Sacrifice What?

"...."He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not freely give us all things?" "

"After these things," says the one telling the story of Isaac's binding, meaning after the call of Abram to go out from a known country to a land that God would show him...after sojourning in Egypt and settling between Bethel and Ai...after receiving again God's promise that the descendants of Abraham would be as numerous as the stars in heaven...after Sarah's barrenness found Abraham bedded with Hagar in hopes of an heir...after angel visitants announced the impossible: that Sarah in her old age would conceive the heir of God's promises...after Abraham wrestled with God over Sodom's destruction...after Isaac, his son, his beloved was born...after Ishmael, the son born of Hagar, was banished, leaving only one to inherit God's promises...after all these things says our narrator, as though these things were not enough, God tested Abraham.

God said to him, "Abraham," and, as he had so many times before, Abraham responded to God's call. "Here I am," he says, which more powerfully rendered would be not "Here I am," but "Ready!" The point was not location but obedience. Then a word whose meaning is lost to our modern ears: "Take," says God, "Take your son." This was no casual choice of verbs on God's part, for when God said "take," Abraham heard "sacrifice." This was a verb which ended in blood. "Take your son," said God, and again, "your only son Isaac," and again, "the one whom you love." Take the son for whom you have waited all of your life...take the only offspring left you...take the one who is the apple of your eye. But more astounding than that, take the son who alone is heir to God's promise...take your future and God's promise, "and offer him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you": God's covenant literally gone up in smoke!

Between "test" and "take," there is a God whose way with us is beyond our ken. We would hold to the God of sweet Jesus, meek and mild, but the Bible relentlessly reveals a God we rather would do without, a God who tests and takes. "Do we need reminding?" we ask as modern people in charge of our lives, do we need reminding "what God can and will do?...Do we need more victims," as Annie Dillard put it, "to remind us that we're all victims?" We rail against anything that would appear to be a test, from a God whose right to our lives has diminished ten thousand fold since Abraham took his son, his only son, his beloved as an offering up the mountain to be burned. For while the Reformers believed God to have "designed the world not for human comfort but as a school for character, as a vale of soul making," we have come to expect a God who, when called upon, says "Here I am...Ready!" We have fashioned a God to bless our comfort and take the blame when things do not quite go our way.

That is why Abraham's readiness is at least as astounding to my mind as the God to whom he responds. Whereas Abraham bartered with God for Sodom's salvation, he is silent as regards his son, his only son, his beloved. Early in the morning he arises, we are told, as though he were eager to do this deed. He sets out with two servants and his son and the wood for the burnt offering. As before, Abraham sets out for a place unknown. Three days they journey, until he sees the place from afar. Abraham tells the servants to stay with the donkey. "The boy and I will go over there; we will worship and then we will come back to you."

Some say Abraham knew all along that God would redeem his son, his only son, his beloved. "We will come back." Others say his words to the servants were meant to allay their fears, as well as Isaac's, lest the offering go awry, for by now the absence of a lamb for the sacrifice was obvious. "We will come back." Still others contend that Abraham believed they would return, though he alone would return in the flesh, bearing the burnt bones of his beloved for burial. The story tells us nothing of Abraham's mind, but leaves us without breath, in the presence of a now silent God.

Then, almost as if to foreshadow another Son, walking up another hill to his death with wood laid upon his back [It is a story told again and again, throughout the Bible, of a beloved child--chosen and sacrificed--until the beloved is God's Son, God's only Son, whom God loves], then Abraham lays the wood of the burnt offering on the back of his son, his only son, his beloved, while he, himself, carries the firestone and the knife.

Again, Abraham's name is called, "Father!" and again he responds, "Ready!" "Here are the firestone and the wood, but where," asks Isaac, "is the sheep for the burnt offering?" Poignant as the question is, the point may not be the innocence of a little boy. Isaac, by various calculations, was as old as thirty-seven, as young as fifteen, but in any case, says one scholar, "not a dolt who fails to notice the absence of the sheep only after a trek into the wilderness of three days' duration." His question rather underlines his understanding: he is to be the sacrifice.

Abraham's response to his son, his only son, his beloved, has been said to be the quintessential response of faith. Where is the sheep for the burnt offering? "God will provide [God will see to] the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." He says this, in part, because, trusting the God who sees, Abraham first "obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out not knowing where he was going." The same God had seen to his welfare as he "stayed in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents." So also he had trusted that God would see to an heir when "he was as good as dead." Abraham's response has been said to be the quintessential response of faith: God will provide. Therefore the two of them walk on as one, "the one to bind and the other to be bound," as the midrash says, "the one to slaughter, the other to be slaughtered," they walk on.

Finally at their destination, their destiny begs Annie Dillard's question, "Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims?...Yes, in fact, we do," she concludes, and it would appear we are about to be reminded by Isaac's demise "not what God can do, but what God cannot do, or will not...." They arrive at the place God intended. Abraham builds an alter to a God whom we would, by now, never worship. He lays out the wood and binds his son, his only son, his beloved, and lays him upon the alter, on top of the wood. Only silence screams in the spaces between these ancient words and our modern ears. Abraham asks no questions; Isaac cries not a tear; God merely watches, as Abraham readies the fire, picks up the knife, moves to slay his son and offer him as a burnt offering to the God who tests and takes.

"Persons released from burn wards, I have read once," writes Dillard, "have a very high suicide rate. They had not realized before they were burned, that life could include such suffering, nor that they personally could be permitted such pain....we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God's blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?)" At this moment in time, Abraham demands nothing, does what he is told, a monster of perfection to our way of being, he reaches out his hand and raises the knife to kill his son, his only son, his beloved.

"The natural father," notes the scholar at some remove, "hands over the son born outside the course of nature to the divine father whose due he is. The divine father," this scholar goes on, "exercises his prerogative to decline the offering he demanded...": "Abraham! Abraham! Do not do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from me." The God who tests and takes is alone revealed, at the edge of our terror, to be a God who redeems, a God who, in the meantime, provides. Abraham looks up and sees a ram, caught in the thicket by his horns. Isaac is redeemed, the promise secured, the covenant renewed, the future open.

Why in the world would such a story be told on the Sunday before we are asked to pledge mere money to God's cause in the world? What has the story of "a beloved son sacrificed" to do with this world, in which we neither fear God nor give up much more than a Sunday morning to worship Him? What have we to do with a God who tests and takes and, at the edges of our terror, redeems?

In the first place, you and I are foreigners to the truth that ordered the lives of these ancient nomads. Abraham was obedient and silent in places where we would have railed and run because, for Abraham, God was due the best portion, the first born, the beloved. To be sure, as time passed, Israel devised substitutes--a pascal lamb, a priest's life promised in service, a monetary ransom, the firstborn given to temple service. Nevertheless, they lived in the light of a God to whom the first fruits were due and rightly sacrificed.

We, on the other hand, avoid any mention, in the Christian life, that God has a claim--a tangible claim--on the first fruits of our labors. Quite the opposite. "Between me and God," we say of our offering, and so say because many of us would be ashamed if anyone found out what manner of stewards we really were. Thus we figure first what needs to be socked away for tuition, for the mortgage, the car payment, the Christmas fund, the vacation plans, retirement. Then we calculate, from what is left, what is due God? By the way, if the highest and lowest pledges are exempted from our church's calculations, the biblical presumption would be that the average income in this congregation is a bit over $13,000 a year. A tithe off the top due to God from those he has redeemed? That is as wild a thought to the modern, mainline protestant as child sacrifice! Therefore this story is told today that our pledge might be placed in the perspective of Abraham's obedient and Isaac's acquiescent response to a God who is still due our best.

In the second place, you and I need to do business with the God who claims not only the first fruits of our labor, but claims the whole of our lives--individually and as a people elected, chosen, beloved. Stewardship is not finally about giving God ten percent off the top. At best, such an act is used of God to jump start us into discipleship, into a life claimed by God for service and obedience. Where God would take us if we would venture out, not knowing where we were going...what God would do in your life and mine if we would trust that God would provide...who we would be if we were tested and found to be God-fearers, destined to be used by the God who came to reconcile the world to himself. God has destined us in Christ for a life clear beyond our imagining! We have simply failed to respond.

Which brings us to the final reason this story must be told on the Sunday before we are asked to do the very thing we are unable, of ourselves to do...asked to sacrifice everything we love more than God to God. The truth is, of course, we cannot or will not or do not. The fact is, after Abraham, none have stood the test, until the beloved with whom God was well pleased, the Son who was with God from the beginning, walked up another hill and onto a cross of wood. In Jesus Christ, God's Son, God's only Son, God's beloved, God withholds not his own Son, but delivers him up, gives up to us the One whom God loves most, giving us, in Him, all things. The God who tests and takes is the God who, at the edge of our sin and sadness, redeems the whole world.

What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. What can I give Him?: Give him your heart.

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