Restoration Quarterly 29.1 (1987) 47-51.
Copyright © 1987 by Restoration
Quarterly, cited with permission.
SERMON
Sacrificing Our Future
(Genesis 22)
RICK R. MARRS
Introduction
Not inappropriately, the story of Abraham being
called to sacrifice
Isaac
is titled by Elie Wiesel "Isaac, a survivor's story."1 If
we were to
question
people in the pew concerning the ultimate value in life, after the
expected
pious answers, many would finally (and perhaps most honestly)
answer:
life itself. Survival is a dominant factor in our modern world.
However,
the importance of survival is not a new phenomenon. In one
of
the better known wisdom tales from
his Ba, we overhear a dialogue
between a man contemplating suicide and
his
inner being. As the man marshals arguments favoring suicide, the inner
being
counters with arguments against suicide. After extended discussion,
the
debate is finally won by the inner being with the argument that life,
namely
this life, is a known entity--and the known is always preferable to
the
unknown! Even we who claim a confidence regarding the future can
understand
such thinking, for in our lives we have known that anxiety
concerning
the future. For many of us, to survive is preferable to loss of
life.
Because of this, Genesis 22 makes us uncomfortable, for it presents
us
with a reality at odds with the dominant world view.
However, this passage may also make us
uncomfortable because of
its
disharmony with modern religion. We live in a religious society in
which
virtually all talk centers on what God can and will do for us. God
the
giver dominates our religious scene. (This is most clearly manifested
in
the popularity of such programs as PTL and the 700 Club.) Little, if
any,
talk discusses the demanding God. In response, modification of a
famous
charge is most appropriate: "Ask not what your God can do for
you;
ask what you can do for your God."
In this context, the message of Genesis 22 must
be heard. The passage
throbs
with drama, for it contains the stuff of which life is made. It treats
fear
and faith; it pulsates with conflict--conflict of the past, present, and
future;
of faith and justice; of obedience and defiance; of freedom and
sacrifice.
1 Messengers of God (Summit
Books, 1976), p. 69.
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Quarterly
The Old Testament Setting
We cannot help being struck with the pathos of
this account. If we
are
honest, we read this account with fear and anxiety (even though we
know
the outcome), for it raises nagging questions which continue to
haunt
us. What kind of father would seriously consider killing his son?
What
kind of God would ask of a father the murder of his son? The pathos
is
heightened as the account progresses. Three times the term "together"
(vss.
6, 8, 19) appears. Each successive movement is charged with drama,
from
the saddling of the pack animal to the splitting of the wood to the
long,
wordless trip. The anguish comes to a crescendo as the son and his
father
journey alone the final leg of the trek, the son with the wood for
his
own sacrificial fire and the father with the flint and knife. As
has
so aptly stated, " . . . ‘and the two walked on together,’ (8) covers
what
is perhaps the most poignant and eloquent silence in all literature."2
Never
was so much and so little said. Soren Kierkegaard, in Fear and
Trembling, attempts to delve into
the "conversation" (or lack of it) between
Abraham
and Isaac as they journeyed on alone to
struggles
with the dilemmas presented in this story and rightly concludes
that
we too quickly solve the dilemma through abstraction and moraliza-
tion.
To say "the great thing was that Abraham loved God so much that
he
was willing to sacrifice to him the best remains a problem when we
concretize
the account once again and realize that the best is his own son!3
And yet, if we can get beyond the initial
repulsion of a father being
called
to sacrifice his son, we discover that this passage involves in reality
a
much larger issue. For in ancient Hebrew mentality, Abraham is being
called
to sacrifice more than just his son; he is really being called to sacrifice
himself,
his very future. For Abraham, this was a call to end his story, to
end
the promise he had embraced in faith. Isaac was more than just the
child
of Abraham's old age; he was the only link to that far-off goal to
which
Abraham's life was dedicated.4 And so, if we read the story aright,
we
can only agonize with Abraham as he comes to grips with the reality
that
the God in whom he has put his hopes is in fact calling in the very
substance
of his hope. For some inexplicable reason, God is recalling the
heart
of the promise.
2 Genesis (AB Doubleday, 1964), 164-165.
3 As Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling [Princeton Univ.
Press, 1941], 36)
states:
And there he stood, the old man, with his only hope! He knew that God
Almighty
was trying him ... and that it was the hardest sacrifice that could be
required
of him ... but that no sacrifice was too hard when God required it-and
he
drew the knife.
4 Speiser, Genesis, p. 164.
MARRS/SACRIFICING OUR
FUTURE 49
And yet as we shrink back at the intensity of
this account, we remember
that
in a very real sense this issue has been central to Abraham's life from
the
beginning. The issue of obedience (or as Breuggemann would call it,
"embracing
the promise")5 is central in the accounts treating Abraham.
Whereas
this incident is the climax of the issue, in a sense Genesis 22
simply
epitomizes the extended relationship of God and Abraham. We see
in
Verses 1-12 a movement in the relationship between God and Abraham,
a
movement revealed in two ways: (1) "take your son, your only son Isaac”
...
(vs. 2) "you have not withheld your son, your only son. .."(vs. 12)
(2)
"God tested Abraham ..."(vs. 1) "for now I know that you fear
God
"
(vs. 12). At the center of this movement is the affirmation in Verse
8
("God will provide"). Verse 8 provides both movement and disclosure.6
The New Testament Perspective
We may be tempted as New Testament Christians to
smugly dismiss
this
ancient text as a somewhat embarrassing reminder of an era plagued
with
barbarity. However, if we are honest, there are passages in the New
Testament
which should terrify us as much as Genesis 22. Mark 8:31-38
is
such an example. Surely we shrink back as we seriously contemplate the
call
to follow and to emulate a crucified Messiah!
In Mark 8,7 we see the question of
Jesus' identity intimately related
to
the question of his disciples' identity and call. In the confrontation
between
Peter and Jesus, Peter rebukes Jesus for his inappropriate defini-
tion
of Messiah. Jesus responds that to profess "Christ" is to relinquish
any
right to define what "Christ" means. Disciples are not to guide,
protect,
or
possess Jesus; they are to follow him. Thus we see a movement in this
passage
from the issue of "who Jesus is" to "what being Christ
means" to
"what
being a disciple means."
This passage demands the utmost from us, for we
are called to sacrifice
everything
that would insure our own vision, our own sense of our future.
Just
as Jesus left (sacrificed) everything (his family, possessions) for the
cause
of God, so we are called to sacrifice our future. The invitation of
Jesus
to us strikingly resembles God's call to Abraham. The call to deny
ourselves,
take up the cross, and follow Jesus is a call to give up our future.
5 Genesis (John Knox, 1982).
6 As Brueggemann (Genesis, p. 187) states: We do not know
why God claims
the
son in the first place nor finally why he will remove the demand at the end.
Between
the two statements of divine inscrutability stands verse 8, offering the
deepest
mystery of human faith and pathos.
7 I am indebted in the following
comments to the excellent exposition of Mark
8:27-9:1
by James L. Mays, "Mark 8:27-9:1," Interpretation 30 (1976): 174-178.
50 Restoration
Quarterly
The
call is not to deny ourselves something, but to deny ourselves. This
is
the great paradox of the call. It attacks the fundamental assumption of
our
human existence. We can never possess our own life! The significance
of
the passage lies in its paradox. I learn who I am by discovering who
Jesus
is; the way to self-fulfillment is the way of self-denial. As D. Bonhoef-
fer
so aptly stated, "When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die."
He [Jesus] begins with a condition: "If
anyone wants to come
after me . . ." The condition is gracious
in its openness.... It
is expressed in three phrases: "let him
deny himself, take up
his cross, and follow me." The symmetry of
this offer with the
vocation of Jesus is obvious. His vocation must
become the
vocation of those who name him "The
Christ," . . . Taking up
one's cross is not a pious interpretation of the
usual woes of
mortality as "the cross we have to
bear." All these notions can
be thought and enacted apart from Jesus. The
call rather means
that Jesus is to become the disciples' passion.
It is the exposition
of the only authentic sense in which one can say
to him, "You
are the Christ." It is the possibility of a
new state of being in
which one can say, "I have been crucified
with Christ; it is no
longer 1 who live, but Christ who lives in me
..."(Gal. 2:20)
The cross in the call of
Jesus makes it a contradiction of
the best human wisdom and a threat to the basic
human instinct.
Who can want to choose crucifixion of the self,
when the will
of man is set on saving his own life from
whatever threatens
or on finding some savior in whose power to take
refuge? In
four interdependent sayings Jesus attacks the
essential assump-
tions of human existence in an appeal to the
will of those he
confronts. Expressed in each saying is the core
wisdom of faith
in God: A person can never possess his own life.
One cannot
enact or fulfill it as an expression of the
sovereign self.8
Conclusion
Genesis 22 deals with something much larger than
child sacrifice. It
treats
the issue of response to a giving God who also demands. It issues
a
call to Abraham to relinquish the gift of promise. The call to sacrifice
goes
to the core of Abraham's existence. It is a call to see the gift of
promise
for what it truly is--pure gift.
8 Ibid.: 177-178.
MARRS/SACRIFICING OUR
FUTURE 51
However, this passage is not simply about God
and Abraham. In it
her
own existence as solely a gift from her gracious God. She who had
been
"no people" had been brought from death to life by a freely saving
God.
However,
also
incredibly demanding, and she was forced repeatedly to renew her
commitment
to this demanding God who allows no rivals. In hearing
Genesis
22,
undivided
loyalty.
In like manner, we are called by the same God.
The God who gives
us
a future in the miracle of the resurrection is the same God who calls
us
to sacrifice our future. As we sacrifice our future, our very selves, we
are
given a "future" by God. And yet, the only thing going for us is our
conviction
(faith) in our God's ability to recreate that miracle in us
(1
Cor. 15). In an age of self-fulfillment, the call of Jesus remains resolutely
firm
and radical: He who would save his life must lose it and he who
would
lose it for my sake will find it.
This
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