Genesis 22.1-14, Matthew 10.40-42
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 2 July 2023, Eldroth, Clapham
You who build these altars now
to sacrifice these children,
you must not do it anymore. [1]
According to Leonard Cohen, his song called The Story of Isaac “is about those who would sacrifice one generation on behalf of another” … “Just at the last moment before he was about to sacrifice Isaac, an angel held the hand of the father,” Cohen said. “But today the children are being sacrificed and no one raises a hand to end the sacrifice. And this is what this song is about.” [2]
The story of Abraham and Isaac seems very old and strange to us, with this act of child sacrifice at its core, but it is a vital text in our scriptures, for it triggers a crucial turn in our understanding of God and his ways in the world.
When Isaac asks his father: ‘The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham’s answer is extraordinary, and one of the most significant points in the whole of the Bible: ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering’, he said. [3]
When God refused the child sacrifice, and provided the sacrifice himself in the form of a ram, this was a shocking move, for it completely overturned everyone’s understanding of God. This was God acting absolutely out of character.
For God took this moment to declare something absolutely new: no more do I need human sacrifice. An animal will suffice. And, even more fundamentally still, God declared, no longer do I need you to sacrifice to me; if there are any sacrifices to be made in the world, I will make them for you.
This is astonishing in itself, but biblical language scholars have revealed another layer of wonder here. For in this passage, God changes names. The word used for God at the start of Genesis 22 - the God who orders the human sacrifice - is a word which is used to describe the ancient gods, the bloodthirsty gods of old; but the word used for God at the end of the passage - the God who stops the human sacrifice and offers a sacrifice of his own - is Yahweh, the Lord, our God. [4]
And so all this reveals that Yahweh is not like the old gods - he is a new and entirely different God. A God who demands no sacrifices from us. But who instead, sacrifices for us.
It was commonplace in the ancient world for a man to lead his son up a mountain to be sacrificed to his deity. It was extraordinary for a man to come down the mountain with his son still alive. Through this ancient story Abraham’s descendants explained why they had changed their view of God, and why they dared to be different from their neighbours who still practiced human sacrifice. It wasn’t too late to challenge widely held assumptions and change the way they saw God!
But they still weren’t finished. Many generations after ritualised human sacrifice was left behind for ever, prophets and poets arose among Abraham’s descendants who made the shocking claim that God doesn’t need animal sacrifices either. The prophet Micah asked,
With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
and the answer came back:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? [5]
Here is the realisation that God could never need anything from us, since God provides everything for us. Not only that, but God isn’t the one who is angry and hostile and needs appeasement. We humans are the angry ones! This will to sacrifice the young and the innocent: that comes from our hostile, bloodthirsty hearts. We are the ones that need to be changed! ‘The only sacrifice that matters to God is the holy gift of humble hearts and lives dedicated to his Way of love.’ [6]
This requirement that we change our ways, is what Leonard Cohen grasps in his Story of Isaac. It has been described as an anti-war song, written in the same spirit as Wilfred Owen’s Parable of the Old Man and the Young, a World War One poem which twists the ending of Isaac’s story so that the old man does not accept the ram provided, but (the poem says), ‘slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one’. [7]
What a contrast there is between the cruel, corrupt, vainglorious old men of Christian Europe who sent millions to the slaughter, and Yahweh, the God of Christians, Muslims and Jews, who looks to his people to show justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with him.
How our world needs to lose our grasp of the idol of sacrifice which we still hold onto, and to be open to recognising that our God demands no sacrifices from us: no sacrifices from Zionist freedom-fighters, no sacrifices from Christian boy soldiers, no sacrifices from jihadist suicide-bombers.
We need to open our eyes to the revelation that comes from the altar of Mount Moriah and from the cross of Calvary: that the rhetoric of sacrifice is a form of abuse. Leonard Cohen says that it comes from old men protecting what they have, against the young, who they fear will take these things from them. The rhetoric of sacrifice is the language of those who have confused God with their nation, or their wealth or their status.
Cohen’s song “does not end with a plea for peace; it doesn’t end with a plea for sanity between the generations”. In his song the peacocks keep spreading their fans, and the conflict rumbles endlessly on. [8] But…
Can we grasp that God’s Way of love offers us an enduring path through life’s conflicts, in which, like Abraham and Isaac, we can learn to walk?
What are the altars we build now, on which our children are sacrificed?
Can Yahweh help us to imagine a world where we, old and young together, walk hand in hand down the slopes of our Mount Moriah, turning our backs on the place of slaughter?
Will God help us to identify and raise the leaders gifted and enabled to begin to shape this world?
We are saved from sacrifice. We are enfolded in God’s generous, sacrificial heart of love. God gives us all we need to do justice towards each other, to share loving kindness together, and to walk humbly alongside him through this world.
Notes
A rewrite of No sacrifice necessary - The Lord will provide, preached in Somerset, 2014
[1] Leonard Cohen, Story Of Isaac [YouTube].
[2] Leonard Cohen: Story of Isaac Lyrics. genius.com.
[3] Genesis 22.1-8 expressed by René Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, pp. 203-04, quoted in Paul Nuecterlein, Girardian Lectionary, PROPER 8, YEAR A
[4] Paul Nuecterlein, Girardian Lectionary, PROPER 8, YEAR A, Genesis 22.1-14: Exegetical note.
[5] Micah 6.6-8
[6] Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation, p.36, my italics.
[7] Wilfred Owen, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.
[8] Allan Showalter, Leonard Cohen On The Story Of Isaac: “The song doesn’t end with a plea for peace. It doesn’t end with a plea for sanity between the generations.” June 28, 2020.
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