isn’t asking for a clonk on the head.
So, God tells Abraham, “Go you”—“go yourself.” The implication might even be,
“As you go to the Mount of Moriah, you will find that you are journeying ever
more deeply into the very essence of who you are.”
We also find
strong emotion underneath a few recurring words and phrases. When God calls
Abraham, Abraham replies, “Hineini”—that is, “Behold: here I am.” When Isaac
gets inquisitive on the journey and says, “My father,” Abraham replies,
“Hineini, my son.” And when the angel of the Lord calls to Abraham from heaven,
Abraham also replies, “Hineini—Behold: here I am.” Abraham’s raw, naked
presence stands before God and before Abraham’s beloved son. Abraham is present
in all that he is. He has truly gone more and more deeply into his very
essence.
You may also
have noticed that when Abraham leaves his servants behind and goes on alone
with Isaac, he instructs them to wait there, “and we will worship, and we will
return to you.” We will return. Does Abraham say this in order to hide
God’s command from Isaac for the time being? Or does he say it because he
cannot imagine that Isaac will not survive this ordeal somehow? What agony is
going on inside him?
There is
even emotion in the angel’s response—which, in typical form in the most ancient
Hebrew writings, begins to sounds more like God’s voice with every passing
word. “Stay your hand and don’t do any harm to him, for now I know that you are
one who fears God, and you have not withheld your son … your only son … from
me.”
God holds us
in life, and God holds us in death. God is one who demands everything of us,
because there is no reality in which we might preserve ourselves apart from
God. Let’s remember that with these most ancient stories, especially, the
appropriate question is not, “Did this event really happen?,” but rather, “What
is this story for?” While we may quibble with the premise that God would test
Abraham—and Isaac, for that matter!—in such a cruel and manipulative way, I
don’t think that’s what this story is for. Closer to its purpose is something
about the all-encompassing sovereignty of God, that not only we but also our
children and all our hopes and all our future are ever held in God’s loving embrace.
Also closer
to its purpose must be something about the fact that Isaac is not killed
after all. The tribe next door may sacrifice their children to Molech with
frightening regularity. But we, the people of Adonai, we will not be like other
peoples. We understand the fear of God not to be an abject fear that the crops
will die, but a deep reverence and awe in the face of God’s unrelenting love in
all circumstances, good or bad. We know that God wants not only our obedience,
but our joy. God wants us to have life, and have it abundantly. And so we obey
God in all things—because those who fear God know that they have nothing to
fear. When God calls, we say, “Hineini.” And when we do, we trust that we will
hear the command, lech lech’a: go yourself. Amen.
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