Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 8 A - Sunday, July 2, 2023
Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42
In the name of the One God, who creates us, saves us, and makes us holy. Amen.Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife.
Andrew McGowan, the dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, writes in a recent newsletter that the binding of Isaac “is about sacrifice in the sense that the Noah story is about navigation or the Parable of the Sower is about agriculture. […] The flood, the seed, the knife, are more than incidental, yet neither are they the point.”
I have to both agree and disagree with Dean McGowan. As with the Cross, the medium is, in some sense, the message. And, as with the Cross, the story of Abraham’s—attempt? Intention? Tearful but necessary submission?—to sacrifice Isaac is baffling and shadowy and impossible to reduce to a single, much less a satisfactory, meaning. Still, I won’t take the preacher’s easy out and say, “It’s all a mystery,” though as with everything of God, it is, in the end, a mystery.
It’s so easy to wonder what on earth Abraham was thinking. How could he be so misguided as to drag his son—who, by the way, is not his only son, though he does keep saying that—up the mountainside with the intention of killing and burning him. But, remember, this is the same man who disguised himself as his wife’s brother in Egypt, nearly bringing her to rape and who, as we heard last week, cast out his first son, Ishmael, and his mother into the wilderness with nothing but a water skin. These actions—or misdeeds, to call them by their proper name—make his exodus from Ur of the Chaldees seem positively reasonable.
Abraham is, if nothing else, a man who listens for the voice of God and who, when he thinks he hears that voice, does not hesitate to act. He is also a man who demonstrates the danger of the charismatic leader unchecked by a community grounded in faith and discernment. This is a threat ever present in our church today, which is in danger of becoming an echo chamber of progressive political action at the expense of the Gospel mandate to love and to welcome those whom we would call our enemies.
I recently heard another a priest say that fascists should not be welcome in our churches. That, in fact, banning fascists from our churches is a sign of moral clarity and purity, a needed beacon of what we stand for in a dark and frightening world. And yet, I wonder if our world would be a little less dark and frightening if we could listen to, learn from, and yes, even love, those whose political or social beliefs we find abhorrent. Surely, the Church should be the place where such hospitality of spirit is not only possible but expected.
If Abraham had had such a community with whom to test the spirits that spoke to him, would he so blithely have cast out his first-born son and his mother into the wilderness? Would he have loaded Isaac with the wood?
And what of that young boy and the load he bears? Did his arms ever set down the burden of those logs? Or, like the wood of the Cross, did they mark him and set him apart for the rest of his life? I once told a friend about the scars my father’s absence had left on my life. He said to me, “Be grateful your father wasn’t around. Mine was, and he was a horror.” Would Isaac have said the same? Did Ishmael get the easier road, cast out though he was?
And then, of course, we must ask, where is God in all this mess?
A spiritual director once told me that experiences of evil, neglect, or suffering are often, paradoxically, initiations into God. Sometimes the darkness is so threatening that only the light of God’s love, surrounding and suffusing us, can save us.
It is surely God’s voice who cries out “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him!” Many artists have portrayed this moment with an angel clad in light standing behind Abraham, grasping his wrist, his arm raised high above the boy, knife in hand. But I recently came across a different image of this scene. In this one the angel stands between Abraham and Isaac, the knife lodged in the middle of her chest, protecting the boy. I thought “Yes, this is the God we have in Jesus.”
The God who stands between the violence of the world and our innocence. The God who bears the weight of the Cross to save us and set us free. The God who loves us beyond loving, and who makes a shelter of his own body for the outcast and a lighthouse of his love to guide us home through the storm.
Whatever else this story tells us, it tells us that we need to be that lighthouse for one another. We need to show one another the way back, when we have lost our way, as we all do. We need to stay one another’s hands and stop one another’s mouths. And sometimes we need to step in front of the knife, to expose the futility of the fire and the knife.
However he carried this moment with him, Isaac certainly went on to live a faithful life, though much quieter than his father’s. He settled, married, and had children whom he loved deeply and freely. He showed God’s faithfulness, not in grand acts of exodus and vision, but in quiet steadfastness, in stability and solidity.
We don’t know if Isaac saw the vision of the angel of God, standing in front of the knife. But whether he knew it or not, God saved him. And whether we know it or not, God saves us in every moment of every day. Not by preventing harm from befalling us and those we love—though we understandably wish it were so—but instead by putting his body and his love between death and our souls.
For in each of us, no matter how hurt or hurtful, there remains a part untouched by evil. “A point,” in the words of Thomas Merton, “untouched by sin and by illusion, […] which belongs entirely to God, […] which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.” And, I would add, incapable of being harmed or shattered by another’s brutality. This is the place where Christ lives in us. This place, hidden with Christ in God, is the foundation of all authentic prayer and all authentic Christian community.
The story of Abraham and Isaac exposes our deep need of one another. We must challenge one another’s delusions. We must support one another’s healing. But most of all—we must welcome and love one another, most especially when it is hardest to do so, just as Christ has welcomed and loved us. There is no such thing as individual salvation. It’s all of us, or none at all.
Perhaps the Good News lies in the fact that our salvation, and that of Abraham, Isaac, Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, and all those we think don’t belong in our churches or our communities doesn’t rely on us at all. For God is good, and that is everything.
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