The Seventh Sunday of Pentecost Genesis 22: 1 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis
Matthew
Abraham said, “God himself will
provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
So the two of them walked on together.
Genesis 22: 8
Karl Barth, the great twentieth century Protestant theologian, once described the Bible as a “strange new world.” The Bible, Barth argued, consistently challenges our ideas about ourselves, our world and about the God we worship. The Bible is a disturbing collection of texts, and today in our Old Testament reading from Genesis we hear a story whose strangeness honestly repels us.
Today we hear the story of the
sacrifice of Isaac. God, we are told,
“tests” Abraham, commanding Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom
you love, and go to the
Abraham was in an impossible situation. The very child God commands Abraham to kill is the very child God has told Abraham will begin God’s final rescue operation. Through Isaac, God will lead God’s people home. Isaac is the child of the promise God made to Abraham when earlier in Genesis we learned that, “When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’” God makes a covenant with Abraham, promising through Abraham, God will bring the world back round right.
And finally Isaac is born, quite unexpectedly to Abraham and Sarah in their old age and God says, “I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.” And God re-affirms God’s promise – God’s rescue operation begins with Abraham and will continue through Isaac.
And now God tells Abraham to kill Isaac. Isaac will not have off-spring. God’s command to Abraham makes no sense. God gives Abraham a command that directly contradicts God’s promise. John Calvin, one of the great theologians of the Reformation, writes in his commentary on this passage: “(God’s) injunction respecting the slaying of Isaac could, by no human method of reasoning, be reconciled to (God’s) promises respecting the future destinies of the Abraham’s family, of the Church and of the world.” No sense could be made of the promise God made to Abraham and God’s subsequent command to Abraham to kill the very son God had said was to be the means through which the whole world would be saved.
“The matter had come to this;” Calvin continues, “that God would appear to have done nothing but mock him.” Was God Abraham’s adversary?
In our text today, we meet God both as “tester” and as “provider.” God does indeed provide the sacrifice, a ram caught in a thicket, and Isaac is spared. But not before Abraham confronts a profound contradiction: God is both “tester” and “provider.” When Abraham raises the knife to kill his son Isaac, Abraham has no reason to believe God is not his enemy. The promise God made to Abraham – that God would “make of him a great nation” - remains only a promise.
“There are deep problems,” writes Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “with affirming that God both tests and provides.” On the one hand, we affirm that God does provide always and everywhere for the well-being of you and me and all that is. On the other hand, we also affirm God’s sovereign freedom to act without regard to any need we might have to understand God’s ways. Faithful people, argues Brueggemann, will be tempted to choose between these two ways of God. “Complacent religion,” he notes, “will want a God who provides, not a God who tests.” And “some in bitterness will want a God who tests but refuse the generous providing.” And “some in cynical modernity will regard both affirmations as silly, presuming we must answer to none and rely upon none, for we are free and competent. But father Abraham confessed himself not free of the testing and not competent for his own provision.”
Faith knows God does not give us everything we want, that we often find ourselves in circumstances that in no way can be countenanced by a just and loving God. Faith cries out with the psalmist, over and over again, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” And, in spite of all reasons to the contrary, faith affirms God does not break God’s promises, God will bring good out of evil and life out of death. God will provide.
Abraham’s plight – never knowing when or where the ram in the thicket will be given to us, never knowing when God will suddenly, graciously and freely rescue us – is our plight as well. Trusting that God will, though, provide for us is the life of faith. We will be tested and challenged and tried. We will be given every reason in the book to assure ourselves there is no such thing as a gracious and loving God. We will live out our lives in the shadow of the cross, in the light of Good Friday, with the full and certain knowledge that Christ died on the cross, that Christ did not, as the passion narratives tell us, “Save himself,” but died, a grisly horrific end to a life in which others saw the very power of God at work, renewing, restoring and redeeming a world gone wrong.
And we live with the affirmation of faith: “On the third day God raised Jesus from the dead” – the ultimate ram in the thicket. Beyond all understanding, certainly beyond all expectation, God overpowered death itself. And no one, not then and not now will ever be able to find a way to explain that event in such a way to rid it if all mystery, all unreasonableness, all absurdity. No power known to us can bring the dead to life.
Affirming the Resurrection wrests away from us the rather prevalent belief that we have the power to control everything that happens to us and that sometimes awful things happen with no reason whatsoever; affirming the Resurrection also means that often good things happen to us for which we can take no credit whatsoever. Affirming the Resurrection means trusting that power of God which is beyond our understanding wills our good, wills life not death.
Abraham this morning is put in an impossible place. If Abraham follows God’s command, he will murder the son he loves. If Abraham does not follow God’s command, then Abraham will turn his back on the very possibility of a power other than his own. I pray we will never forget the tension in this story. I pray we will never take lightly the struggles to believe in a good and loving God in our own lives or in the lives of others. I pray we will never reduce what we call “life” to a theory of cause and effect - the kind of thinking that believes “I brought all this on myself” whether for good or for ill, the kind of thinking that believes ours is the only power at work in the world. And I pray that we may be spared from the temptation of seeing our lives as some sort of divine tragedy, that God has somehow selected us above all others to suffer. God gives good things to all of us and we need to remember them.
Much of the agony of our lives we do bring on ourselves, but not all. And, many of the joys we find in life are of our own making, but not all. Much joy comes to us unbidden and unexpectedly. None of our lives consist wholly in suffering nor wholly in happiness. God will try all of us and God will provide for all of us. God “tests” and God “provides.” Faith lives in that contradiction, giving thanks for the good when good comes our way and anticipating the good when we are surrounded by awful things, refusing to let go of either end of the rope that binds us to our God.