A Reflection on the Akedah         6-29-08  

The story of Abraham and Isaac is a powerful one.  It is also confusing, and disquieting.  That’s probably why Mary was only too happy to allow someone else to give the homily today – and I said, “Sure, I’ll do it!”  No doubt, an unanticipated side effect of my chemo treatments.   Have you ever noticed that many of the pivotal Old Testament stories have one word names: Creation.  The Flood.  The Exodus.  The story of Abraham and Isaac is called, The Akedah.    Recall that God had promised Abraham and childless Sarah that their descendants would be as countless as the stars in the heavens.  Now, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. But to obey would mean the complete abrogation of that first promise, for Abraham’s other son Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, who had been Sarah’s maid,  had been cast out.  So, without Isaac, there could be no descendants.   Abraham could not possibly have understood why God asked this of him, but he did not question; he obeyed. “Here I am, Lord.”  The same Abraham who had earlier argued passionately with God against destroying Sodom and Gomorrah quietly sets out to offer up his son.   In painfully terse verses, Abraham and Isaac arrive at Mt. Moriah and, in bitter irony, it is Isaac himself who carries the wood  up the steep slope, piling it on the rough stone altar, asking with seeming innocence, “Father, where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”    But, is that the voice of innocence, or is that the voice of forgiveness: “I know what you plan to do, and I will not hold it against you. I bind myself to you, father, out of love.”  Or perhaps it is a taunt – “I know what you are planning.  Know that I will always hate you if you do this, and that you will hate yourself even more.  What you bind today you cannot unbind later.”   And when Abraham does take the cords and ties up his child, we feel our own muscles tighten in sympathetic response as Isaac struggles against the bonds of both the rope and of the flesh, perhaps horrified, perhaps yielding to what his father’s god contemplates – but bound regardless.   Traditionally, we are taught to hear in this story a testing of faith: specifically, the testing of Abraham’s faith in God; God’s faithfulness calling to ours; and here also the proof by which God has shown that He is faithful, and does not demand of us more than we can give.    But when I read it, often seems to be my understanding of God that is really being tested.   To try and make sense of this story, we must first realize that child sacrifice was not uncommon in the days of Abraham, and was practiced by many of the cults in the lands where Abraham lived.  Thus, for a god to ask this was not un-godlike, although it was a little extreme.  In Hebrew, the generic word for any god is elohim, and in the scripture it is worth noting that it is elohim who tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But at the crucial moment, it is the voice of Adonai, the Hebrew name reserved exclusively for  the God of Abraham, that stops the descending blade.   Although Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was a sign of his faithfulness, the truth of Abraham’s faith was in obeying the voice of Adonai and  not sacrificing Isaac – in not doing what any other elohim would test him to do!  And even with that faith, the angel of God had to call out Abraham’s name twice to deter him.  “Abraham!  Abraham!”   And if Abraham is a symbol of faith, the bound Isaac becomes a powerful symbol, as well.  Stop and look closely.  Do  you recognize the child who writhes against the binding rope; and why does the cool stone  knife feel suddenly familiar in my own hand?  Who and what have I bound upon my own stone altar?  Who and what have I been willing to sacrifice for the perceived needs of others? Or for my own needs and desires, my own expectations?  My own expendiencies? Who are the elohims to which I listen, when Adonai is trying to speak? Elohims say that those who do not have the right set of beliefs are bound with judgment knots and damned to eternal fire.  Adonai says, “Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me.”  Elohims, are those little “g” gods that  say that Hurricane Katrina and the falling of the Twin Towers was God’s judgment on a corrupt America, that AIDS is the well deserved cords we  fasten on homosexuals;  Adonai says, “Whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these …in the name of a disciple – truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”   Adonai gets a lot of bad press, on account of all these elohims.   When I was diagnosed with cancer, a friend of a friend suggested I visit a website, “Christ and Cancer.”  And there, I was told that “God controls who gets sick and who gets well, and all his decisions are for the good of his children, even if they may be very painful and long-lasting. It was God who subjected creation to futility and corruption, and he is the one who can liberate it again.”  Now, I’m sure this was meant to be part of a message of hope – somewhere in there.  I think.  But what I hear is an elohim, and not the voice of Adonai.  God, it says, will sometimes just throw you off a cliff for no apparent reason, but have faith, it is for your own good.  Go and sacrifice your son, but have faith that it is for your own good. And if you have the right kind of faith, then just maybe elohim will accept you and then – what? What good is that kind of faith?  More importantly, of what possible use to God is that?  Marcus Borg, in his book, The Heart of Christianity, says that, “The opposite of faith…has both milder and stronger forms.  The milder form is doubt; the stronger form is disbelief. If you have doubts, you don’t have much faith. And disbelief is the absence of faith. And if one thinks that “belief ” is what God wants from us, then doubt and disbelief are experienced as sinful….But this [definition] puts the emphasis in the wrong place, and thus distorts the meaning of Christian faith.  Faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless.  Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power.  Instead, faith is about the relationship of the self at its deepest level to God.”   And so Adonai calls out to us, “Abraham! Abraham!”  Adonai reaches out and stills the knife, looses the knots with which we have bound our very souls.  Adonai does not ask us to prove ourselves by tying up our dreams and offering them as sacrifices, or make us somehow better by first making us sick – Adonai is there with  compassion, strength, and love after we thump painfully onto the ground, broken, afraid, uncertain, having somehow stumbled over life’s cliffs on our own.   Adonai is the grace that unbinds our individual Isaacs:  Adonai is the rustling of a ram’s horns in the bushes which Adonai, himself, provides.