Mosaic of the Binding of Isaac, Beth Alpha Synagogue, 6th century C.E., in
Israel’s Jezreel Valley.
Trust beyond Understanding
Proper 8 Year A
28 June 2020
8 a.m. Said Mass on the Labyrinth;
10 a.m. Said Mass with antiphons livestreamed from the
Chancel.
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)
“God said, ‘Take your son Isaac,
your only son, the one whom you love, ... and kill him … for me.’” This
is a text of terror, a tale of horror. It raises all sorts of questions,
without a doubt one of the most troubling and disturbing stories of the
Bible.
This story does not attempt to
explain God to unbelievers. No—it is
for people already in a relationship with God.
Ellen Davis, Professor of Bible at
Duke University, says this,
“[T]he hard truth is that the world turns upside down for the faithful, more often than we like to admit. … The 22nd chapter of Genesis is the place you go when you do not understand at all what God allows us to suffer and it seems asks us to bear – and the last thing you want is a reasonable explanation, because any reasonable explanation would be a mockery of your anguish. This story … is the place you go when you are out beyond anything you thought could or would happen, beyond anything you imagined God would ever ask of you, when the most sensible thing to do might be to deny that God exists at all, or deny that God cares at all, or deny that God has any power at all. That would be sensible, except you can’t do it, because you are so deep into relationship with God that to deny all that would be to deny your own heart and soul and mind. To deny God any meaningful place in your life would be to deny your own existence. And so you are stuck with your pain and your incomprehension, and the only way to move at all is to move toward God, to move more deeply into this relationship that we call faith. That is what Abraham does: without comprehension, nearly blinded by the horror of what he was told to do, Abraham follows God’s lead, for the simple and sufficient reason that it is God who is leading – to what end, Abraham has no idea.”
Reading this story as if it’s about
obedience and testing makes it an ugly story indeed. Many rabbis in the Talmudic tradition note
that Sarah dies in the next chapter, probably of a broken heart, and that this
is the last time scripture says Abraham walked with God. In Fear
and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard says that an Abraham willingly obeying
this wicked command is an Abraham whose hand is not stayed by the angel at the
end. No—this is not about
obedience. It is about trust.
God commands something that is
against everything God has promised. God
behaves in a way that is contrary to everything Abraham knows about God. The child Abraham is called to sacrifice is
the very child through whom God’s promised blessing to Abraham would come.
The great post-Holocaust Jewish
theologian Eliezer Berkovits, in With God
in Hell, explains that this trust beyond understanding is what kept Jewish
faith alive despite the Nazi mass murders.
He imagines Abraham saying to this God during the heart-broken walk to
Moriah:
“In this situation I do not understand You. Your behavior violates our covenant; still, I trust You because it is You, because it is You and me, because it is us….“Almighty God! What you are asking of me is terrible…. But I have known You, my God. You have loved me and I love You. My God, you are breaking Your word to me…. Yet, I trust You; I trust You.” (Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps [New York and London: Sanhedrin, 1979], 124.
I had a spiritual director once who
told me that love was risk. “Love means
putting your heart out there where the beloved can break it. This is all the more the case when it comes
to loving God. This is certain: sooner
or later, God will break your heart. At
least that’s how it will feel.” That is
just the nature of an intimate relationship. When we go through hell, we go through hell
with those we love, for good or for ill.
Abraham goes through this with the very God who he thinks is causing him
the pain. He does so because he loves
him.
Saying God here was testing Abraham merely
expresses how things look to us when we are suffering. It is an insult to God
to say that somehow God was actually checking to see whether Abraham would obey
such a horrible command. Again, this
story is about the human heart, not the heart of God.
Loving the Living God, the God of
Abraham and Jesus, is dangerous, fraught with risk. Sometimes it will hurt like hell. It will rob us of any meaning or sense. Our heart will be broken by the one we love
best. We will find ourselves, in the words of Dante, “midway in our life’s journey
lost in a dark wood.” We must descend
into hell and come out the other side into joy.
Only the stark cross stands before
us. But beyond the cross, is
resurrection morning. Hidden in the
bush, there is a ram. God’s angel stands
where we cannot see, ready to keep us and save us though we have no idea
how. All we need to do is in
bewilderment keep on putting one foot in front of the other as we climb Mount
Moriah. All we need is trust beyond our
understanding.
Amen.
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