Second Sunday of Lent
St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford University
Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac
Gen 22:1-2, 9-13, 1518
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
8 Mar 2009
For the theme of my sermon on this second Sunday of Lent I have chosen not to preach on the Transfiguration, that premature manifestation of God's glory; not even to speculate briefly on why Moses was invited before Abraham to participate in this miracle and why Elijah was preferred to Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Deutero-Isaiah!
I have rather chosen to meditate inconclusively on the first reading from the book of Genesis, where Abraham proposes to sacrifice to God his son Isaac.
Over the years as a bishop I have been asked by the press to nominate my favourite music, my favourite books, five or six persons from history I would invite to a dinner party, and of course my favourite scripture passages. Today's passage from Genesis is not one of my most loved scriptural excerpts, but it is certainly one of the most mysterious and difficult, generally regarded as describing with the Passover one of the two events from the history of the Jewish people which help us to understand Jesus' redemptive death on the cross before his glorious resurrection. One commentator has written that "no story in Genesis is as terrible, as powerful, as mysterious, as elusive as this one. It defies easy and confident interpretations (Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, p333).
As a preliminary consideration I must confess that I have a philosophical or logical difficulty which colours my whole approach to the passage. I believe there are moral truths and that humans are constrained to search for these truths, to recognise them. Such truths are not relative to their circumstances and not human constructs.
As someone who believes that the one true God is the creator of the universe and is eminently reasonable, I believe that the moral truths I mentioned, which are expressed incompletely in the Ten Commandments given to Moses, reflect God's reasonableness and not his arbitrary decisions, not some act of Divine will which could be cranky or wrong headed. I do not want to constrain the omnipotent God by the limitations of my personal reasoning, but I find it difficult to understand how God could have commanded or requested Abraham to kill his innocent son even in a sacrifice to God himself.
For a parent to be asked to kill a child is terrible enough, but there was another dimension to Abraham's dilemma, who had been promised by God that through his own flesh and blood he would have innumerable descendants. God had said: "Look up to heaven and count the stars if you can. Such will be your descendants". (Gen 15:5)
Abraham believed this and "put his faith in Yahweh, who counted this as making him justified". What was to happen to these promises if Isaac was sacrificed?
For some reason Abraham did not try to bargain with God, did not try to find some alternative to Isaac as he had pleaded with God for the righteous inhabitants of Sodom before its destruction. Apparently too in the Hebrew text God's words are more properly translated as a request rather than a command although most of the English translations fail to translate the particle "na" which indicates this. Whether Abraham might have felt any greater freedom to disregard a request, rather than disobey a Godly command is a point we cannot answer.
Let me now try to identify a few firm points for consideration even as we agree to have much of the incident shrouded in mystery and our own uncertainties and incomprehensions.
An easy opting out would be to claim that the author has simply misreported whatever were the facts of the original event, but I am unwilling to do this, because we do not have sufficient grounds within either a Jewish or Christian framework to justify this escape. We have to wrestle with the facts, and especially with the overwhelming factor that the one true God, awe inspiring and all powerful, largely incomprehensible to us despite His goodness and rationality, is the principal actor. We moderns are generally not good at feeling awe when confronted by an invisible, spiritual God as we are more used to reserving our awe for the material wonders of contemporary science and technology, or e.g. medicine.
Abraham had heard God's call on a number of occasions and had answered these calls. He had ratified the new covenant with the rite of circumcision, seen God's judgement on Sodom and Gomorrah, been blessed through the birth of Isaac to his wife Sarah.
With this background two points can be made. This incident is a test for Abraham and one clear constituent of this test is that Abraham has to decide to place God in front of his own flesh and blood, his aspirations for his progeny in the years to come and even before the promises God had already made to him. God comes first.
God also was running a risk in entering this test because his plan of salvation would have been derailed, if Abraham had not passed it. Can we say that God must have been confident of his choice of Abraham as our father in faith?
One professor of Judaica has raised the fascinating possibility that Abraham gave the wrong answer and should have pointed out to God that it was against God's own commands to kill the innocent; that it was only zealots and fanatics who perpetrated child sacrifice. Was Abraham proposing to do the wrong deed (sacrifice his son) for the right reason (accepting the one true God's sovereignty) and was his obedience and generosity to God sufficient to justify God's lavish promises; "your descendants (will be) as many as the stars in heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore" despite his wrong headed intentions? "(Leon Kass, n57. p347)". Such an hypothesis would resolve my logical problem with the usual interpretations of the account of the aborted sacrifice.
We do not have precisely the same problems with Our Lord's sacrificial death, because the Father did not kill his Son and we readily acknowledge the different levels of evil doing for Judas, and the Jewish and Roman authorities, even though they did not fully understand what they were doing.
However it is also clear that good will never triumph and faith will not survive if selfish or overprotective fathers successfully prevent their sons and daughters from entering into the age-old struggle between good and evil, because they fear the wounds and hurt their children will suffer.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
