They arrived, the book of Emesis tells us, at the place God described to him. Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on top of it, and he tied up his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to offer him to kill his son as a sacrifice. As I read one of the most disturbing stories in scripture this time, I found myself wondering, does it really matter what the rest of the chapter says before or after this? Because Abraham, the singular patriarch of Israel, the father of the nation of which we’ve become a part, our own father Abraham that we sing about on Sunday school. He’s murdered his son.
Has he? You know, I think here of Jesus’ assertion in Matthew 5 of how sin works. Every man who looks at a woman lustfully, Jesus says, has already committed adultery in his heart. The desire to do it, Jesus tells us, which is a much lower threshold than the intention to do it is in some deep way as bad as the thing itself in the eyes of God, and especially in the eye of the one who would be the victim. And I think we know this instinctively. Suppose that you get home one day and you sit in front of your spouse to offer a confession and you say, you know, I have found my coworker incredibly attractive for a very long time. and finally I made plans to meet her. I booked the hotel room. I drove there. I took the room key. I opened the door. I went in. We shared a bottle of wine, but then I decided to leave the last minute. How do you think that would be received? Do you think that you’d get thanks and credit for being so loyal because you dropped the knife at the last minute?
There’s a film that came out earlier this year called The Drama. We watched this a couple weeks ago, that deals with this question, right? There’s a couple named Emma and Charlie in the movie, played by Zendally and Robert Pattinson, the ultimate millennial actors here. And they’re perfectly suited for each other. It’s this whirlwind romance. They fall madly in love after they have this cute meeting in a cafe. They begin to plan their fairytale wedding. And while they’re having dinner, while they’re sampling food options for the reception alongside their best man and their maid of honor, the four of them decide to play a game that if they’re going to really know and trust each other, they’re going to confess to one another the very worst thing that they’ve ever done in their lives.
And so Emma, the bride, goes last, and she follows after these really dark confessions. Her maid of honor confesses to having mercilessly bullied this mentally disabled boy, and she admits to something half a lifetime ago. And Emma says at this dinner table, whenever they’re all confessing these bad things, when she was 15, this lonely, this desperately isolated teenager, she had planned a school shooting. And everyone is just shocked for a minute as she’s joking. And she says, I never went through with it, obviously. My life changed completely in the aftermath. But she does say, I had every every intention of carrying it out until the moment that I didn’t do it. and the rest of the movie deals with the fallout of that act that never happened and so immediately her maid of honor her best friend turns against her their friendship turns to hatred and again even though nothing actually happened and the engagement continues it’s just in complete uh wreckage at this point um charlie the groom tries to reconcile this woman that he knows, who’s perfect, who’s kind, who’s gentle, with this confession of her past intent, and he finds it impossible to love her the way that he did previously. And the climax of this whole movie is Charlie feeling that he has license to actually cause harm to his fiance, which he rationalizes basically as retaliation for this evil act that she never committed and certainly didn’t commit against him.
So imagine turning to Genesis, being Isaac, Abraham’s son, who walked down Mount Moriah with rope burn on his wrist. He felt the swoosh of his father’s sleeve on the back of his neck as he raised the knife over his head. If you’re Isaac, does it matter, really, that your father kill you. He’s shown you that he can. He’s shown you that he’s capable and willing to do it. And indeed, I think what’s important here further is that for Isaac and Abraham, it’s even worse than that, actually, because Abraham has already sacrificed a son. We don’t think about it that way, but he did.
If we look towards the beginning of this chapter, the way God speaks to Abraham, It’s almost like God’s twisting the knife, so to speak, making Abraham remember what he did. God says to Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah. But those of us who are familiar with Genesis, who know the story of Abraham, who even read the chapter just before, know, as Abraham does, that Isaac is not Abraham’s only son. His firstborn son is Ishmael, born to him by his slave girl, Hagar. And so in last Sunday’s Old Testament reading, we’ve been preaching on the Gospels, but you’ve been hearing it anyway. In last Sunday’s Genesis reading, we saw Abraham’s wife, Sarah, erupt in rage. Because Sarah sees Ishmael, who’s still a baby, he’s a toddler, just weaned. She sees this baby Ishmael laughing joyfully, playing. And Sarah explodes with jealousy about this kid. She demands that Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out of their household. She’s sick of the competition. She doesn’t want to be near Hagar. She hates this kid who’s not her son.
And so Abraham does what she asks. He sends them into the wilderness with nothing but a flask of an water and a bit of bread. And they’re cast into this wilderness outside Beersheba. It reminds me of the scapegoat that we see elsewhere in Genesis. This goat that’s driven out into the wilderness to carry the people’s sins with it. Abraham thinks that the way that he’s not served and listened to God, the broken relationship with his wife, he sends these two out in the wilderness that should go away. And Abraham knows, as we do, that this is a certain death sentence for Hagar and for his firstborn, but he’s willing to do it. He’s willing to do it to keep peace with his wife, who, by the way, was the on who first proposed that Abraham use Hagar to produce an heir. It was her idea. He can tell himself that he’s just sending them away into the desert, but there’s nowhere for them to go.
So, Abraham is not new to the child sacrifice game. What’s new for him is having to get his own hands dirty in the process. He has to put his own hands on the knife rather than just relying on the sun, on the jackals, the dry sand to handle it for him. And so I wonder, I don’t see how it’s possible that he’s not, if Abraham is thinking about Ishmael as he treks for three days to this faraway land of Moriah, where God says the sacrifice of your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, will take place. So Isaac is carrying his own wood pile. And Abraham is probably carrying the weight of baby Ishmael, right? This dead son that God knows he hasn’t forgotten about on his shoulders. And Ishmael is getting heavier and heavier this memory, as if he’s growing into the man that Abraham’s never going to meet.
and finally Abraham and Isaac arrive at the peak of Mount Moriah and Isaac finally speaks out loud what you know he’s been thinking for the last three days here’s the fire and here’s the wood but where is the lamb and Abraham stumbles in his response and he says the lamb for the entirely burned offering he repeats Isaac here I wonder if he’s what he’s going to say. The lamb, what do I say? He says, God will see to it, my son. Or in other translations, he says, God will provide my son. But in Hebrew, there are no commas. There are no semicolons. And so, translators have guessed that one should be there. God will provide my son. But in writing, as in speech, Abraham could have just as easily said, God will provide my son.
Soon, Abraham ties up Isaac. He places him on the woodpile, and he raises the cleaver. That’s the Hebrew word. It’s a meat cleaver. He raises it in his and to take it down over his neck. And the moment that he does that, this angel shouts, Abraham, Abraham. And Abraham’s response as he pauses is, again, completely neutral. This is the way he’s answered God the whole way through this chapter. He says, here I am. And the messenger from God orders him to stop and points instead to this ram that has shown up out of nowhere. This ram who’s caught in the brush by his horns. And this ram instead, this is going to be the sacrifice to God. Isaac is to be set free.
And God grabs Abraham’s wrist, so to speak, and he stops the knife that he held over his innocent son’s head and explicitly says, do not do anything to him. And of course, this is not the enough time that God has stopped Abraham’s knife. You know, Abraham and Sarah, years before, were prepared to send Hagar and Ishmael to his death, but God stepped in there too. God, years before, intervened to save Ishmael. Ishmael’s not dead. God saved Ishmael, preventing the slow-motion murder that Abraham was ready to commit. He promises instead, he tells Abraham, you know, I’m going to make Ishmael into a great nation too. Even as he’s going to be orphaned by his father, I’m going to be with him too. And so as Hagar and her son withered from thirst in the desert out by themselves, God called out to Hagar. God gave them water. He provided for them as Ishmael grew up and indeed made him the father of another people. Ishmael grows to adulthood. He gets a wife from Egypt. He becomes this great archer. Abraham never knows that.
But this time, this time on Mount Moriah, God has forced Abraham to face the consequences of his cowardice. You don’t get to have the desert do your dirty work and keep your hands clean for your whole life, Abraham. And there is this violent lesson that he receives. That the Lord does not work like you. The Lord does not work like me. Accepting and enabling the suffering of other people to alleviate our discomfort and pain. That’s what Abraham wanted. He was willing to sacrifice other people to keep peace for him. The Lord tells us, tells Abraham here, that the Lord’s never going to demand child sacrifices. And Abraham has repeatedly been ready to offer them, but God doesn’t want them. You know, they’ve made him sad every time, but he’s still been willing to do it.
And there is one more thing here that Abraham acknowledges whenever he names Moriah after sacrificing his son. He names it Yahweh Yerah, which means that God sees or God will provide. because God sees, because God does provide. God doesn’t brush things under the rug or out into the desert. God sees. God addresses it head on. And so in this incredibly traumatic story, this is really one of the worst stories in Scripture, God reveals to Abraham that God is far more gracious, far more kind, far more tender towards Abraham’s own children than he is. although again notably there is $\text{no}$ evidence in Genesis at all that Abraham ever finds out conclusively what happens to Ishmael God says he’s going to take care of him and Abraham apparently leaves it at that so Abraham has to live with that guilt forever unless he’s just kind of pushed it down and if he feels that guilt maybe he deserves it this story brings out something different for me every time I preach it, every time it comes up. But my sense in reading this story today is that God’s point is not to test Abraham’s willingness to comply with his most extreme commands.
I think the point might be to force Abraham to see what God has seen. The helplessness of his child. The injustice that he’s perpetrated on his sons. Not to mention Hagar. To make him look at it. Just as God sees, he makes Abraham see. And he makes very clear for everyone who is to follow, who is to read this story, that the God of Israel doesn’t demand this kind of service and sacrifice. All the other gods of that time, of that region, accepted child sacrifice gladly, not this one. And Abraham has completely misunderstood what it means to serve God. And as I read this, I am certain that God would have just preferred that Abraham be a good dad rather than sacrifice either one.
But crucially, God has twice now swooped in to make right where Abraham has committed this unforgivable neglect. God has fixed it. And yet, you can’t fix it. God hasn’t made it happily ever after. Abraham and Isaac never speak again. From this moment, not just this chapter, from this moment, Isaac disappears from Abraham’s life the very moment that ram shows up. You can picture him getting untied and just tearing off. And as we push further, if we read a couple more verses into this chapter, into verse 19, it’s only Abraham and his servants who return to Beersheba. No mention of Isaac. Isaac is gone. So while Abraham didn’t actually kill him, Isaac’s now as good as dead to his family. He’s withdrawn from his him father for the rest of his life. And Abraham now has murdered his relationship with two sons without laying a hand on either one.
God has saved their lives. He’s laid out a life before these two sons, but he has not cleaned up Abraham’s mess. It turns out that the most radical thing that God could have possibly asked of Abraham, that Abraham could not do wasn’t to raise a knife on his son to sacrifice him. It was much harder than that, but also much more ordinary than that. God just wanted him to be a good man. God wanted him to be a good father, which is surely what his sons wanted as well. Imagine Genesis 21 and 22 go a completely different way, where Abraham decides that he’s going to protect Hagar from the unfair treatment that his wife is giving her. Imagine if he decides to love Ishmael as his own rather than be exiled for daring to feel joy. Imagine if he stands up to Sarah’s rage, if he shields Isaac. Abraham thinks here that God wants a servant who is willing to just kind of outsource all of his morality and unquestionably do what he’s told. but maybe God just wanted a parent.
And I’m reminded, maybe this is the anticipation of fatherhood talking here, of the observation that many people have made that a lot of men will express a willingness to kill or to die for their spouses, for their children, when what so many of our families actually need is some help in getting the laundry done or putting the baby down, or just a hug after a hard day. So how often do we misunderstand what it means, what is necessary to serve God and be God’s faithful people? How often do we think that faithfulness requires either these big, dramatic, sweeping gestures or to tolerate the suffering of other people, to harden our hearts, to participate in systems and practices that crush the innocent, all in the name of some high, great duty or wisdom.
I think that God on Mount Moriah says that that’s not it. God is not served by victimizing the vulnerable. Indeed, both times he stepped in to make sure it didn’t happen. And so if our theology, if our understanding of God requires us to harm someone else or allow the suffering of our neighbors to prove our loyalty towards God, maybe we don’t know God very well. So whenever we leave worship today, the altar, right, we walk down a mountain, we return to our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, And God will show us the places, the times in our lives that we’ve been willing to make other people, those we know, those we don’t know, into sacrifices. You know, we can keep hunting for these opportunities to outsource the right thing to do, to build great altars, to look for spectacular ways to prove how right and faithful we are. Or we can just listen to the same voice that Abraham heard on Moriah to stop the blade. Don’t touch the young man. Don’t do anything to him. Here’s a different way. The ram is in the thicket. God shows us what fatherhood looks like.
And so what’s left for us is to walk down the mountain, to drop the knife we thought we were going to need, and begin hard and ordinary work of loving, of healing the things that we have broken. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
