The usual interpretation of the binding of Isaac is that God may require us to sacrifice everything, even, if asked, our own children: but a contextual awareness changes everything. (Listen.)
All around the world today, people will be listening to the story of Abraham and Isaac. And the preachers will preach and the teachers will teach that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son is a model of faith; and so we, too, must be called to sacrifice everything for Jesus’ sake—even, if necessary, our own children.
Some adults will nod wisely, thrilled by such demands; others will feel sickened, and maybe even leave the faith; and many children who are paying attention will be horrified. They will wonder why anyone would want to worship a god who might ask their parents to hurt them, and that is an excellent question.
For the usual reading suggests that God may require the sacrifice of vulnerable people entrusted to our care; and this is why, for example, many pastors and missionaries have felt able to work so hard and to sacrifice so much of their own children’s childhoods. I myself was uprooted every two years as my mother was called to each new church, a process I found incredibly difficult; and several friends of mine were sent to boarding school as very little children so their parents could work as missionaries, unencumbered by the demands of parenting.
But is there another reading that does not demand sacrifice, a reading more consistent with the God of love? I think there is; but it requires us to read the story carefully, thinking about its context and looking at language. If we do this, I believe we will find that this is a story which celebrates life. Not death, but life.
The first thing to note is that the story was told at a time and in a context where the blood sacrifice of children was normal. It was the right and good thing to do. In the Ancient Middle East and in many other cultures, children were sacrificed to appease the gods. Indeed, the abduction and ritual murder of children by sorcerers and witchdoctors still happens in some countries today. We might feel revulsion at the story of Abraham and Isaac and the knife, but we need to understand that nobody hearing it for the first time would have raised an eyebrow. Abraham was doing the right thing: called to sacrifice his son, he prepared to do so.
The second thing to note is the changing name of God, usually masked in the English translations. The story opens with ‘El’, the generic word for god. El is the god that everyone knows, the god like all other gods: and it is this god which demands the sacrifice of Abraham’s son. But it is Yahweh, or the Lord, who stays Abraham’s hand. Yahweh is the personal, relational God revealed to Israel: and it is a messenger from Yahweh who calls to Abraham and says, “Do not harm the boy…”
The third thing to note is that, when this god speaks, Abraham does something brave and radical. For he listens to this new voice: the voice which tells him not to harm his son, the voice which demands he act differently to everyone else. In most people’s eyes, the good, right and proper thing would be for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but he does the harder thing: he comes back down the mountain, and he brings the boy with him. And then, one imagines, he has to try and convince all his neighbours and friends and relatives that he has done the right thing, while they, no doubt, are terrified that, in his failure to sacrifice the boy, God will punish them all.
In our context, we can get so caught up in the shocking thought that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son that we can miss the point: In his context, the truly shocking thing is that, based on new information and a new understanding of God, Abraham did NOT sacrifice his son. And that is precisely the point: followers of Yahweh, the God of Israel, DO NOT sacrifice their children, and this is a major shift in understanding.
It’s so huge that it is hard for Israel to believe it. And so, as the history of Israel unfolds, people continue to engage in child sacrifice from time to time; for example, in 2 Chronicles 33, King Manasseh burns his own sons in a sacrificial rite. But the prophets rage against it, and gradually the refusal to sacrifice children becomes the norm. Abraham was willing to give everything he had to God, and this is wonderful; but what is even more wonderful is that he accepted that the God of Israel, Yahweh, does not want destructive sacrifice.
This understanding grows and grows until the prophets reveal that Yahweh does not even demand the sacrifice of animals. Instead, this God wants lives shaped by justice, mercy, kindness, and peace; and to live such a life is our sacrifice. Anything which demands the sacrifice of others, or destructive acts of violence, is not the God of Israel, our God: instead, it is an idol.
It’s a good thing that we all get this—or do we?
Actually, we don’t. We sacrifice children—our children and other people’s children—to idols all the time. At the extreme end, some children work in armies and sex shops, sacrificed to idols of warfare and adult desire. Overseas, children slave in cocoa and coffee plantations, and in factories and sweatshops, growing the food that we eat and making the clothes that we wear. In the US, many labour laws are changing to enable children to work in heavy industry and on night shift; closer to home, hundreds of children have been found to be working in fast food joints. They are all being sacrificed to the idols of capitalism, cheap labour and the politics of an avoidable poverty.
In this country, children as young as ten are thrown into jail for minor offences and breaches of bail; traumatized children are kept in solitary confinement; Indigenous children are targets of racist over-policing: all sacrificed to idols of law and order.
What else? Children seeking asylum live in the hell of visa limbo, sacrificed to the idols of national sovereignty and border control. Autistic children are removed from mainstream classrooms, sacrificed to the idols of ‘normality’ and political games. Same-sex attracted and transgender children are bullied at school, excluded from churches and turned into political scapegoats, sacrificed to the idol of heteronormativity.
Many churches exclude all children from the worship service and particularly the communion table, sacrificed to the idol of well-ordered, quiet, cerebral forms of worship; and don’t get me started on the many thousands of children sacrificed to vicious priests and the power and reputation of the church.
In private homes, children are all too often given the dregs of their parents’ time, energy, and focus, sacrificed to the idols of careerism and ‘me-time’. Children are manipulated by controlling adults and divorcing parents, sacrificed to the idols of adult egos and needs: and anyone who has watched Succession has seen just how destructive things can get. Which is all to say, we might not slaughter children on stone altars these days, but children are sacrificed all the time to the demands and values of our society.
But our God is the God of life, the God who says, “Do not harm the child…” Our God will watch as we lay children upon our altars; but, just when all seems lost, our God will ask us to stay our hand. And we choose.
We can choose to act like everyone else, sacrificing children to ideals and idols and our society’s rapacious greed—or we can choose to live differently. We can risk approbation and censure, and seek to get children off plantations and out of sweatshops; free children from detention; educate and feed all children; and honour our own children’s needs when work demands escalate or our relationships break down. We can choose to care for the planet for the sake of our children, and to welcome all children into our lives and our churches, however noisy or messy or uncomfortable things become.
We can opt for the violence of normal life, the life that is a living death and which continually harms our kids; or we can choose for the god of life. The one who demands justice, mercy, kindness, and peace for people of all ages. The one who took on flesh as a vulnerable newborn baby. The one who placed a little child at the heart of things and told his disciples to do likewise.
Sacrificing children is the default setting: it’s the easy option. But if you seek the God of life, the God here revealed to Abraham, you must live differently. You must come down the mountain and face the harsh criticism of the people of the tents: your relatives, your neighbours, your employers, your politicians and your priests.
They’ll call you a hippie do-gooder, a bleeding heart, out-of-touch with reality, naïve. They’ll accuse you of undermining traditional family values; they’ll mock how you raise your own children, and how you worship, work, shop and play, indeed, how you conduct your whole life. But do not be afraid. You will not be alone. For coming down the mountain, you will be dawdling and listening to chatter: for you will be hand in hand with a little child, who is trusting you to do as God asks. Amen. Ω
A reflection by Alison Sampson on Genesis 22:1-14, given to Sanctuary on 2 July 2023 © Sanctuary 2023 (Year A Proper 8). Image Header shows The Sacrifice of Isaac – God Restrains Abraham’s Hand, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN, found here [retrieved June 25, 2017]. Sanctuary is based on Peek Whurrong country; full acknowledgement here. I pay my respects to elders past and present. The peace of the land, waterways and skyways be with us all.
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