And the expectation of blind faith
Proper 8A | Genesis 22:1-14, Matthew 10:40-42
There was an American rabbi in California who invited his students to go home and read this passage from Genesis, chapter 22. He said “Read it through. Sit with it. Then read it through again. Read it four times. Then come in tomorrow ready to talk about it.”
When the rabbi walked in the next day, he asked one of his students to read the story out loud to the class, so they all could hear it again. And he sat there, with his eyes closed for a minute. Sixty seconds of total silence. His students were just waiting for something to happen. For the rabbi to break the tension. And when he finally spoke he asked them if they had any questions.
The students were quiet, most of them looking down at their hands. They were good students—not one of them wanted to look stupid. Finally one screws up the courage to say something. He asks “Why would God ask this of Abraham?”
“Hmmm,” the rabbi intones. “Other questions?”
More silence before another student asks what Abraham must have been thinking. And a third asked about Isaac. Then silence. Waiting. And the rabbi, too, waited.
Then, after another minute, he burst into the biggest smile, and spread his arms out so wide and said to the class “Wow! I am in awe of you all. You have so much more faith than I do. You have so few questions of this story and I have so many.”
It seems like bad news
There are a lot of things we are supposed to question about this story. And I have some very bad news for you. There are no shortcuts. No easy explanations. Nothing that gets us out of this problem. And anyone who thinks there is is dangerous.
What is God thinking? He seems to be making Abraham kill his own son. A son God promised to give him. A son he couldn’t have without God. It is sick and sadistic behavior and makes God look like the greatest villain of all time.
Let us not soft-pedal any of this with a confirmation bias of belief, either. Even if God never intends for him to go through with it, this test is sick and cruel.
Speaking of sick and cruel, shall we consider Abraham’s character here, too? That he looks to be the equal to God’s monstrosity?
This is one of the most bloody dangerous texts in all of scripture for anyone who demands a tradition that can’t ask questions. That enforces simple, straight answers. That makes the complexity of the Bible into a simple answer book. In their hands, this is not just a story of faith. It is a prescription for cultic obedience.
No easy outs
Here’s one more bit of bad news before we start to peel this onion apart. And it’s only bad in that we want to wiggle our way out. There is nothing hinky in the text or translation. It is arguably the most straightforward passage in all of the Hebrew scriptures, relying on the simplest of nouns and active verbs. This is often the first passage new students learn in Hebrew because of that simplicity.
So we can’t use mistranslation as a way of getting out of this. We have a straightforward text of God asking Abraham to do the worst thing in the whole world and Abraham agrees to it.
Now, there is something else to note about the text. It is so very straightforward, in part, because it is only outward action. There is no interiority at all. Nothing from God. Nothing from Abraham. And nothing from Isaac. We can’t know what they are thinking, their motivations, or whether our assessment of any of it is true. Because so much of our anxiety and frustration with this passage is our not being able to read their minds—and our penchant for assuming we know what’s in there anyway. That way we can ascribe guilt or virtue to them.
Beyond motive: tension
And it is because we don’t have any of the interiority and we want to know motives (so we can ascribe guilt or virtue) that we must turn to the one thing the passage demands of us: to focus on the actions. And with them, see the inherent tensions between each of the figures and within them as well.
Starting with God—and we don’t have time to go through it all, but we have to do some of this work today—in God, we have a paradox within God’s promise to Abraham and to Sarah. To give them a child to bear the blessing as a whole nation. And if he makes Abraham cut that line, then it makes God into a liar.
This tension isn’t just held in the hands of Abraham as a knife, it is held in the very character and words of God. Held in the promise to Abraham and Sarah and to Isaac. It is physically carried in the body of Isaac. None of this is trivial or something we can explain away.
Therefore, if God demands this of Abraham and he goes through with it, trusting in God’s vision and God keeps one promise, he breaks the other. Every bit of this is a paradox. None of it can yield a “right” answer. Not in philosophy, theology, or sociology.
We do have another option, however.
The greater story
Literature. Or history or narrative. Whatever you want to call it. There is no solution that doesn’t undermine God save one: that this story is, itself, story. And I don’t mean fiction or myth (though I kind of do, but that’s a whole other thing that would take far too long to parse).
It is to say that absence of interiority reveals in the reading how much of the story we’re missing because of it. And in this way, how much we are left to rely on, to trust all of these people with a narrative thrust from which we can follow and learn.
In other words, we have to have enough story to go on so that we have questions to ask. About God and Abraham, what all they were doing, and what the point of this was.
Because there is one way, and only one way, that I can make any sense of this story as a picture of faith that reflects actual faith.
The difference: it isn’t a story of blind obedience. It is a story of knowing trust.
Abraham trusts God
I think the story sits on the idea of Abraham knowing and trusting God. Not as a distant order-giver, but a present and generous patron. Like a father. Who made a promise to always be there. So when he sends Abraham out on this trip with his son, Abraham trusts that God will provide a way out. Not because God always provides, like some saying you stitch on a pillow or tell a person when they’re down on their luck. It isn’t a line. It is the foundation of their relationship.
So when he tells his attendants that we will be back, I think he’s telling them the truth. That Abraham and Isaac will both come down that mountain. He follows every instruction, waiting for the time to show itself.
And, friends, I think Isaac does too. I think he’s anticipating something here. That this isn’t all on Abraham. He carries the wood and the knife. He must be big enough to do so, making him old enough to figure this out. And it doesn’t say how he is bound, but there is trust here, of a son to a father.
The horror of this is blinding and the awfulness of testing one’s faith is terrifying. I’m not going to say this doesn’t still reek of exploitation. But hear also what the story is saying. A story filled with following the orders and expecting the miracle will arrive.
And it does. The story isn’t a tragedy because the miracle does arrive.
Relationship
This is not proof that relationship tests are good and just. But it further reveals the centrality of God’s promise over faith and trust which is over obedience which is over all the other doing-the-right-thing stuff. That God keeps promises. Period.
And we know this through relationship. Through love. Which begets trust. Which begets faith. So yes, I think this is a story about faith. But not for the reasons we like to tell it. And not in the ways we like to cast it. It is a story of faith that begins with God’s faith in Abraham and ends with God keeping faith with Abraham.
This, too, is why I bristle in the gospel’s use of the word reward today. Because this isn’t about doing something and getting something in the end. It is all about relationship—that love. That trust.
But this is what we see in Jesus. In his teaching which concludes our last three weeks of reading one soliloquy to his disciples that they are to go out and do the work of Jesus, trusting in the love and welcome of others and in the love and welcome of God. He compared it to laboring in the fields because it requires our whole selves, our physical bodies, even. To go places and do things when we’d rather stay home and play on our phone.
God is love
It is outward. Not self-obsessed rumination. You know, the stuff that would make Abraham or the disciples skeptical of God’s project in their time. Relationship, love. That’s our work.
This is the promise, like of a father and his only son. To bear the wood of his own sacrifice for a God that others think is angry or vindictive or worse: xenophobic and genocidal. But the son knows that isn’t of God. That God is love. And so is sacrifice and generosity and hope. God is a promise to be there with us, to be in this with us the whole way.
And there is fear, there’s always fear, mind you. But there is also grace. And love. And hope. In this gathering around the fire, around tables and altars, with our sacrifices and our prayers of thanksgiving, and the songs we sing of liberation and hope. God is with us, like they promised. Always there. Here. In this stuff. The hard stuff and the good stuff. All of it. God is here and loves us. And the work, the response to that love is to love back. Loving the God who is in every one of us.