Hey All,
This week I get the opportunity to teach on Genesis 22 this Sunday. Yes, I get to talk about Abraham and Isaac going on the worst camping trip ever on Father’s Day. Sometimes things line up just so and you have to wonder is it odd or is it God? I’ve been diligently doing my prep work, consulting commentaries, scholarly essays, cultural references that parallel this story, and examining translations to glean additional insight that gets lost in the switch from Hebrew to English like this little morsel: the word in Hebrew that get’s translated as knife in verses 6 and 10 is ma’akeleth this type of knife, according to Robert Alter, is used in butchering animals. So, what is being described here is not a sacrifice but a slaughter. From these jumbled nuggets, factoids, panic, wisdom, epiphanies, and God’s grace I’ll hopefully put it all together in a way that reveals something about God, faith, and those of us who would call ourselves “faithful.” The thing is I can’t take my eyes off of Isaac.
I read through the story of Abraham’s test of faith I see all these wonderful theological thoughts, possibilities, notions, implications, I mean the scriptural hose is on full blast here. Yet what I keep returning to is the kid who was probably really excited to be going on an adventure with his dad. Not just any trip either a mission from God. Isaac was going to be partaking in something he had heard about his whole life. Isaac was going to get to learn what it meant to take part in the covenant that his dad and God had together.
Isaac is most likely a teenager at this point in the text. That age where we’re trying to figure out what it means to be a man. I wonder if he felt acceptance and love when his dad told him they were going on a trip. Did he puff his chest up a bit? Walk a little taller? Run and tell his friends all about how his dad was taking him on a mission from God? I wonder if Isaac was up early the day they left sitting with his gear ready to go. I wonder if he stumbled along the way, got embarrassed, and hoped that his dad didn’t notice. I wonder if he took his father’s silence on the trip personally; obsessively looking back over the day to see if he had done something to cause this behavior. I wonder if Isaac prayed on the trip. I wonder if God responded. I wonder.
Then the day arrives and they get to where they’re going. Abraham tells the slaves to wait while he and Isaac go on ahead to worship. Was Isaac excited? Running around his father asking all types of questions or did he just ask the one, “Hey Dad, we’ve got the fire and the wood. Where is the sheep?” Is there something to him not including the knife in the list of things they already have?
How did the slaughter go down? It’s horrible if you picture it, a father taking hold of and binding his son, laying the boy on the altar, and raising a knife to kill him. Did Isaac struggle? Did he cry out? Did he plead for his life? As Abraham stood over Isaac with the knife trembling in his hands did Isaac hear God’s messenger, or did only Abraham hear it? The scene closes with Abraham returning to the men and they head home. It doesn’t say whether Isaac went with them. Did Isaac refuse to go anywhere with Abraham after this? I think Isaac needed some time to deal with what just happened. Who wouldn’t?
Isaac is now faced with the option of holding on to this event or moving forward. Does Isaac stay in the wreckage of this place or does he grieve and heal? Will his victimhood define him? This is pretty daunting, how do you accept that your father decided that his faith, God, and his covenant with that God is more important than you? How do heal that? How do you then inherit the very covenant that put your life in peril? How do you reconcile with the God who told your father to kill you? How does that work?
Abraham’s willingness to slaughter Isaac on the altar of faith and obedience to God is an extreme example to be sure. However, some of us know what it means to have our father’s choose something else over our well being. Some of us have had our emotions, spirits, intellect, sexuality, or innocence slaughtered by our fathers in their obedience or enslavement to something. Perhaps, like Isaac, our fathers chose God over us. For some our fathers chose drugs or alcohol over us. Maybe it was religion. For others it was careers, status, and/or money. Maybe for others it was our father’s sexual desires. For some of us our fathers chose the country over us. Duty, Honor, and the common good may have been what other fathers chose. Or maybe our fathers wanted to be anything but fathers and chose accordingly. Some of the things that were picked over us aren't evil things. In fact some of them are good things. But, that doesn't change the idea that we where weighed in the balance of something else and our father’s chose those other things over us.
The question then is how do we come to a place of acceptance with that? How do we mourn the fact that we didn’t have the fathers we could’ve, should’ve, or would’ve had? How do we grieve the fact that something else was more beloved, cherished more, or flat out wanted more by our fathers than we were?
For me healing has come from admitting that these wounds exist. In some instances I've seen that Dad made the right choice. There was a time when he chose the family over me. I was drinking a lot, had gotten kicked out of college, and was generally making a wreck of myself. Dad told me that he couldn't have that in his house. He was right to ask me to leave. He was right to choose the family's well being over me. It hurt at the time. I see now though that I made a choice to, I chose booze over my family, and I left for the Marines. There were other times where I was deeply wounded and I had to realize that it is okay to feel the resulting pain. I talk about that pain and the events surrounding it to folks I trust. I pray that God helps me to see my father as God sees him. I’m walking each mile of the road to acceptance: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, and finally Acceptance and I try to allow myself to feel every emotion along the way. Out of this I’ve come to realize that wounded people wound others. Odds are, if someone is hurting me, then that means someone got to them first. I’ve tried to see things from my father’s perspective and recognize that he was a kid once too and that his dad hurt him as well. He didn’t deserve some of the events from his childhood anymore than I deserved some of the events of mine. Doesn’t make what happened to either of us okay. It’s just life in a broken world. It’s not fair. It’s not just. It doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t get us off the hook though.
We have choices in this life. I can stay in that place of pain, needlessly picking at those scabs, or I can let God do God’s thing, ask for help, and allow healing to occur. For some of us that may mean seeking professional counseling, pastoral care, support groups, and/or medication. This is what I see in the rest of Isaac’s story. He moves forward. He makes mistakes. He get’s married and has some kids of his own. He tries to do better by his sons. He fails. Ultimately he is counted as one of the faithful. I think this is at least in part because he didn’t stay on that mountain rehashing his father’s betrayal any longer then he needed to. Isaac grieved, he accepted, he reconciled as best he could, he moved forward.
Doesn’t mean the scars went away and healing didn’t happen overnight. For me it has been a weekly, daily, and sometimes hourly thing. But by submitting to God’s healing process I have found a sense of well-being and serenity that surpasses my understanding. My dad and I have a good relationship today. I love him, forgave him, and seek out his counsel. He loves me and is proud of me. I am no longer bogged down by these unresolved emotions and lingering aches. I get to move forward and work on the next batch of unresolved issues. I am able to move beyond the pain of my past and fully immerse myself in the life that is available to me right now. I get to be present. I get to let go. I can acknowledge them as part of my story but they no longer define me. I get to be the sum of my actions today rather than be the sum of what others did to me.
Have a good one,
Carl
