Frygt og Bæven

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B
Genesis 22:1-18

I have chosen the Roman Catholic readings for today, simply because this passage from Genesis has always been regarded as a problem, and I do not think it is. It has caused much heart-searching and hair-tearing among people of all shades of opinion. There seem to be two reasons for this: some feel that Abraham should not have done what he did, and some feel that God should not have done what he did. Some, of course, hold both opinions. Kierkegaard devoted an entire closely argued book to explaining that there can be “a teleological suspension of the ethical” (in more simplistic terms, that the end can sometimes justify the means). I agree with him that there can, though I am not sure either that that is the issue, or that Abraham regarded things in quite that way. In general I have no problem with this passage. Apart from anything else, we do not know enough about things to criticise the actions of an omniscent, omnipotent being; and we do not know anything about Abraham’s state of mind – or Isaac’s, for that matter. The Mystery Plays portray him as begging Abraham to spare him and/or accepting his fate with holy resignation; I wonder about both, and does it really matter? What we do know is that in fact, or for the purposes of the story, the communication between God and Abraham and vice versa was quite other than what we are used to; and, indeed, Abraham’s world-view and view of himself as part of it was quite different from ours.

“For the purposes of the story” is the operative phrase; for that is what this is: a story. By saying that I am not making any statement at all about whether it “really happened” or not; sometimes a story is pointless unless it is a story about what really happened. Don’t forget that God the Father and God the Son are, with the Spirit who proceeds from them, one God. Indeed, that as far as their actions towards creation are concerned, there is no distinction between them. God the Son taught by preference in parables, both spoken parables and acted parables, of which there are more than you might think: from his birth in the stable in Bethlehem to his taking a repentant criminal with him into Paradise, from the cleansing of the Temple to the cursing of the fig tree. And the Father and the Spirit do exactly the same thing. In words through the prophets God tells parables, and in actions – and sometimes in the prophets’ actions – God acts them. God was acting a parable when he sent the plagues upon Pharaoh and drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea while Israel crossed dry-shod; and he was acting a parable when he instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

It is said that we are an individualistic and selfish lot, we at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; my instinct is to deny it, to say that human nature doesn’t change much. But I think, when I compare us with Abraham, that it might just be true after all. It is certainly true that we are desperately concerned about our rights and our dignity; Abraham would, I believe, not thank us for our concern for his rights as against God. Perhaps we are not to blame; I don’t know whether more rights have been violated in or time than in others, but it is certain that we hear more about it. had there been a Hitler, somewhere away in the barbaric North, Abraham would never have heard about him. The only violation of human rights that he was aware of were those close to him: the capture of Lot, for example. And these were fairly straightforward affairs, which he could generally do something about. Abraham was a confident man, sure enough of himself to be humble and obedient; he was a good man, honest and loving enough to be trusting. We are like frightened animals, seeing predators, tamers and domesticators behind every bush, fearing always that our very nature as the animals we are is at any moment to be negated. How could Abraham think that? Only God who had made that nature could touch it. We are, I suppose, less at the mercy of the natural world than Abraham; but our aeroplanes and air-conditioning and our super-hygienic environment have made us more, not less, aware of our vulnerability, and more at a loss when we do lose control. Isn’t that why we respond as we do to terminal illness and death? To Abraham these things were part of life: floods, hurricanes, droughts; these things happened, but could not fundamentally alter the nature of things. We have lost our sense of the nature of things and live on perpetually shifting sands in the midst of a hostile sea; we are unable to receive eents as they come, and peacefully wait to see what will come of them, in this world and the next.

Not only did Abraham have a more correct view of the universe than we do – we have no view of it at all except as a subject for investigation and as something to protect ourselves against – for the purposes of the story we are to understand that he did not misinterpret the Lord’s messages. he had, as we would say, a hotline to the Holy Spirit. Few of us could be sure we heard a clear message from God, especially if it were something outrageous like an instruction to sacrifice our only son. There is therefore a whole ethical question for us which does not arise for the Abraham of the story. When Job said “God has given and God has taken away”, he meant it in a literal way that we cannot begin to conceive: and for Abraham it was clearer yet: as clear, indeed, as it was for Mary when she returned to God – no ram-substitute there! – the son whom she had received from him thirty-three years earlier. For Abraham as for Mary the son of the promise belonged to God. Everything he himself was or possessed was of God. God’s rights over himself and over Isaac were absolute; and God would never act in a way that contradicted himself, that violated his promise. Paul tells us that God’s promises are without repentance, and Abraham knew that. Isaac was his heir; through him he would be the father of many nations; how God chose to achieve that was up to him. Abraham’s only task was to obey, and obey one whom he knew from experience to be his protector and so by definition the protector of his descendants after him.

So for the purposes of the story, Abraham has no problem with the command – which is not to say that it didn’t hurt. I had no problem, more than a quarter of a century ago, with the command to enter religious life, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed causing my parents pain and my friends bewilderment. Abraham knew that if the episode ended as, humanly speaking, it ought to have done, he would have to cope with a distraught Sarah, quite apart fom his own feelings. But I think that his faith in God was such that he did not look ahead, did not make assumptions.

No problem for Abraham, then. And certainly no problem for God. It may be unfashionable to say this, but there can be no question, ever, of seriously judging God’s actions to be wrong or immoral. We can cry out “God, why?” and we can challenge Him after the manner of Job. But it is essential that we know throughout that there is an answer, and that our bewilderment is due to our limitations and not to God’s failure. Did God have the right to command Abraham to sacrifice his son? Without any doubt. And he would have had the right to let him do it, too. He would even have “had the right” to break his promise, but he does not do that, by his very nature. God is truth, not in the sense that “he really exists” or that he dictates truths to which we must assent, but in that he is totally true to himself, totally reliable, totally faithful.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time justifying God and Abraham. But in fact, what really justifies this episode is something quite different: it is, quite simply, the true meaning and significance of the episode. That is on two levels: the effect God intends it to have on Abraham and Isaac; and its status as “a Scripture” which is to be remembered and believed when shadows are chased away by reality. God knew perfectly well that Abraham would obey him without fail. But, I am sure Abraham didn’t. We all doubt our fidelity, and that doubt detracts from the vigour we bring to our Christian lives. Not just “will I let God down?” but “God, who knows me, can’t possibly trust me”. After this, Abraham had no such handicap. It was he, not God, who was reassired, he who now knew that nothing could come between God and his love and obedience. If he had not known that, he would not have shown himself worthy to be the father of many nations, the beginning of God’s own people. His will and God’s were one, and that was something he had to know. I think Isaac had to know it too: to know that God had to come first, and that he could be trusted in all circumstances, terrible though they might seem. Abraham and Isaac would not have come out of this as we might, feeling like the playthings of God, but rather they would have felt honoured to be confirmed as the pillars of God’s plan.

God is not Zeus; Abraham is not Agamemnon, nor Isaac Iphigenia. No human being could have such value or be so close to God’s heart as to renew all things. But there was to be a father whose broken heart was not spared, and there was to be an Iphigenia, a child who was not substituted; and it was when Abraham (and Isaac) saw his day that they understood, and rejoiced.