Abraham, Isaac, and the End of Sacrifice

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost, June 28, 2020 by The Very Rev. Tyler Doherty.

         One of the most important things to realize about the entire sweep of Holy Scripture—from Genesis to the Book of Revelation—is that it is a story whose main concern is to pronounce the end of sacrifice. It’s a story that’s told in fits and starts with human beings under the pressure of of God sometimes getting the message that sacrifice is something we need to weaned from in order to fulfill our destiny as truly human human beings, and sometimes falling back into old patterns, old traps where we think that the sacrifice of some person or group is justified, required even.

If you think back to those lines in the Gospel According to John where Jesus pronounces the words— “It is finished,” or “It is accomplished,” it’s essential to realize  what has actually happened. Jesus is explicitly not referring to his horrible, tortuous ordeal on the cross finally being over. Not at all. What is actually “finished,” what is actually “accomplished” on the cross is the fashioning for humanity by God in Christ through the Holy Spirit a living, breathing, embodiment of what a truly human human being looks like, how a truly human human being lives, acts, and moves through the world.

This project, of God fashioning for Godself a truly human human community, a community of love, a beloved, and boundaryless community where all are welcome, is something that God has been up to since the foundation of the world. Few of us spend too much time reading the Genesis accounts of creation. We sit through it restlessly during the Easter Vigil with the mistaken impression that this evocative, poetic, symbolic account of how all things depend on God for their creation and depend on God for being sustained in Being is a “primitive,” outmoded, and intellectually bankrupt quasi-scientific account that has been replaced by the Big Bang and string theory.

That’s not what Genesis is up to at all. As I mentioned, it’s a poetic evocation of the very simple truth that everything relies, depends, comes into being, and is held in being, by God. The story of the expulsion from the Garden and all the subsequent shenanigans of the Fall is what happens to human beings when they miss, or forget this Truth, when they try to assert their independence and autonomy separate from the God of all creation and go their own way. In case you haven’t figured this out, it’s not a pretty picture captured by the foundational murder of Abel by Cain.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the creation story is the subtle shift in language that occurs when God is creating things like the light, the dome in the midst of the waters, the dry land, vegetation, creatures in the waters, creatures on the land etc, and when God creates human beings. For everything else, the creation is done by fiat, by unilateral decree--”Let there be.” But something important, something crucial, happens when God creates human beings. God doesn’t create unilaterally, by fiat, in the case of human beings. Instead, God says, “Let us make humankind.” It’s a huge difference. Trees, rocks, raptors, roaches, redsnappers and the like are created by fiat. When it comes to human beings, God partners with, invites, welcomes human beings into participation in God’s life—”Let us make,” instead of “Let there be.”

So human beings—made in the image and likeness of God--are in a co-operative and participatory relationship with God—we are “partakers of divine nature” as it says in 1 Peter 2: 4. God has imbued us with free will that can be used to co-operate with grace, with the invitation to the banquet of Divine Love that has gone out since before the world began, or we can choose to go our own way, to listen to a different voice than the voice that says, “You are Beloved,” the voice that loves us into loving. In the person of Jesus--who is silent before his captors, who forgives on the way to the cross, who returns from death not as a vengeful spirit, but as a risen body breathing peace—we get for the first time in human history the enactment of what this project of God fashioning for Godself a people actually looks like. In the person of Jesus we get once-and-for all the embodiment and enactment of a life lived transparent to the love of God.  In the person of Jesus, we see what a truly human human life looks like. A life turned to, and utterly dependent upon God. A life of forgiveness. A life of healing and reconciliation. A life of standing in solidarity with all of those who have been cast out or excluded.

So when Jesus says, “It is finished,” he’s saying that this is who we are called to be. Nothing more needs to be done. The gift only needs to be received, taken in, accepted, and lived from. No further work needs to happen on our part. You could say that God in the person of Jesus does for Israel, and the whole world, what Israel and the world couldn’t do for itself. Jesus is the end of sacrifice. Jesus is the one who shows us the bankrupt and dead-end nature of all attempts to secure the peace for which we yearn on the backs of innocent victims through the mechanism of scapegoating violence. Those words on the Mount of Olives, “No more of this,” are God’s pronouncement in the person of his only Son that violence, exclusion, casting out are not the way to the peace for which we are made. The new community founded at the foot of the cross is a community that refuses sacrifice. It’s a community with the love of Christ at its center. It’s a community that follows Jesus into loving, liberating, and life-giving relationship with God, each other, and the earth.

What on earth, you might be asking, does this have to do with the story of Abraham and Isaac? Everything! You see for years we’ve misread this story from a purely psychological perspective asking questions like, “How could Abraham be willing to sacrifice his son?” and “What would I do if I were placed in that same situation.” The trouble with that whole way of hearing the story is that it misses the simple anthropological reality that child sacrifice played in cultures of the near and middle east at this time. For many cultures (some would even say most cultures) sacrifice, child sacrifice was the norm. It was the normal, expected, and accepted way of relating to the divine. While we are rightly horrified at the prospect of sacrificing a child, Abraham was not. 

So you see the huge difference this makes. Without this understanding of sacrifice being the norm, we can get tied up in all sorts of knots thinking that God will only love us if we’re willing to give up our child, or that God sets up tests, existential obstacle courses, in order for us to prove our love for God. That’s not a very compelling picture of God. That’s not in keeping with the picture of who and how God is as revealed in person of his only begotten son, Jesus Christ. The Anglican theologian John Macquarrie might even say that it presents us with a God who is not worthy of worship.

But what if the “voice” that Abraham heard calling for him to sacrifice Isaac, was not God’s voice, but the voice of Abraham’s cultural conditioning, the voice that Abraham mistook for God’s voice? If that’s the case, and I think it is, then what we have is a powerful story that firstly tells us of the human propensity to take their habitual, human-constructed, and culturally-conditioned norms and turn them into God’s Voice, and that secondly reminds us that sacrifice has never been a part of God’s plan. The community of love centered on Jesus is a community that renounces sacrifice and scapegoating once-and-for-all. 

And if we dig a little deeper into the story, that reading starts to make more sense of why God might provide the ram caught in the thicket by its horns. It’s as if God says to Abraham—I do not desire sacrifice, least of all the sacrifice of your son, but if you are hell-bent on this idea (yours not mine) then here’s a ram. That should keep you busy while I try to show you who I really am and who I am calling you and your people to be. Think about it. In that case the faithfulness of Abraham comes not from his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but from his willingness to listen to the voice of God that is so outside of his habitual, expected, cultural understanding. Abraham’s faithfulness comes in his willingness to let his ideas of himself, God, others, and the world be called into question, to be interrupted by the in-breaking goodness and loving-kindness of God. Abraham’s faithfulness derives not from his willingness to engage in sacrifice, but in his willingness to be astonished by the God whose words are not our words, whose ways are not our ways.

With Abraham, we always have the choice of which voice to listen for, which voice to listen to, which voice to live from. Will it be the voice that calls for casting out, for exclusion, for scapegoating violence heaped on the backs of innocent victims? Or will it be the voice that stays Abraham’s hand? Will it be the voice of radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality, that offers a cup of water to the least of these, the voice that seeks and serves Christ in each person? The easy thing is to go along with the voices that call for the raised knife. But that’s not what God meant when God said, “Let us make humankind.” That’s not what God meant when his Son uttered those words, “It is finished.”  That’s not what it means to be a truly human human being in a world without sacrifice, in a world with no more victims.