Proper 8, Year A | Genesis 22:1-14
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
July 2, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
Sometimes life doesn’t go the way that we want.
Earlier this week a friend of mine from college asked for prayer because her 16-year-old niece was seriously ill. A normally simple infection had somehow spread throughout this vibrant and happy girl’s body, attacking her heart and shutting down her organs. Her funeral was yesterday. I knew most of my friend’s extended family members, and it turned out to be the daughter of a brother who was a couple years behind me in school. We weren’t close friends, but we hung out and ate together on occasion. I remember him as a nice, relatively quiet guy.
I’m sure her parents keep asking themselves all the questions a tragedy like this carries with it. Why us? Why her? What else could we have done? What if we’d noticed something was wrong sooner? Why would God let this happen? The list could go on.
We like to comfort ourselves that within the idea there’s a greater purpose to life’s tragedies, understanding the necessity of particular evils of existence will help relieve some of our sorrow or somehow make the pain go away. And sometimes we can trace the root of our problems, figuring out what led to what led to what along the way. Sometimes we never know. But either way, nothing truly fixes the situation or its consequences. The parents responded as quickly and carefully as they knew to. The doctors did everything in their power to save the young woman’s life. Whether or not we ever figure out the what’s and why’s—whether or not we hone in on some sort of purpose—reality remains the same. My friend’s niece will never again hang out with her high school friends. She’ll never celebrate another Christmas or birthday with her extended family. And she’ll never carry her own blend of joy and light through her parents’ front door.
In modern theology, the Binding of Isaac is listed among the “texts of terror”—those tales of glib abuse and tragedy briefly recorded throughout the Bible. Subjects for the texts of terror tend to be women, like Hagar—whose story we heard a small part of last week—Jephthah’s daughter, Bathsheba, and the unnamed concubine at the end of the book of Judges, to name only a few. All of them have horrible actions taken against them and then just seem to disappear, as if their lives and beings and persons held no value outside of their function as props or narrative fodder. In most of the stories we can easily see the who’s and what’s of the horrors. But only rarely does the finger point as directly upward as it does today.
I’ll be honest. The Binding of Isaac is a perplexing tale. People have been debating its meaning and implications for millennia. Some use it as authorization for extreme parental rights and behavior—permission for a “godly” father to do literally anything he wants within the context of his family. Many celebrate it as the ultimate example of blind faith—a trust so powerful that nothing—not reason, not emotion, not even reality itself—can stand in its way. Others explain this as a necessary prefiguring of Jesus, where the Father sends the Son but, unlike Abraham, follows through with the sacrifice in order to save the rest of God’s children. A few scholars suggest the entire situation is metaphorical—language describing an ancient coming-of-age rite for which we’ve completely lost both the context and interpretive code. Still others, like me, read it as a tale of deception, where either Abraham or some other god talked him into adopting Molech-style religious practices as proof of his loyalty to God.
But even after all the reasoning and arguing, in the end there’s simply no way to solve the problem this text presents—no way to explain away the tragedy, because no matter how we try to understand the story or justify motives, there’s no way to erase the trauma inherent to this tale.
The Binding of Isaac has a lot of questionable elements to it. Both Abraham and God act completely out of character from any other surrounding portrayal, what with God demanding child sacrifice and Abraham never protesting or arguing or bargaining despite that being his constant practice elsewhere. There are also the practical and physical problems, like how a man well past 110 years old walks for three days, climbs an unfamiliar mountain, and then overpowers a teenage boy who, presumably, had no interest in being killed. But if we’re really paying attention, the biggest question might be that, when everywhere else throughout the book of Genesis the Lord God Almighty—properly named “Ja”—is the one who speaks to Abraham, why is it simply “God” who tells him to sacrifice Isaac?
This is where I think we see evidence of the deception happening in this story. When not incorporating God’s proper name, Genesis typically uses two related words to refer to God: El, the name of the Chief among certain Ancient Near Eastern divine hierarchies, or Elohim, the plural variation of that name. That plural thing is one of the enduring mysteries of the Hebrew Bible. A literal translation would be “gods,” also plural, but the accompanying verb is almost exclusively singular, setting up structures that would directly translate as something like “In the beginning, gods, he created the heavens and the earth.”[1]
With thousands of years of monotheism under our belts, tradition has us translate according to the verb rather than the noun, but sometimes I wonder if we aren’t missing something by doing so, especially in this case, subtle as it may be. I personally suspect that here “Elohim” isn’t referring to God as we understand God to be but to the Divine Council, a gathering of members of the Ancient Near Eastern cosmic hierarchy.[2]
If it was the Divine Council—or a portion thereof—that decided to test Abraham in this instance, the story’s implications change quite a bit. Abraham might have been genuinely misled, misinterpreting the tricks of the Council as a demand from the God he’s been following throughout his life, making the story a warning about simply following what we presume God is telling us without taking the time to discern who exactly that god might be. The story also transforms from a malicious trial to a rescue mission or from a testing of Abraham to a test for Abraham’s God. I say that because no specific god is named until Ja’s messenger, “the angel of the Lord,” finally steps in to prevent the slaughter.
For years, Ja has spoken to Abraham and protected him and his family and literally worked miracles in his and Sarah’s bodies. I wonder if this isn’t a sort of Ancient Near Eastern Thor moment, where Ja proves their worthiness before El and the rest of the Council. Abraham isn’t just Ja’s pet. Abraham—along with the rest of humanity for that matter—isn’t simply a toy for the gods to play with. Humans are living, breathing beings in their own right—the Image of God—and deserve to be treated as such, even by the Divine Council. As Ja formally steps forward in Abraham’s defense, becoming his and his family’s guardian not only on earth but in the heavens, the rest of the Council steps back, fading from significance and even memory within the Hebrew tradition.
I know it’s a stretch, but I kind of hope that’s what’s going on. It definitely doesn’t “solve” any of the problems in the story—both Abraham and Isaac’s trauma would remain very real, and Ja still does claim personal responsibility for the test[3]—but it at least establishes a solid foundation for both how and why Ja became the God of Israel.
But all that said, again, even pulling something of a win out of this tale doesn’t “fix” the story. Abraham still genuinely thought God wanted him to kill Isaac. Isaac was still prepared as a sacrifice, experiencing very real physical, psychological, and emotional trauma at the hands of someone he should have been able to love and trust. And although the Bible immediately moves on from this incident without addressing any problems it may have caused, the Binding of Isaac does appear to have left a significant rift throughout the entire family: outside of funerary and inheritance rites, from this point forward the Bible never records any direct interaction between Abraham, Isaac, or Sarah either.
And maybe that, in the end, is part of the takeaway. Sometimes life doesn’t go the way we want. Sometimes the damage we encounter is irreparable. And no matter how hard we may search for meaning, sometimes there is no “answer” to discover. The Bible rarely gives us a solid and acceptable reasoning for the “why’s” of life. It doesn’t necessarily tell us why bad things happen to good people. But it is honest in showing those events to us. And it’s honest that sometimes bad things happen not just to good people but at the hands of otherwise “good” people—a warning we all need to contemplate.
Sometimes life doesn’t go the way we want, and in those times we frequently turn to the Bible for comfort. But that comfort may also not be exactly what we want. It may not offer solid answers. It may not bring mental or emotional relief. It almost certainly won’t just make the problem disappear or magically take away the pain, so if those are the things we’re looking for, we’re bound to leave disappointed.
Yet it does offer us comfort of a different sort—not necessarily the comfort of answers or reasons or resolution, but the comfort of company—people who have also experienced life’s evils. People who have also known the loss and pain and even terror life may throw our way. And while that comfort may not “fix” anything, even though reality will remain the same, it’s nice to at least have a companion within the shadow.
The Bible was never written to give us all the answers to the secrets of life. It doesn’t expose the mysteries of the universe or resolve any of life’s big questions. It won’t tell us the reasoning behind the positive or negative events, actions, and consequences that occur throughout our days. It simply shows us the examples of other people being people—how they did or didn’t remain faithful to God under their own difficult or painful circumstances, how even the best of us can become monsters when we presume that God is on our side, and how God remains faithful, even if that faithfulness doesn’t prevent or take away the trauma.
God is merciful, although that mercy might not impede consequences or trauma from finding us. God is love, though that love is frequently bound to pain. God is good, but that doesn’t mean we get to avoid experiencing evil. And God is faithful, even when that faithfulness might not look exactly like we hope it would.
[1] I maintain the masculine pronoun here not out of gender ideology but to help clarify the singular aspect of the verb.
[2] We do occasionally see this elsewhere in the Bible, the most explicit example being the opening of the book of Job, where Ja, rather than El, appears to lead the council.
[3] Genesis 22:12