The Offering

Living in The Story reflections from
Genesis 22
Psalm 22
John 19

One of my favorite hymns comes from the words of the prophet in Lamentations: “Great is thy faithfulness! Morning by morning, new mercies I see!” But how strange to juxtapose those words of hope with the sentiments of the Psalmist: “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me!?” This incongruity jars us to remember that our Bible is not one voice but rather many voices spoken by different people from a variety of life experiences giving witness to a gamut of understandings about the two big questions of faith: Who is God and Who are We?

We’ve considered the faithfulness of Father Abraham on his own journey of faith and we’ve been impressed by his commitment to follow God, to trust and obey. But this? This binding of Isaac really stretches me out of my comfort zone. Who is this God who would ask such a thing? Who is this father who would do such a thing? Who is this beloved son who would give himself willingly – and why? I don’t know. Here is a story that speaks to the very real possibility of the complete annihilation and extinction, not only of Abraham and his descendants, but also of the promise and of faith itself.

Remember God had called Abraham and promised him descendants like the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:5). In the ancient world and even among some peoples today, a man’s descendants is the way he measured his value; it was the way he believed his life could extend beyond his one lifetime. In this way of thinking, having descendants that continue on beyond your life is a kind of immortality, as it were. But if Abraham followed this call of God this time, giving up the very son of promise, the future God had promised would be forfeit. His life would have no meaning and Abraham himself would be, as it were, non-existent. So this story of Abraham’s faithfulness to obey such a drastic call gives new meaning to the depth of his faith. Abraham’s is a faith so grounded in the faithfulness of God that he believed nothing could make God’s promise forfeit. 

I don’t know if this binding of Isaac ever actually happened or not. In the Islamic tradition, Ishmael is the one pictured as submitting to the Father’s will. When I try to read this story literally, it smacks of child abuse and it’s hard for me to find any kind of respect for this father. So here is a very powerful opportunity to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally. The story is true; it tells us something deeply true about God and ourselves and our relationship to God and to one another. The story is true even if it never actually happened in history. 

I think of all the things I cling to so dearly, all the things that are precious to me, that define my identity and my worth. And I think of how very hard it is for me to let go, to release my control, to give up myself to the One Who is Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. I say I want to but I know better. Giving up, letting go – even of the very good things that we do, that we are, that we want to be – and stepping into uncertainty, truly embracing the unknown: I’m not there yet. Maybe one of these days. But for me, this testing of Abraham and Isaac is a story that gives a kind of flesh and blood reality to the abstract truth we speak much too easily: “the one who would save his life will lose it; but the one who – for my sake – loses his life, will find it.” 
(Matt 16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24, John 12:25)
 

Here is a story of resurrection faith.

Now make a huge jump with me and imagine 1500 years later: the nation of Israel is in exile in Babylon. This Babylonian Captivity is probably the era when the Genesis stories were actually gathered and edited and preserved for posterity. And once again, like Abraham, a people stood at the precipice of extinction. In Exile, they faced the very real possibility that they would be lost to history. Here is a people who have seen themselves as bearers of the promise, called to be a blessing to the nations, chosen to be light for the world – but now they find themselves on the verge of non-existence.

Imagine Psalm 22 coming from this period. Imagine how forsaken this people of God might have felt: “my God, my God! Why have YOU forsaken me?!” And imagine how this intriguing tradition of the Binding of Isaac, might have helped shaped their identity and their self-understanding as a people. Here in Exile are the very children of Abraham whose existence had been put at risk before on the Mount of Moriah for the sake of the Promise. When they read and re-read this story in their own day, they could see how Father Abraham had - tenaciously, stubbornly, absurdly – trusted that God would keep the Promise and preserve the people.

So surely for this rag tag remnant of a people, this story offered comfort for their affliction, brought hope into their hopelessness, built confidence in their future and steeled the faithfulness of those who had seen themselves as forsaken. And the ancient story – reinterpreted for their own day – gave them a challenge: How would they face their own testing? Would Israel choose to trust God with Abraham’s resurrection faith? Would they too believe that the Lord would provide?

Now jump again and imagine Jesus of Nazareth, carrying his cross to the Place of the Skull and facing the very real possibility of extinction. But for this Lamb of God, there would be no ram in the bush. Sometimes we speak too easily our creed that Jesus is truly human and truly divine. What does this mean? If Jesus of Nazareth were truly human, then he would have faced his death like all of us do – with the sure knowledge that when humans die, they stay dead. But Jesus believed anyway, he trusted anyway, he counted on God’s faithfulness in spite of the sureness of death. 

Because faith is the opposite of certainty. Faith flies in the face of the facts. Living by faith is not knowing but believing anyway and acting as if… If the Jesus who went to the cross was truly human, he could not have known what God would do. No one can know that. Instead there was simply and profoundly a tenacious, stubborn, absurd resurrection faith.

Now one more jump - imagine the community of Christ 40 and 70 years after Jesus, grappling with the unfathomable reality that their long awaited Messiah had been crucified. Why? What does this mean? Making sense of startling, earth-shattering events almost never happens in the moment. It is usually in retrospect that any of us can conjure any wisdom about meaning and find any sense in what – at the time - seems like non-sense. And so, once again, like their fathers before them, the first century Christians read and re-read the ancient stories and re-interpreted them for their own day.

Paul and Mark, and then later Matthew and Luke and John all taught and wrote in order to help a new community of Christ to ground themselves in a faith that was founded upon the fact and unspeakable mystery of a crucified Messiah. Each one made sense a bit differently from the other; the mystery is too big to put in a box with neat descriptions and tidy explanations. Truth is too large to be one little thing. Each understanding offered by faithful seekers contributes to the whole. Every insight adds light. 

And now and ever since, countless other followers of Christ have been grappling with the mystery: theologians and scholars, mystics and dreamers, those from the academy and those from the desert. What does this mean? we ask for our own day.

In recent years, as creative conversation partners continue to read and re-read the ancient stories, as faithful people of God continue to make meaning, I’ve been especially influenced by two: Jürgen Moltmann and Alan Lewis.  

Moltmann’s theology comes with an intriguing title: The Crucified God. For Moltmann, God is not a God who orchestrated the crucifixion from a distance. Rather – in the incarnation - it is God’s own Self who has entered into the human experience; and in the cross, God has entered into death itself. This is not “the death of God,” Moltmann insists; but “this is death in God, since through the cross, death itself pierces the life and the heart of the very being of God” (225).  

I can hardly get my head around that idea.  

Did God put God’s own self at risk?

What does this mean?

I don’t know.

But evidently, even the Creator is bound to the deep truth that “the one who would save his life will lose it; but the one who – for my sake – loses his life, will find it.” And so God took death into God’s own Self so that God’s own life that is unstoppable and God’s own love that is unconquerable would absorb and extinguish death itself. That – for me – is the unfathomable mystery of the cross.

Alan Lewis says it well:

The community of God in the Trinity takes on death and overcomes it in the overflow of love. This is the basis of our justification, the ground of new, divine possibilities for the sick and sinful, the dying and the dead. In justification we hear God’s “Yes” and we become what we hear; we are redefined by the gospel’s “word of the cross,” which pronounces us forgiven and renewed.

It is the same creative Word by which God raised the crucified Jesus from the grave that has from the beginning summoned existence out of nothing. It is a word not abstractly spoken at a distance, but a Word embodied in a fleshly act of divine identity with the godforsaken, the judged, and the dead themselves (256). 

Who is this God who would ask such a thing of Abraham and Isaac? we wonder. I daresay it is the same God who - from the foundation of the earth - is a God of divine Self-giving. And even though Abraham and Isaac never knew Jesus of Nazareth, they walked toward the Mount of Moriah with Jesus’ same resurrection faith. And the God who gives, the God who loves, the Lord who provides was already there.

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001).

Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio, in the Baroque tenebrist manner
 

© Charlotte Vaughan Coyle 2014