This enigmatic story, from Genesis 22:1-19, has puzzled more than a few thinkers. I referred to this story where God ostensibly asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. Over the centuries, millennia even, readers have wondered, Why would God ask Abraham to sacrifice his own son? Of course, those of us who know the story, know it has a ‘happy ending.’ Well, happy for Abraham and his only son, but not for the ram that God pointed out to Abraham at the last minute to offer instead of his son.
I titled this essay, “Lessons…”, not singular, indicating there has been more than one understanding drawn from this tale. So, what might they be?
There are at least two common meanings that have been derived from the story since it first entered Hebrew consciousness. Actually, I should more accurately say, not having studied Judaism to any extent, these are lessons Christianity has taken from this saga.
The first is concerning religion of the time in a general sense. Apparently, many of the peoples surrounding Abraham at the time, and perhaps even more so when his descendants came on the scene after that 400-year sojourn in Egypt, offered infant and child sacrifices in an effort to appease their gods, to gain their gods’ ear in their accompanying supplications. The line I was thinking here goes that God was testing Abraham. God wanted to see if Abraham would indeed offer his son as a sacrifice as his contemporaries were want to do. We understand that Abraham was one of the original monotheists, i.e. believing in only one God ultimately, and perhaps God was testing him here to see if he still also would continue to worship other gods in the way his contemporaries and perhaps ancestors had done
In the first place, with regards to this interpretation, we should first of all note that Abraham was obedient to his God. He followed the instructions he apparently received and took several days journey with his son, servants and firewood, to the mountain where God had indicated this sacrifice was to take place. This is just another example of where Abraham obeyed God. That was one of Abraham's strong points, and something we can learn from in itself.
As we have already mentioned, ultimately, Abraham was not required to sacrifice his son. This leads us to a second understanding of this story. Some see it as a ‘type’ or an example of something that was to come, namely the sacrifice of Jesus. Some might say that the sacrifice of another human would be ineffective to the extent to which what has been viewed as another sacrifice some 2000 years later was viewed. I refer, of course, to Christ's death on the cross. There is a degree to which the traditional and generally accepted understanding of Jesus' death is that it was a sacrifice, a sacrifice to end all sacrifices, as is described, at least in first reading, in the book of Hebrews in the New Testament.
There are many though, who still are uncomfortable with this story, and at the same time are uncomfortable with the traditional understanding of Jesus' death. Increasingly, over the last half-century and more, theologians have begun to seriously challenge the long-standing understanding of Jesus' death as a ransom, paid to free us, a substitute for us. In that understanding, humanity was viewed as under a curse ever since "the fall", the story in Genesis 3, and only Jesus' death could remove that curse, not a human, such as Abraham's son, because only Jesus, as both all-powerfully divine and all-human, was capable of accomplishing that.
Even if we stopped to think about the word ransom, to whom was this ransom owed? To whom was it paid? If we contend that the human race had fallen into the domain of Satan ever since our ancestors' disobedience to God, was this a ransom paid to Satan to obtain our freedom? This is absurd. Our all-powerful God owes nothing to Satan. Why would he sacrifice - his son - to Satan?
Others understand it slightly different, seeing Jesus' death as taking on our penalty for disobedience and giving his life to atone for that, as we, imperfect as we are, could never achieve that. Again, the question is asked, would the God of love, grace, light, truth and mercy scheme to send his only son to earth to die for us in such a horrible way?
Some of those who question these understandings maintain that holding to those beliefs is what has led over the centuries to what they would see as a distorted belief in the value of suffering and ultimately even in suffering abuse, such as a spouse from her husband. How often have we not heard of clerics telling their female parishioners to go home and stay with their abusive husbands, as that is their duty, or by so doing they may witness to their husbands and stop the abuse. With this really be what the God we described in the last sentence of the last paragraph would want? Those who have really been oppressed and suffered, over the centuries, such as women and Blacks, who are now writing their own theologies, cannot accept this. This is entirely understandable.
Then there are those of us who have long had difficulty reconciling what appears to be a judgmental God who even orders genocide, as might appear to be described in the Old Testament, with a God who is otherwise described as Love, with a God who was exemplified by the life that Jesus lived. The life that Jesus lived, the picture he gave us of God, seems so different from what many have understood as representing "the God of the Old Testament."
This understanding is something that has increasingly come under the scrutiny of my co-religionists, anabaptists, who firmly believe that Jesus taught us away of peace and nonviolence. They, plus those thinkers and writers described in the second to last paragraph above, are leading us in a new understanding of the nature of Jesus' death that does not require us to accept all those other views of God and explanations of Jesus' death that have become unacceptable.
I am not going to flesh out what these new understandings are. That would be the subject of further writing. However, I think it can point back to our original subject story and give it a third even more important meaning. If we can accept that God did not offer Jesus as a sacrifice, a ransom, a substitute, with all the negative connotations those interpretations bring, we can see that this story of Abraham and Isaac is indeed typology, but in a different way than I mentioned above.
According to what I am introducing here, this story points not to the belief that the death of Jesus was required as a sacrifice over and against a human sacrifice. It points to the even more fulfilling understanding that such a death, a sacrifice, is not necessary at all. Again, the full understanding of this point would only be gained by further reading of the texts of those anabaptist, black and female writers I referred to above (One good place to start though, as far as that is concerned, would be J. Danny Weaver's The Nonviolent Atonement, particularly as he critically summarizes any of the writings of those other camps).
Just a footnote here: Some might still ask, what about the ram? To that, my simple comeback would be, as Jesus and the subsequent New Testament writers themselves made clear, animal sacrifices are no longer required either. Indeed, there are some hints in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 6:20 and 7:21-23 come to mind, that they might never really have been demanded by God. Again, that is another subject.
