Rev’d Peter Balabanski
Pentecost + 5A – Genesis 22 1-14
How do we talk about today’s story of Abraham almost killing his son, his only son whom he loves; and because God tells him to!? As you’d expect, rivers of ink have been spilt over this story. Some, like the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews say this shows us Abraham’s utter trust in God Heb 11.17,19. Others like Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard passionately argue that the God we know would never have commanded such a thing; that Abraham must have heard some other voice.
The OT scholar Klaus Westermann points us another direction. Genesis 12-36 p. 354 He reminds us that God commanded that the first-born of your sons you shall give to me, Exod 22.29 but that this command was repeated but immediately revoked in Exod 34.19-20 when God says All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem [with an animal sacrifice]. That’s what we see the Mary and Joseph do when they take the infant Jesus to the Temple to present him to the Lord. Luke 2.22-24 So Westermann raises the question that this story may be an archetypal myth showing us how Abraham’s faith fulfilled all righteousness centuries before the Law was given to Moses. (Just as an aside, for Muslims, the son bound on the sacrificial pyre was Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arab people. So Abraham is our common ancestor.)
There are thousands of learned arguments. But sometimes the path to understanding becomes clearer through the genius of art. So I want to tell you about two art works. Both of them depict that dreadful scene where Abraham holds the sacrificial knife above his helpless, bound, only son, whom he loves. Their locations are startling.
There’s a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre / Resurrection in Jerusalem marking the place where we believe Jesus was crucified. It’s called the Chapel of Golgotha, as its altar sits directly above the rock where we believe the Cross stood. The chapel’s other name is the Aqedah Chapel – Aqedah is Hebrew for ‘binding’.
You get why it has this Hebrew name, because as you face the crucifix above the chapel altar, you become gradually aware that looming over your right shoulder, there’s a huge, mosaic, and it depicts the binding – Aqedah – of Isaac. Abraham has his knife raised; the angel is about to stop him; the ram is caught in the thicket. You look from Isaac to Jesus and back again. Jesus is bound and nailed to the wood he’d carried. And Isaac is bound, the wood he carried is ready to burn him once he’s been sacrificed. Two loved children; two shocking stories; each story central to our faith. The images explore each other in extraordinarily powerful ways. Each challenges us to ponder where our freedom comes from, and what it’s cost. Silence
The other artwork is one I only learned about this week when I was talking about this story with Bishop Greg. As I said, it’s also a picture of the binding of Isaac. And again, its location is startling. Bishop Greg served as the Rector of St John’s Darlinghurst back in the early 2000’s. And he told me there’s a window depicting the Aqedah – the binding of Isaac – in that church; and it’s over the baptistery.
It’s literally illuminating the place where people present themselves to the Lord; where people bring their children to present them to the Lord. A baptistery is the place in the church where we use the language of being buried with Christ in baptism and dying to sin so that we might rise to new life with Christ. It’s a place where we make promises to trust in God; to bring our children up in the faith and practice of the church so they can commit themselves to God. And all the while, this picture of the binding of Isaac looms over us to tell us how serious it all is.
Serious? Bishop Greg told me that in 1986, Mordechai Vanunu was baptised there. Mordechai Vanunu was the Israeli nuclear physicist who blew the whistle on Israel’s covert nuclear weapons programme; baptised with that scene above him! An Israeli is often far better understood if they abandon God or die than if they become Christian. What a setting for Mordechai to be baptised as he did the two things Abraham did – in Genesis 12, giving his past to God, and in Genesis 22, giving his future to God.
So in Jerusalem, we’ve got the Aqedah depicted in the place where our salvation is offered to us because of Christ’s sacrifice. And in Darlinghurst, there it is depicted again, at the place in the church where we first take hold of that gift. Our Christian faith echoes the Aqedah, and it’s echoed by the Aqedah – another Son willingly journeying in company with his Father to what seems a senseless death.
You have to lay aside your normal categories of thinking as you hear a story like this. Could Abraham, Sarah and Hagar ever have imagined the size of the promise God made to them? Here we are, over 4,000 years later, children of a land they never dreamt existed, and we, and nearly four thousand million of our living sisters and brothers count ourselves among their children. We do so because they stepped out in faith – risked, trusted – journeyed beyond the horizons of their imaginations.
God once took Abraham outside and said, Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. Then God said to him, So shall your descendants be. Gen 15.5 You and I number among those stars; those children. And every child knows what stars really are, don’t they. When we are challenged in our faith, challenged to put God’s priorities front and centre, here’s a story we can go to. Amen