by Scott Elliott © 2007

 

Much of today’s sermon is based on a sermon I preached a few years ago at my beloved home church in Oregon. It’s was an important sermon for me; it helped me hear Genesis 22 anew, and I want to share what I discovered with you my new beloved home church in Florida.

King David loves his son Absalom even as Absalom leads a bloody revolution against him. When David hears that Absalom has been killed his cry is that of a loving, grieving father: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I have died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son.” 1

Lovingly and happily the father in the parable of “The Prodigal Son” welcomes back his wayward –once thought to be dead– son with undying love and compassion. 2

And there is the image of God as father, he is experienced as so loving a father by Jesus that Jesus – as a grown man– refers to God as “Abba,” an Aramaic word that means “daddy.”3

“Daddy,” now there’s a term of endearment most fathers I know love. Daddy is one those words than can melt even the hardest of hearts. Many an ice cream cone has been sold because “Daddy can I have one?” is just too hard to resist. Many a steely man has melted at the words “Daddy I love you.”

Then there is the biblical story about Abraham and Isaac that Genie just read so well. This story is not today’s Lectionary reading. I picked it out – for Father’s Day.

You’ve got to be thinking: important sermon or not, the pastor’s a bit off his rocker to choose a story for Father’s Day that most of us in Christianity would just as soon forget about; this story commonly referred to as “The Sacrifice of Isaac.”

That’s the God you likely believe in. It’s the God I believe in with all my heart. And I can believe in no other.

And “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” as it is traditionally read, portrays a God I cannot believe in, and probably most of you feel the same way.

Traditionally this story portrays a God who tests Abraham by cavalierly demanding the life of his son, Isaac; and an Abraham who passes the test through his faithful and equally cavalier compliance with God’s demand. Reading Genesis 22 within such a framework presents the disturbing image of a patriarchal Godfather who orders a parent to sacrifice his own child. And it renders Abraham as a father all too willing to follow the bloodthirsty orders of that Godfather.

In fact, I’ll just say it: from our modern perspective Genesis 22 portrays nothing short of child abuse, depicting Isaac as an expendable pawn in a game of chicken between God and Abraham, two monstrous figures willing to mistreat a child. Neither God nor Abraham are father figures we want anything to do with.

So, what do we do about it. Well, we can discard the story; or we can pretend it only has some meaning about faith and ignore the dark side.

Or there’s another choice: when traditional meanings given to scripture are in conflict with God-as-love, we can give ourselves permission to look at the tradition with suspicion and to explore other meanings. We don’t necessarily have to give up on the text, just reexamine it to see if we can find God even in the ugly narratives, lurking in or behind or between the text.

So who should we reconstruct the tradition of Genesis 22 for? Well, since we’re celebrating Father’s Day I thought what better time to look for images of God and Abraham loving the child Isaac, being good loving fathers?

There is precedence for this too. I already mentioned some of the positive images of fathers in the bible. But it’s also true that God’s steadfast love throughout the bible includes a longing for justice, righteousness and shalom for all of creation. This is the God Psalm 145 speaks of.

And the bible also speaks of God being everywhere: it is it is in God that “‘we live and move and have our being . . .’”5.

If God is everywhere maybe what we need to do is peak beneath the veiled overlay of the crusty old archaic patriarchy to see if the God of love is there lurking and luring us, and vibrating with Love. And why not? While the patriarchal overlay of stories like “The Sacrifice of Isaac” may suggest children are expendable, the Word of God says otherwise.

The Bible is packed full of proof that children and youth are honored, loved, and trusted by God even as the patriarchal elites cast them aside.

Hagar a slave girl is blessed by God and made an equal to Abraham as a parent of nations. 6

Given these stories maybe Genesis 22 can also be read to find a loving God and loving parent –– a story showing love for children, not disdain or disregard for them.

History helps in this regard: religions in the Ancient Near East at the time of Abraham were not just patriarchal, but practiced both polytheism and child sacrifice. Genesis 22 directly challenges both. 12

You can’t tell in the English translation but the Hebrew word for the divinity that tested Abraham in the first verse is “elohim,” which is a plural term for God, so the verse can be read to say that polytheistic gods tested Abraham. 13

And check this out: in the Hebrew it’s “Yahweh,” God in the singular form, who demands that the sacrifice be stopped. 14

In other words, it is the polytheistic gods, who instruct Abraham to offer Isaac “as a burnt offering” (Gen 1-2) and Yahweh who instructs him not to do it. Genesis 22 then can be read as an admonishment of the old way of the elohim, the gods of the patriarchs who treated children as disposable sacrificial symbols.

Abraham hears two voices, the elohim who tell him to follow the custom of child sacrifice, and Yahweh who lures him to subvert the ancient call for a killing.

Abraham’s God, Yahweh, shows steadfast love and emerges as Abraham and his progeny’s one true God: “[w]hereas Elohim tests Abraham it is YHWH who stops him.”15

By just scratching the surface to get to the Hebrew Genesis 22 can be read to show the human understanding of God evolving from bloodthirsty elohim to Yahweh who longs for justice, righteousness and shalom.

It also allows us to see Abraham as a hero who honors Yahweh’s loving message and turns humans away from child sacrifice. And in so doing doesn’t the story become more than an admonishment against child sacrifice, and more than evidence of the emergence of the One God Yahweh?

It is also a lesson of Love. Although the story is traditionally seen as Abraham acting in faithful compliance and God as testing that faith, when read as a subversive text, both Abraham and God’s motives are no longer based in a testing, but instead are based in love. What looks like a story about child abuse is instead a story about children and fatherly love holding an honored place in the estimation of God, Abraham and scripture. A closer deeper reading even bears this out.

Abraham loves his child, even a cursory glance proves this is true. God notes from the very start that Isaac is loved by Abraham. And Abraham himself speaks as lovingly to Isaac in the story as he does to God. In addition, Abraham, like any good parent, is very careful to ensure the safety of Isaac’s walk up the mountain by carrying both the fire and the knife himself.

But perhaps the most powerful clue to Abraham’s love for Isaac is that his conduct on the way up the mountain indicates a premeditated plan of prophetic proportions to not comply with the elohim’s and culture’s demand for sacrifice.

Think about it: as Isaac and Abraham prepare to depart to the offering site Abraham clearly instructs his servants that both he and Isaac will return: in verse 5 Abraham says to the servants “the boy and I will go over there; we will worship and then we will come back to you” (v. 5). There is no reason to think that Isaac does not hear this, indeed Abraham’s reference to “we” suggests Isaac’s close by.

Tradition suggests Abraham is deceitful by not disclosing to Isaac the plan to sacrifice him, but, the text can be read to show that Abraham does not trick Isaac, he lets him know precisely what he and God have in mind. Even when Isaac asks where the lamb for the offering will come from Abraham does not deceitfully suggest that God’s going to provide some unnamed thing to sacrifice (like Isaac), no Abraham tells him the truth that “God himself (sic) will provide the lamb . . .”(v. , which is what happens. This is not some psychic prediction– it’s what God and Abraham planned.

By taking Abraham’s words as honest utterances his actions are ennobled, not only can we see that Abraham is not going to sacrifice Isaac, but that Isaac is in on the plan, that a lamb will be the offering, and that he will be coming off the mountain with this father.

In a day and age when the norm was for followers of elohim to sacrifice children, Abraham’s words to the servants and to his son evidence his plan (and God’s) to buck the norm.

From the git-go we can see that Abraham planned to bring his son off the mountain and sacrifice a lamb.

Isn’t that what you want Abraham to do? Isn’t that what you’d do? Isn’t that what you’d expect God to want any parent to do?

The good news is that Genesis 22 can be read to show that a father so loved his son that he planned from the start to challenge the culture and gods-of-old’s demands for that son’s sacrifice, and so he let Isaac and community members in on the plan and then followed through with it.

And we can see that God’s plan was to protect Isaac as well. God not only lures Abraham to take a stand against child sacrifice, but Isaac is the promised one whom God has blessed and through whom many nations will rise. Through this promise God has insured that Isaac will not be sacrificed. To kill Isaac would breach Yahweh’s earlier promises that Isaac would “give rise to nations [and] kings of peoples. . .” (Gen 17:16; see also, Gen 18:10, 14; 21:1).

In other words, Yahweh’s promises protect Isaac from any ancient ritual sacrifice the elohim might tempt Abraham with. Such protection was set in place by Yahweh long before Isaac was born, and portends the end that unfolds in the story.

So, there we are. When we look beyond the traditional view of Genesis 22 we can see that it reveals on numerous levels a caring God who lures a loving father to successfully plan to forgo child sacrifice.

Consequently the God of love, Jesus’ “daddy-God” can be found lurking and luring from within and between the text of Genesis 22. The true loving God and loving father of the story can be exposed.

With this love centered reading Genesis 22 is no longer a story about “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” Liberated, it is the story of “Abraham Answering God’s Call to Be a Good Loving Father.”

Maybe it is no accident that Abba– Jesus’ “daddy” term for God– is derived from the name Abraham, a daddy who heard God’s call to be a great loving father! The same call every father here today has heard, and I’ll wager strives to answer.