Unbinding Isaac

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Track 1, July 2, 2023

Readings: Genesis 22:1-14 (The Binding of Isaac), Romans 6:12-23 (Brought from Death to Life; Instruments of Righteousness), Matthew 10:40-42 (Whoever welcomes me, welcomes the Father)

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

God said to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”

Let’s just pause for a moment to take in the gravity of these words we have heard. The words we have just proclaimed “Thanks be to God” after hearing. God – the God of love; the God who granted Abraham and Sarah a miraculous son, Isaac, in their old age; the God who promised to make a great nation of Abraham, whose children will be “as numerous as the stars in heaven,” has now commanded Abraham to commit filicide, to kill his promised son. (Gen. 15:5) But if he were to do this, it would not only mean the loss of his son. This sacrifice, in a sense, would also erase any hope for Abraham’s own future. How could he ever recover from such an awful act? And even more than that, in some sense, to sacrifice Isaac would be to erase the future of the entire world, insofar as God had promised that “all the families of the earth will be blessed” through Abraham and his children forever (Gen. 12:1-3). God has told Abraham to place the entire history and hope of humankind upon an altar to sacrifice.

This harrowing story is the source for Soren Kierkegaard’s iconic philosophical work, Fear and Trembling, in which he sought to understand Abraham’s terror as he grappled with the two choices before him to either sacrifice his son, himself, and the world, or to disobey a direct command from the Almighty. We should approach this text with the same fear and trembling ourselves because our understanding of the very character and goodness of God rests upon how we choose to understand this critical passage.

Gallons of ink have been spilled throughout centuries of Jewish and Christian thought trying to understand how God could command such an appalling thing and still come out as good and loving. I want to walk you through a couple of these understandings.

Perhaps the most common interpretation you will hear of this passage, which is known as the Binding of Isaac, is that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son in order to test his faith and to demonstrate God’s own faithfulness to Abraham and humanity by showing His displeasure at child sacrifice. In this way, Rabbi Ari Kahn writes the “Isaac’s death was never a possibility… Isaac was to be raised up as an offering, and God would use the opportunity to teach humankind, once and for all, that human sacrifice, child sacrifice, is not acceptable.”

I personally find this answer less than satisfying. It does not remedy the problem of theodicy, which is the problem of God’s justice. The problem is this: two of the fundamental things that we know to be true about God from scripture are first, that God is perfect love and perfectly loving. Second, God, as the creator of all that is, past, present, and future, has perfect knowledge of all things. The technical term for this is that God is omniscient. God knows the thoughts of our hearts and all of our future deeds and actions. If these two things are true, how could an all-loving and all-knowing God command Abraham to do such a fearful thing to prove a point about His faithfulness, if He knew from the start that Abraham was going to act faithfully in the end? I don’t see a way through this problem where God does not come out looking like some kind of cosmic tyrant.

Let’s look then at another interpretation of the Binding of Isaac, known as the typological interpretation. This interpretation holds that Isaac in this story is a ‘type’ or symbol who foreshadows God’s cosmic intervention in the world by sending his only Son, Jesus Christ, to be sacrificed for us. The 3rd Century theologian, Origen of Alexandria, noted the parallels between the story of the binding of Isaac and Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross. He observed that like Jesus bearing his cross, Isaac carried the wood he was to be burned with on his shoulder as he climbed Mount Moriah. Isaac’s perplexed cry to his father, Abraham, is similar to Christ’s own cry of dereliction – “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” as he hung upon the cross (Matt. 27:46). Up until this point in the narrative, it appears as if Isaac, like Jesus, is both the priest and the sacrifice. These parallels then diverge at the dramatic climax of the story. Just as Abraham’s hand is raised high, about to strike the fatal knife-blow, an angel of the Lord appears and shows Abraham a ram that is caught in a thorn bush which is to be sacrificed instead, thus saving his son Isaac. The image of the sacrificial ram in the thorn bush shares a curious resemblance to Jesus, the Lamb of God, who wore the crown of thorns as he became a saving sacrifice in place of humankind.

While Origen’s typological interpretation of this story does not resolve the problem of God’s justice at the beginning of the story, which we may have to leave for fear and trembling for now, it does redirect our attention to something powerful at the end of the story, which is God’s profound intervention to avert an utter tragedy.

Origen’s Christological move introduces the idea that God is eternally offering us salvation by breaking into human history and redirecting us away from unnecessary sacrifices. God has provided for us an alternative course of history by the sending of His son for our redemption.

There is a rabbinic tradition that says that God had placed the ram in the thorn bush at the beginning of creation. This other option in the form of the sacrificial ram was always there in Abraham’s periphery and it just took his faithful listening to God in order to see it; to see the alternative God had provided, and to take it.

In this way, Abraham’s situation is not unlike our own. On the one hand, we as a human race are faced with options to continue on sacrificial collision courses that could threaten the future of our existence, such as burning fossil fuels that make our planet unlivable, courting global political conflict by sidelining diplomacy and peace efforts, or choosing a pandemic of gun violence over policies that would protect our children and families.

And like Abraham we must trust that God has made provision for us. There is a ram, somewhere in our periphery, which God is offering to us as an alternative course of action that will save us from making these unnecessary sacrifices and instead choose to live into the blessing and abundance of being God’s beloved family on earth.

And that alternative is here in our sight, St. George’s. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is with us here now. Not just as a one-time historical event two thousand years ago, but the Christ alternative here and now – Christ’s salvific sacrifice of love is presented before us again and again in the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving that is the Holy Eucharist. When you come to this altar – this thorn bush – to receive Christ’s Body and Blood, you too are listening to the voice of the angel that is pointing us away from these tragic collision courses, and towards a new reality, a new future which God has laid out for us.

When we receive the Holy Eucharist, we are, as St. Paul says, being brought out of death into life, and are presenting ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness (Rom. 12:13). God is calling to us to let Christ’s sacrifice be our sacrifice instead, and take the necessary steps, like Abraham, to avert crisis that does not have to be inevitable. To let Christ’s love transform us into instruments of peace and inheritors and agents of a love that is “established forever” (Ps. 89:2).

God loves us far too much to let us do to ourselves something He has willingly done for us. God wants us to unbind Isaac, to unbind our children, and to unbind ourselves. And Christ is eternally here to help us do it. So thanks be to God. Amen.