And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham. And He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” And He said, “Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you” [Genesis 22:1-2 (The Hebrew Bible, tr. by Robert Alter).
As I have allowed on a number of occasions over the past 35 years or so, there is a tendency for many of us to examine the familiar stories of both the Old and New Testaments and convince ourselves that the text really is about us.
We see the rich young ruler approach Jesus [Mark 10:17-22], asking what must he do to inherit eternal life. We hear our Lord’s answer that the young man should sell all, give it away, and follow after Jesus. Many of us wonder, “Could we/would we do differently than the man who sadly walked away?
Or perhaps when we hear Peter’s confident declaration on Maundy Thursday evening—“Even if all fall away, I will not” [Mark 14:29]—we squirm just a bit when the issue is posed to us from many a modern pulpit, “Would you or I have denied Jesus three times before dawn?”
But what if Holy Scripture isn’t about us? What if the bulk of scripture isn’t so much to give you and me a “manual for successful living,” but rather to serve as a self-revealing statement “of“ and “from” the Almighty? When we think of the rich, young ruler, what if, instead of wondering if we’d answer Jesus’ question differently, we instead thought, “Why would our Lord make such a radical demand on someone like the young man?” What is Jesus getting at?
Or instead of wondering if we’d have been stronger than Peter—most of us would not have been—we instead think, when we see Jesus greet his disciples on the shore following His resurrection, and offer forgiveness to Peter? Might we think something like, “What kind of Savior forgives the unforgivable?”
Turning to the Old Testament lesson for this upcoming Sunday, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Genesis 22:1-14” [RCL, Year A], we encounter an altogether familiar story—the one about faithful, Father Abraham taking Isaac up on the mountain to do you know what there, all because that’s what God told him to do.
Much is made of how faithful, how obedient Abraham is, and perhaps, rightly so. But what if the story isn’t so much to tell us about Abraham—and therefore, perhaps, something about ourselves—and instead, its purpose is to tell us something powerful, incredible, even scary and intimidating about God?
Tester or Provider—run with me here for just a bit, if you will. Do you find it at all interesting that in verse 2, God tells Abraham to take his son, “your only one, whom you love, Isaac,” and make of him a burnt offering on a mountain later to be identified? Doesn’t God know that Abraham has two sons—Ishmael and Isaac, and that he loves them both?
Well, of course, God knows that Abe has “fathered” two sons, not one. But Ishmael is the son of a plot—the plan that Sarah put together because she became impatient with her own progress—or was it “God’s progress”—in giving Abraham a son. And Abraham, dutiful Abraham, of course, went along with the plan. But it wasn’t God’s plan. To be sure, God loves the “other son,” Ishmael. We see a splendid example of that in Genesis 21. Indeed, God will cause Ishmael to be the father of “a great nation” [Genesis 21:18].
But God is a God of Covenant. God’s Covenant is with Abraham and Sarah, not with Abraham and Hagar. God’s Covenant will be fulfilled through the line of Isaac, not Ishmael.
And, of course, therein lies the rub. Given the test that God has designed for Abraham, the old man is left to wonder how it is that God’s Covenant will be fulfilled, how nations will be blessed by Isaac, if Isaac is to be sacrificed on a mountain in the area of Moriah?
Tester or Provider—Let’s just say it, “What kind of God devises a test like this?” What kind of God gives a promise, takes His sweet time in beginning to fulfill it (Isaac is just one son, not quite yet a “nation”), and then tells the lad’s father to dispatch as a sacrifice? “A sacrifice to what?”
Is God a provider—providing the promise of blessing to flow from two old, barren souls? Is God a provider, a God who listens to Hannah’s cries and then gives her a son [1 Samuel 1 and 2], or who later favors Elizabeth and Zechariah with a son who will be known as John the Baptizer [Luke 1]? Is God a provider?
Or is God a tester? What kind of God would look at a father and tell him to kill his son or daughter?
Verse 8 is important. Isaac sees that he and his father have fire and wood. They have a knife or cleaver to be used with the sacrifice. They appear to have everything. Everything, that is, except for the life that will be sacrificed. Isaac inquires, “Where is the sheep for the offering?” Abraham says “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son.”
Abraham cannot tell Isaac all Isaac wants to know because Abraham himself does not know. As Robert Alter carefully points out, the Hebrew phrase here is idiomatic. Telling Isaac that God will see to the offering is identical to telling him God will provide the offering. It’s just that Abraham doesn’t know what God is going to provide.
And, of course, we, like Paul Harvey, know the rest of the story. God does, in fact, provide the ram whose horns are caught in the thicket. Isaac is spared, although just barely.
Is God a Tester or Provider. By now, perhaps we’ve discovered that the answer is, “Yes!” At the beginning, God is the “tester.” At the end, however, God is the “provider.”
Can the same God who promises life also command death? In this story, Abraham comes to an awareness that there are at least two sides to God—tester and provider—and that those two characteristics of the divine must be encountered together. The call of God—both to Abraham and to us—is to live in the presence of a God who moves both toward us and away from us. Many of us want only half. We want a God who provides; we are less sure about a God who tests. Some others—perhaps fewer of us—have turned from God in bitterness. We’re comfortable with a God who tests; we refuse His entreaties when He generously provides.
I discussed this passage with a “preacher” friend a week or so ago. He allowed that most of us want a “reasonable” God. This story teaches us that God will never succumb to our definition of reasonableness. As an old (unattributed) note in my note book offers, “God is no logical premise who must perform in rational consistency. God is a Free Lord who comes and goes as He pleases.” God is, therefore, both tester and provider. My preacher/friend related that he thinks “God tests to discern who is serious about faith and to know in whose lives He will be fully God.”
Abraham was justified to God through his faith. In my notes is another quote—this one clearly attributed to Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann (his commentary on Genesis (the Interpretations Series).
Faith is nothing other than trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance. Abraham knows beyond understanding that God will find a way to bring life even in this scenario of death. That is the faith of Abraham. That is the faith of the listening community. And that is the meaning of the ram at the last moment. A substitute not brought by Abraham but given by God in his inscrutable graciousness.
There will, of course, be one more opportunity for us to ask the salient question, “What sort of God would allow a Father’s only son, a son whom He loved, to be offered up for the lives of others?” It’s the question that Jesus offers up while praying in Gethsemane. As three of his disciples snooze nearby, Jesus recognizes that He must choose. Will He choose the Tester or the Provider? His answer is an unequivocal, “Yes.”
Just like Abraham, Jesus knows that God will find a way to bring life even in the scenario of death. God calls that “Way” resurrection.
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