The Binding of Isaac

The sermon preached by Fr. Ernie on July 2, 2023.

One of the things I was taught in seminary was to preach on the gospel as much as possible, and that’s what I generally do too. And yet sometimes there are other readings that I just can’t ignore. Take this week’s Old Testament passage, for example. Here is one of the darkest and most troubling stories in the entire bible. The Jews call it the “binding of Isaac.”  

The story itself is simple enough. After decades of waiting for Sarah to conceive and bear a child, God at last gives Abraham and his wife son, Isaac. Soon afterward, though, God comes to Abraham and asks him to prove his trust in God. God tells Abraham to take Isaac up into the mountains and sacrifice him. This Abraham agrees to do. He takes the boy, and they travel to a spot, where together, they build an altar. But when Isaac asks where the animal is that they are going to kill, Abraham’s only reply is to take his son and bind him with rope and place him on top of the altar. He then raises his knife to kill the child. Abraham is less than a second away from slaying his only son when suddenly an angel stops him. Abraham has shown that he will indeed kill the child who he loves if God asks him to do so, and that is enough. God provides a ram for the sacrifice instead.

It’s quite a story, isn’t it. But really, what are we to think of it? Does this sound like the God we have come know? Is this truly the God who Jesus called Abba, father — the God of love, the God of compassion and righteousness, the God of mercy and forgiveness? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. The story is truly disturbing, and yet I believe there are three points that we can draw from it — three points that do show it to be consistent with the God that we have come to know from the Gospels and from Jesus’ life.  

The first of these three points is less than obvious, though, because believe it or not, many scholars think that this story of the binding of Isaac is really meant to be a condemnation of human sacrifice. God had to be clear about this, given that Abraham was now living in the land of Canaan, a country whose current inhabitants did practice human sacrifice. These were primitive times, after all — cruel times — and God had to make it clear to Abraham that this pagan practice was not something he should imitate. Human sacrifice was out. Scholars believe that this story is how the Israelites remembered the time when they first learned this.

The thing is, we have to remember that although God hasn’t changed, humanity’s understanding of God has changed dramatically over the centuries. People in ancient times lived by violence and vengeance, and they so assumed that their God lived by violence and vengeance too. Only slowly did they come to realize that God wasn’t like that at all. This is one of the main reasons why Jesus came to us, in fact, to correct our false ideas about the God we worshiped.  Of course, the Israelites would continue to practice animal sacrifices for many centuries more, but in the end they saw that this was not what God wanted either. As it says in Psalm 40: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, [my God]… burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. … [Instead,]  I desire to do your will, my God; your law is within my heart.”

Seen in this way, the passage looks a quite different, but I believe that there is a further interpretation also. The binding of Isaac shows us that we must question whenever we begin to think that God is calling us to do something that involves treating others in any manner that is less than loving or respectful — and certainly whenever it involves doing something harmful. Such things have happened far, far too often in human history. There have been many too many times when an individual or a nation has done terrible things in the name of God. This is never right. God said that he was testing Abraham. The question is, did Abraham pass the test or fail it? I believe he did both. I’m not alone in this either. He passed it in his willingness to do God’s will, but he failed it in not realizing that God could never desire anything that was less than loving. Abraham had not yet learned this. In many ways this is something that humanity is continuing to learn even now.

There is one final lesson to gained from this passage, though, and it is also one that I suspect we all have to work on constantly. I know I do. And that is this: we truly do have to put God in the center of our lives in a way that allows us to accept all that comes our way, the pleasant and the unpleasant, the joyful and the sorrowful. This is so hard. It requires acknowledging daily — hourly even — that we are not actually the masters of our lives, God is. Of course, we need to do what we can to make our lives and the lives of those around us better, but in the end, it will not be up to us. The only thing truly in our control is the attitude we take to the events that unfold around us. Do we open ourselves to receive them and do the best with them that we can, or do we fight them and try to push them away? Let me tell you, the second option really doesn’t work. Life is going to run its course. Things are going to unfold as they do. It works much better to learn to ride the waves rather than battling to push them back.

There’s a lovely poem by the great Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi about this very thing. The poem is called the “Guest House.” In it Rumi says that each of us is actually a guest house where new visitors constantly appear — visitors in the form of feelings, or events, or celebrations, or sorrows. Some of those visitor make us happy. Some make us sad. But we need to learn to welcome them all. As translated by Coleman Barks, the poem goes like this:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. 

That’s it. It’s so true. The question is, can we do it. “Be grateful for whatever comes, he says, because each has been sent as a guide from the beyond.” So let it in. It comes from God.  AMEN.

If you like this Sermon, feel free to leave a comment below or follow us on vimeo.