Sermons
September 14, 2025 (Proper 19)
Stop!!!
Genesis 21:1-3; 22:1-14
You know, if Abraham were living today, and he claimed God told him to do something like this, we’d be calling Social Services on him and getting him hospitalized for a mental health evaluation. This just isn’t right.
A lot of times when we read something horrifying like this in the Bible, we have to remember that it was a completely different world, with completely different values, different ways of understanding the meaning of life and death. Quite honestly, most of the Bible reflects ways of thinking about the world and everything in it that are so alien from the way we think today that making sense of a lot of passages can be very difficult.
But this story…it’s hard to imagine a time and place where this wouldn’t be horrifying.
The more I have read and studied this story over the years, the less I have liked it, and the harder it’s been to make sense of it. As we become adults and are exposed to more and more harsh reality, the harder it is to deal with the notion that God could ask someone to sacrifice their own child. There is so much abuse, so much bloodshed, so much violence and horror in the world, as adults it’s not possible for our minds to sanitize this story, which in Hebrew is called the Akedah, as our children’s Bibles tend to do.
I’ve read commentaries, even went back to the transcripts of the PBS series Bill Moyers did thirty years ago, in which people of all faiths sat down together to talk about the book of Genesis. I’ve looked at art, at various people’s depictions of the scene, from ancient mosaics and carvings through 20th-century works.[1] One of the best—and most disturbing—is Caravaggio’s from 1603. It’s beautifully done in the realistic Renaissance style, very detailed, incredible color…the angel grabs Abraham’s hand just as Abraham is preparing to cut Isaac’s throat, while Isaac’s mouth is open in a terrified scream.
Some of the Jewish Midrashim on this story portray Isaac as a willing participant, telling his father to tie him tightly to he doesn’t flinch and ruin the sacrifice. I think the way Caravaggio portrays it is probably more realistic.
I just want to take Abraham by the shoulders and shake him.
Why, Abraham? Only four chapters earlier in the story, when God came to tell you what he was planning to do to Sodom and Gomorrah, you argued with God.[2] You reminded God what it meant to be God, tried to talk him out of destroying those cities if there was a chance of innocent people being harmed. You talked God into promising to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if even ten decent, righteous people could be found there. “Far be it from you,” you said to God, to inflict collateral damage.
But now, having been given the son through which God promised to create for you a family as innumerable as grains of sand in the desert or stars in the sky, you don’t say a word when you hear God tell you to sacrifice that child? Was it nothing to you, the promise God made, and kept? Did you really take it that lightly, that you’d be willing to throw it away like this, without a question? Why didn’t you argue, when you argued for the lives of perfect strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah?
Abraham, why?
The trouble is, the story says he did it because God told him to do it. It says God was testing Abraham.
What kind of a test is this? What kind of a God is this?
But again I want to know why Abraham didn’t resist. “Far be it from you,” as he said earlier, to ask such a thing—this is not in keeping with the Lord God I have come to know. But no, Abraham never says a word, just gets up, gathers the equipment and goes.
(We never hear anything about what Sarah thought of all this. One Midrash indicates Abraham got Sarah to consent to his taking Isaac with him by saying he was taking Isaac for advanced Torah instruction. Midrashim aren’t really all that concerned with the fact that Abraham and Isaac lived centuries before Torah was given to Moses. But the story of Sarah’s death is placed immediately after this episode, at the beginning of Genesis chapter 23. This has led some to suggest that Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac directly led to her death, perhaps from a shattered heart.)[3]
Interpretations of this story are all over the map.
One very simple one says that this story tells us God has put an end to child sacrifice for God’s people. This story is there to say that, among Abraham’s family—the Jewish and eventually also Christian and Muslim people—there is not to be human sacrifice. The sacrificial system that was central to Israelite life and religion clear up to the time of Jesus was not, because of this story, to include the offering of human beings as burnt offerings to the Lord.
This interpretation has a pretty obvious problem: according to the story it was God who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Some say it wasn’t God’s voice Abraham was hearing. He was a wanderer, a resident alien, in a land where people lived who practiced child sacrifice. The people who lived in ancient Jericho killed their children and buried them under the walls of their city as it was being built, perhaps to ensure that whatever god they worshiped would protect their city. Children were sacrificed to ensure good harvests, rain at the right time, all sorts of things. So, this interpretation says, Abraham might have been tempted, in a time of anxiety or economic instability, to follow the customs of the people in the land and sacrifice a child to ensure prosperity But it wasn’t God who told him to do that.
(Actually, the Name of the Lord isn’t in the story until Abraham is stopped from actually killing Isaac. Before that it’s always Elohim, which can simply mean “God,” but the word is literally plural and could be a generic term for the gods of the people who lived in that land. That’s something that is lost in translation from Hebrew to English.)
But here’s the problem: Abraham had lived childless for a hundred years before Isaac was born—except for Ishmael, but Sarah had forced Abraham to kick Ishmael and his mother out of the house after Isaac came along. Surely he would have recognized that any short-term gain he might get from such a sacrifice would be cancelled out by the fact that he had killed the only person who’d be able to take care of him when he was no longer able to take care of himself.
Then again, fear and anxiety do cause people to do stupid things, sometimes.
The traditional Christian interpretations aren’t especially attractive, either.
There’s a story floating around in which Martin Luther’s wife was commenting on this text. She said she couldn’t imagine any father being willing to sacrifice his child like this. Martin is said to have answered, “But, Kate, God did.”
Christian tradition says that Isaac is the precursor to Jesus himself, that just as Abraham was willing to offer his son as a sacrifice, God offered Jesus as a sacrifice to take away the sin of the world. Or we might say that just as God provided the ram to be sacrificed in place of Isaac, God provided Jesus to be killed in our place, as punishment for our sins.
But if we’d call the Children’s Division on Abraham for binding Isaac and preparing to kill him as a sacrifice to God, how much more so should we call them on God for sending his own son to die to satisfy his need for somebody to be punished for the sin of the world? Did you ever really think about what we’re saying about God when we say God sent Jesus to take the punishment we deserve for our sins? And is that really what the God revealed through the life of Jesus Christ is like?
Do we really want to worship a God who is nothing but a child abuser on a cosmic scale?
And getting back to the story at hand, do we really want any part of a God who would test people by telling them to kill their children?
There is a Midrash out there with a different perspective that I find pretty compelling. It argues that, yes, maybe God was testing Abraham—but Abraham failed the test.
Maybe God was testing Abraham, but never intended for him actually to kill Isaac. God wanted to know a couple things.
Did Abraham truly understand and appreciate the magnitude of the promise God had made to him, to make of him a great nation? Or did Abraham take that promise for something trivial; did he perhaps take it for granted? And the question occurs to me: do we fully understand and appreciate the promises God has made to us, or do we take them for granted?
Another question this Midrash says God wanted answered was whether Abraham was as willing to fight for the life of his son as he had done for the lives of people he didn’t even know, the possible righteous inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah? The test was whether Abraham would stand up and argue with God again—say to him, “Far be it from you” to ask such a thing of me! Was Abraham worthy of being the ancestor of the people who came to be called Israel, which means “one who struggles with God”? Or would he turn his mind off and stumble forward in blindness and willful ignorance?
I’m not sure I like the idea of a God testing someone like this, either; but if that’s what happened, Abraham surely failed the test.
What about us?
Remember that we have now, through Christ, been adopted into the family of Israel. Is one truth of this story perhaps that God is not interested in blind obedience, that God gave us our minds to be used, not as temptations to be overcome—that God prefers God’s people to struggle with God, argue with God, protest when it seems that even God is in the wrong?
Abraham failed the test because he didn’t argue, for the sake of his son, his favored son, Isaac, whom he supposedly loved. Abraham failed because he didn’t struggle with God.
Quite frankly, if faith is easy, if we don’t ever struggle with understanding and accepting God’s will, if we don’t sometimes protest and even argue with God, well, I wonder if we might be doing it wrong.
[1] You can see a great many artistic depictions of the Akedah/Binding of Isaac at the Tali Visual Midrash website: https://talivisualmidrash.org.il/en/search/page/1/?_topics=1067. This site contains dozens of images, but omits any by 20th-century Russian-born Jewish artist Marc Chagall. You can see two of his depictions of the story, one pre- and one post-Holocaust, at https://inthecoracle.org/2024/02/abrahams-faith-nonviolence/. Interestingly, the 1966 one includes, in the background, the image of Jesus carrying his cross.
[2] Genesis 18
[3] Note that Sarah occasionally appears in the art at the Tali Visual Midrash. In one Sarah is shown under the altar on which Abraham places Isaac, suggesting that she is the angel that stays Abraham’s hand.