Our readings this week begin with the akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac. Not due to this story alone, Abraham stands as a paragon of obedience to God’s word.
While biblical scholars haggle over whether or not Abraham believed he would actually be required to sacrifice his son, the details of the story stand: the doting father, when asked by God to offer up his beloved son, without hesitation set out on a journey whose practical end was compliance.
The journey to Moriah took three days. For three days, Abraham and his son travelled to the mountain, the boy with the kindling for his own eventual burning on his back, the father weighted down by the implications of the horrible task at hand.
They woke on the third day, looked toward the horizon, and saw the mountain in the distance. The whole situation was hopeless and foreboding.
What impresses us is that Abraham seems never to waver. He’s cryptic about details when talking to Isaac and otherwise stoic through the whole of the mission. Though his soul must have been crying out for reprieve, he goes so far as to climb the mountain with his son, to bind the boy, and to raise the knife for the sacrifice.
Not until the angel cries “stop!” do we receive any indication that Abraham ever would have. He was poised, fully willing.
We comfort ourselves when reading this troubling story by assuming God never meant to let the sacrifice happen. Still, Abraham’s three days of torture, and Isaac’s own trauma, seem an unnecessary cruelty to inflict upon two human beings simply to test their obedience.
We hope the story is told as an allegory, a way to assert Abraham’s superior qualities whilst exaggerating the real details, but we have no way of knowing. We are left to admire the patriarch, the whole time quietly struggling not to bestow too much credit on him for his cofounding willingness. We respect him. We do not always know why.
We read Abraham’s story, and wonder. Would we? Would God ask it of us? What incredible sacrifices are solicited from us instead?
These readings collectively suggest that obedience to God’s word becomes a sacrifice in and of itself sometimes, in that it often requires relinquishing our attachment to personally beneficial reasoning. So the Psalmist is able to bemoan God’s hidden face while still discussing Divine generosity: the Psalm knows that God is good without pretending to understand how (Psalm 13:1, 6).
Similarly, Paul speaks of obedience as a kind of slavery, a life to which one gives oneself over at the cost of some autonomy where tasks like love are concerned (Romans 6:18). What God asks is not always easy: the task to love one another without condition itself is one which we, in our particular situations, often are left struggling against. Yet if we love God, we are to bind ourselves to it; we are to become servants to God’s will therein.
Sacrifices are easy enough only in theory; “love” is an easy word to make use of; but who hasn’t wished for reprieve when confronted with a “neighbor” who’s wronged them terribly? We accept and laud God’s word, but it’s human to tacitly hope that there are unspoken conditions, limitations which we’re not expected to love, or obey, beyond. Our readings struggle against that hope: obedience is to be absolute; it is to forego our personal, earthly desires.
In every age, believers are faced with the din of critical voices, voices which decry their obedience as foolhardy or antiquated, as silly and without merit. They flay believers with recollections of an unhappy history wherein God has not always rescued the godly from persecutions which occur despite their obedience.
They mock concepts like absolute love, burdening them with added conditions: are we to love dictators, murderers, thieves? The “yes” we borrow from our Bible only redoubles their scorn; obedience to it resists the “acceptable” limits of reason, and so they reject the obedience of the faithful.
In past ages, some not so distant, obedience has faced such contempt that it’s even been legislated against. Thus we have the examples of the Acts of the Apostles, and of Roman history, which indicate that Christians were persecuted for their beliefs.
We have too the history of anti-Semitism, wherein even Christians have sometimes been wont to forbid their Jewish brethren, by and bye, to be obedient to God’s word. At various times, it has been a dangerous thing to keep kosher, to observe the Sabbath, to celebrate a bris. Such things have been made illegal; they’ve been turned into markers, and used to justify the unspeakable.
We have, sadly, contemporary examples as well. In San Francisco, a group of activists is currently attempting to push through a law which would make circumcision illegal, punishable by fines and imprisonment.
Though these activists insist that their motivation exists wholly in the realm of human rights, it has recently come to light that one of their leaders is responsible for conceptualizing and circulating an anti-Semitic comic book which depicts mohels as monsters, and those who bar the covenantal tradition as saviors.
Despite this exposure of the nastier elements of their ideology, the group continues its campaign. They hold themselves up as enlightened and decry those who would be obedient to the tradition as “barbaric.” It has always been so, and has always so lacked substance.
Abraham was asked to do much which he did not understand. God asked that he become a wanderer, that he leave his home and move toward a land promised to his posterity. God asked that he sacrifice his son, eliciting his obedience without actually requiring that the task go through. God made a covenant with Abraham, and as a sign of it God established the bris, a ritual which would draw believers into the covenantal community on the eighth day of their lives.
God gave Abraham much room, and many ways, to be obedient; he did not provide corresponding whys. They are beyond our purview. We do not need them to justify our obedience. They are almost in the realm of “because I said so”; they are more nearly “because I have shown you so much love, and asked of you so little.”
We honor Abraham for his obedience this week in our readings, and must so honor those who continue to exemplify it. Obedience to God’s word, even if in areas which we think are replaced, for us, by our own “covenant” in Christ, is to be admired and applauded by all who believe. It’s something which we should always defend.
In San Francisco, the obedient are currently under fire. It is hardly the only city on Earth in which believers of various faiths face challenges, but it presents a particular opportunity for us to raise our own voices in defense of obedience.
Our Jewish neighbors, and our Muslim neighbors, are affronted by such laws, which would necessitate their disobedience to God in the name of obedience to a legislative body which is supposed to protect their religious rights.
Our gospel reading this week insists that those who love righteousness for
righteousness’ sake are beloved by God (Matthew 10:41). We don’t always understand righteousness as it’s been presented in the Bible; gracefully, we don’t need to.
God asked that we love one another. God asked the Jewish covenantal community to do this too, but also to perform other acts of obedience, of which the bris is one. Our gospels assure us that such obedience is righteous; we are to awe over, and protect the rights of, those who display it.
People of faith are all asked, in some measure, to travel to their own Moriahs. We face our own tests, and we confront the possibility of faltering each step of the way. Can we, ourselves, bring ourselves to bind that which we love? Can we do these things without asking why?
We hope, but never know, that a voice from Heaven will cry “stop!” at the opportune moment. We hope. Yet our job as people of faith is not to listen for the voice; it’s to do as we were asked. Because God loved us enough to make Divine and incredible sacrifices. Because God has asked, of us, so little in return.
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