Abraham 4: Living Dangerously

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"After these things God tested Abraham."

-- Genesis 22:1

  At the symbolic center of the present tragic contest between Jews and Arabs, is a shrine the Muslims call the Dome of the Rock and the Jews call the Temple Mount. The rock in question is for Jews the place where the high altar of the temple once stood, and for Muslims it is the place where Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice. At that rock Abraham submitted absolutely to God, despite the extreme cruelty of the divine demand, and thus proved that he is the first Muslim. Later, from that rock, the horse of Muhammad leapt up from the earth and bore the prophet to heaven.  It is no wonder then that the sovereignty of that little hill is so fiercely contested.

The Muslims make Abraham the first Muslim, and we Christians, not to be outdone make him the first Christian. The Apostle Paul puts the matter succinctly by quoting Genesis 15:6 (Romans 4: 2), “Abraham believed God and that was accounted to him as righteousness.” Abraham believed God and that alone made him righteous, that is, put him in a right relationship with God. How could he have been a Christian before the advent of Christ? Christ is the eternal word of God made flesh, and to the extent that Abraham obeyed the word of God he had faith in Christ.  There is an important difference, however, from Islam: the Abraham to whom Paul refers is not the Abraham of the “Binding of Isaac”( Hebrew “Akedah,” which means “binding”) in Genesis 22, but the Abraham of the covenant, with whom God enters into an agreement, in Genesis 15.

Need I add that the Jews make him the first Jew, the first to enter the covenant with God and to accept the duty of circumcision. When asked how there could be Jews before Moses, the rabbis make an argument that is structurally the same as the one we Christians make, namely that Abraham knew the law of Moses naturally, that it was written beforehand on his heart.

So, Muhammad claims that Abraham’s submission to God is the foundation of Islam, and Paul claims that his simple and vigorous acceptance of God’s command is the foundation of Christian faith, and Moses claims that his covenant or agreement to observe the law of God is the heart of Judaism. So who is this Abraham anyway?

This is the fourth sermon in succession that I have preached on Abraham, because the lectionary set the texts, but more importantly because Abraham is the father of our three Western religions, which are now locked in a deadly contest of siblings. To recap: it is as if we have been viewing a series of great paintings in a gallery, dramatic canvasses that begin with the “Call” then pass to the “Divine Visitation,” then to the “Expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael,” and now, as a climax, the “Binding of Isaac.” These scenes are individually and together a disclosure of the determining characteristic of Western religion, namely, faith. The “Call” tells us that the faithful person will believe God’s promise to make him a great nation and obey God’s word at the age of 75 to leave everything and set out on a journey to an undisclosed destination. The “Visitation” discloses that such a person will believe God’s word when it tells him that his 90 year-old wife will bear a son. The “Expulsion” tells us that such a person will risk the life of his eldest son by driving him out to be exposed in the wilderness; and today’s picture, “The Akedah” (which it the traditional Hebrew name for this passage, meaning “binding”) tells us that having lost his elder son he will also present his younger son to God in sacrifice simply because God wants it.  These are the foundational pictures of faith from which we take our cue, and in the light of them I must ask, “Who is capable of faith?”

We Christians answer immediately, “Jesus,” he alone has given God perfect obedience, and it cost him his life. In this he perfects even Abraham’s already inaccessible faith; he does not give the lives of his sons but gives his own life to God. For this reason the Apostle exults in Romans 8:31-32: “…If God is for us who is against us? He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how can he fail to give us all things along with him?” God spared Abraham’s son, but he did not spare his own, because of his love for us, and our need of redemption. I know that I have run ahead of myself, but I hope you will take it as an example of the richness of the reflection on the Akedah textured and layered into Christian theology, and perhaps even more richly textured and layered in Jewish and Muslim reflection. Let us turn at last to the Akedah.

At the psychological level and in the context of the four scenes it appears totally appalling. Sarah demanded the death of Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son by the slave girl Hagar, and God commanded him against his will to comply; could Abraham be revenging himself on her by planning to kill his younger son, her only and miraculous son of her old age, and attributing his own vindictiveness to God?

At the anthropological level the story might reflect the moment when the ancient Hebrews gave up human sacrifice, specifically the sacrifice of the first-born son, and replaced it with animal sacrifice, the moment when they discovered substitution, symbols and representation. It might be significant that the passage preceding tells of Abraham’s dealings with a Philistine named Abimelech, since it is known that the sea peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, like the Phoenicians and possibly the Philistines, practiced a particularly zealous cult of child sacrifice. Perhaps we see in the Akedah lineaments of a cultural decision to break with the surrounding culture and to stop sacrificing children.

At the ethical level, an interpretation made famous by the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose essay is entitled, “Fear and Trembling,” says that the story teaches that we do not really possess anything until we have possessed it once and given it up and then received it again, as if from the hands of God. He tried this experiment with his fiancée and she married someone else, on which his narcissistic comment was that although he did not receive her back he did at least receive himself back and now values himself twice as much as he did before. There is moral wisdom in the view that one only really possesses something if one is willing to give it up, does not cling to it - if one clings, it possesses you not you it -; but the purport of the scripture is much deeper than that, perhaps too clever, observation.

On the theological level, that is, in what it tells us of God, the event is a test of faith. That’s what the text says, “God tested Abraham.” If your faith is all ethics this is where you will want to get off the train, even before it leaves the station. How can one justify ethically a father who without telling the mother takes their only son out to kill him because God told him to do so? What shall we say of a father who answers his son’s pitiful question, “My father here is the fire and the wood but where is the lamb?  With the laconic, “God will himself provide the lamb? (Do we hear in this a faith beyond faith a hope beyond hope, that God will not require him to go through with this?). How merely clever Kierkegaard’s moral musing seems before this depth of seriousness! Yet even so, it is not deep enough to probe the abscess of our fever or the depth of our need. Let’s go from the world of the text to the world of current action. Here God is testing our faith sorely.

Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac were spared; today, perhaps at this very moment, Arab fathers who trace their descent from Ishmael are sending out their sons and daughters with explosives strapped around their waists to kill the sons and daughters of Jews who trace their descent from Isaac by killing themselves; the sons and daughters of Ishmael go out to murder the sons and daughters of Isaac who return to kill the sons and daughters of Ishmael, and on and on. Not even the Akedah reaches the depths of our need as this example, one among thousands, shows.

Let’s conclude with one more example of sacrificed children. Wilfred Owen was one of the young and tender English poets of WWI. He perished on the Western Front, of gas, within days of the armistice, at the age of twenty-eight (he was one of the old ones). He wrote a poem based on the Akedah, which Benjamin Britten set to heart-rending music in his “A War Requiem.” There it is a tenor and baritone solo, and it begins, “So Abraham rose, and clave the wood, and went…” At the denouement of the scriptural story Owen changes it as follows, “…Behold/ A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;/ Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. / But the old man would not so, / but slew his son,- /And half the seed of Europe, one by one.”  We old men all know the shame of offering the young, our sons and daughters, instead of the Ram of Pride, and for policy of course, and patriotism, and re-election.  We are willing to let our seed slay the future and each other, while we sit amazed telling ourselves that we have no option, and making windy, lying and fantastic speeches.

I too of course am out of my depth. God is God and His ways are not my ways, and He does not often explain to me why He does what He does or demands what He demands. This God is ferociously divine, appallingly other, absolutely real. Real? you say. Yes, real. He knows what an act of faith it is to offer my son, and how much greater an act it is to accept the substitute and slay the Ram of Pride when I have been set to show my virtue, patriotism, and faith by slaying my sons and yours. Wilfred Owen enables us to see that the hardest thing Abraham did was to accept and slay the Ram instead of his son and thus show not only faith but also the faith beyond faith, which is humble love. Thus by faith God knocked the pride out of him, and that is why Abraham is the exemplar of faith. His determined faith ended in humble love, the obedience he gave to God turned into a humility that received from God. So all is of God, all faith, all hope and all love, and Abraham is the example of faith because he discovered that love is the truth that faith seeks, and that faith great enough to move mountains is nothing if it is not also humble love (cf. 1 Corinthians 13). Oh, and by the way, he was also willing to live dangerously!