Sermon

In Judaism, and derivatively in Old Testament studies in general, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is known as the Akedah, ¡°the binding.¡± It is certainly one of the most problematic stories in Scripture. It has been taken as indicating that Abraham came from a culture where human sacrifice was practiced, and that one essential feature of the new religion was its prohibition. One sermon by a rabbi linked the story to child abuse, and there has been rabbinical speculation on what Isaac did actually think about all this. What did he think of his father when it was all over? What did he tell Sarah, and what did she think of her husband? These are speculative questions, to be sure, but if we imagine ourselves in that situation, they are questions that do arise.

At the meetings of the American Academy of Religion which I attended last weekend, one section, with four papers, was devoted to ways in which artists have dealt with this story. While the reader may be able to take the story on a theoretical level, the artist cannot. The artist must decide what the expression on Abraham¡¯s face should be as he travels toward the mountain, or binds his son, or raises the knife. The artist must decide what expression should be on Isaac¡¯s face, and interpretations have ranged all the way from utter terror to pious acceptance.

The problems the story raises at this level, though, are basically reflections of the problems it raises concerning the nature and will of God. If it were told concerning one of the Canaanite religions, if the god of the story were Moloch, we would take it as an indication of the benighted nature of that religion, and its ending would be a happy one. But this is the God of Israel speaking. This is our god speaking, and apparently going out of his way to emphasize how unnatural the act is. He does not say simply ¡°Go sacrifice your son,¡± but ¡°Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love . . .¡±

One of the speakers at the American Academy of Religion called special attention to the first verse of the story, and argued that it set the tone for the whole. That is, we know from the outset that this is a test. We do not know how the test is set up, but we know that it is a kind of artificial situation, that things are not what they seem. Since this speaker was the last, no one really had a chance to object that this still leaves us with a test that can only be described as cruel.

Swedenborg, characteristically, gives only passing attention to the literal meaning; but the attention he does give is significant. In paragraph 2768 of Arcana Coelestia, he makes the following observation.

The statement that God tested is according to the literal meaning, in which tests/temptations are attributed to God along with many other things. But according to the inner meaning God never tests. He is constantly freeing us from temptations whenever it is possible, or whenever that freeing would not do us harm. He is constantly focusing on the good into which he is leading the person being tempted. This is the only sense in which God concurs with temptations; and even though it is said that he allows them, this is not according to the concept we have of permission, . . . that the one who gives permission also wants to. Rather, it is the evil we do that leads us into temptation. Its cause is never in God . . .

This is a fairly familiar general principle, stated in fairly general terms. How can we apply it more specifically to this particular story?

We can start by looking more critically at the first three words of our text, ¡°And he said.¡± We need to look at it with some awareness of the difficulties God has in getting through to us. We cannot grasp divine truth. Our minds are not big enough or clear enough. They are too full of our own preconceptions and too biased by our own self-regard. So whatever message comes from the Divine, we will hear only what we are capable of hearing. Let us try to go back to the source, then, and follow the message until it reaches Abraham¡¯s consciousness. This is a theoretical exercise, to be sure, but we have enough guidance from our theology to point is in a general direction.

That is, we know on the basis of theory that the Lord¡¯s whole intent is always to bless, to fill us with all the love and wisdom we can accept. What the Lord is always saying is perhaps most perfectly presented at the last supper-- ¡°Take, eat, this is my body . . . Drink this, all of you: this cup is the new covenant in my blood.¡± The central message is always the Lord¡¯s self-gift.

We do not necessarily hear it that way, because there are obstacles in us to accepting that gift. Perhaps the simplest translation we make is to hear the message as ¡°Come to me.¡± We hear it this way not because we are in fact distant from the Lord, but because we believe we are. We are hearing the message in terms that make sense to us, given the way we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the Lord.

Our perception of a distance between us and the Lord is an obstacle to our acceptance of his self-gift. There are other, more specific obstacles as well. We can be too wrapped up in ourselves, our feelings can be hurt, we can be too attached to our own notions or our own possessions. We can even be too attached to particular people, not in the sense of loving them too much, but in the sense of regarding them as extensions of ourselves.

Let us suppose that this is the case with Abraham. He has left home and family on the strength of the Lord¡¯s promise that his descendants would become a great nation. Against all odds, Isaac has been born; and now all Abraham¡¯s hopes are bound up in this son. If we put this in contemporary terms, we have a father who has decided absolutely what his son is to do and to be, a father who has so identified with his son that the son has no chance whatever to become himself.

This possessiveness is a huge obstacle to Abraham¡¯s inner acceptance of the Lord. The quality of that love is not to possess but to give, and the father in whom that love is accepted wants his children to become the people the Lord intends them to be. So when the Lord¡¯s love comes down into this possessive attitude, it can be heard only as a command to let go.

The extreme form this command takes in the case of Abraham would then indicate the extreme extent of Abraham¡¯s investment in Isaac. Only if his possessiveness was a consuming one could the Lord¡¯s love be heard as demanding such an impossible renunciation. ¡°Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, . . . and sacrifice him for a burnt offering . . . .¡± This says a great deal more about Abraham, under a Swedenborgian construction, than it does about the Lord, just as all the commands to go to war and all the descriptions of the Lord as angry of vengeful portray ways in which the Lord was perceived, and therefore reflect the states of the people involved.

The pertinence of all this to our present situations was brought home to me by a remark Bob Kirven finds useful on occasion--¡±Some of the most terrifying people I know are the ones who are sure that they know God¡¯s will.¡± We¡¯ve met them. They are juggernauts, so far beyond doubt that nothing will induce them to swerve from their path, not one millimeter to the right or to the left. In particular, our own faith or our own feelings do not seem to have any reality for them.

We would not recognize this syndrome if there were not a trace of it in ourselves. If we believe in the supreme truth of our theology, it is all too easy to feel that we are called to convince everyone else of that truth. The Lord¡¯s message is coming down through us, taking the form of concern for others. It is telling us to try to perceive the needs of others, and to offer whatever we have that is appropriate. It may be saying ¡°Offer,¡± but we may be hearing ¡°Convert.¡±

This might seem to leave us in an impossible position. We are, after all, supposed to do the will of God, and yet it seems that our understanding of that will may be radically imperfect. In fact, it sounds as though the more we need it, the less likely we are to understand it. The more we are caught up in our own self-concern, the more distorted will be our version of the message.

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac, the Akedah, points to a way out of this dilemma if we read it in this Swedenborgian sense. The message we get is that if we try honestly to obey what we think we have heard, the Lord can bring us to a better understanding. Abraham did the best he could, and at the last minute the angel spoke, the ram appeared, and Isaac was spared.

If this is to happen to us, though, we must allow ourselves to be conscious of uncertainty. There is a particular attitude of mind necessary, an attitude that says, ¡°This is the very best I know, and I know that it is not the best there is.¡± Otherwise the angel may speak, the ram may be there, but we will neither hear nor see. We will go on blindly doing what we thought we heard the Lord tell us to do, deaf to the pleas of those we are hurting.

At the end of the story. Abraham is praised for his willingness to sacrifice what he held most dear. This may highlight the other side of our ¡°uncertainly principle,¡± namely that unless we go ahead on the basis of what we do think we are hearing, we will never get anywhere. Yes, we must acknowledge that our understanding is surely incomplete, but no, we must not therefore wait until we are sure our understanding is perfect. To use another image, the Lord cannot show us the whole path at once. We can be shown the beginning, but the rest will come into sight only as we begin to walk along it, alert for signposts.

In the Gospels, we find Jesus speaking in parables--not in order to confuse, but in order to suit his discourse to the individual minds of all his different hearers by leaving them room to interpret in their own ways. We may hope that we have progressed some and can understand more deeply, but we are still far from understanding the mind of God. What we do know is that the light we have can guide us into more light, if we follow it with faithfulness and humility.

Amen.