Abraham & Isaac: Sacrifice
This morning I read from the Daily Office of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, and the Old Testament Lesson was Genesis 22:1–14, the story of Abraham hearing the command to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Of all of the stories in the Bible, this is one of the toughest to read. I remember my late mother hated this story: she refused to believe that a loving God could ever ask such a thing of any parent. On the other end of the spectrum, I have heard people repeat the usual platitudes: “You know, God sacrificed His beloved Son” or “of course, it was a test of Abraham’s faith.” Certainly a Christian reading of the story connects well with the story of God sending His only Son as a sacrifice. But I’ve always been torn on this one.
There is no denying the dramatic quality of the story: a fanatically devoted patriarch binding his son to the altar, Isaac’s seemingly naive question about the absence of a sacrificial lamb, and the deus ex machina that concludes the tale. We can picture a tearful Abraham raising the knife, and then hearing the voice of an angel stopping him. But the question always comes to my mind (as I know it has to others): what would we think of a parent who was convinced God told them to murder their child? We would come to the obvious conclusion that the person was dangerously psychotic, would we not?
