Genesis 22:1-14 Commentary

A mere 21 chapters into the Bible, the Holy Spirit was brave when it inspired the authors and redactors of Genesis to include a scandalous story such as the one we get in Genesis 22.  As some have noted across the ages, here is a narrative with so many fraught elements—not the least being things that go to the core character of God himself—as to tempt some biblical readers to slam the book shut and proceed no further.

It is from most any angle a terrible and terrifying story.  Sure, it turns out OK.  And yes, we can try to soften the hard edges of some of this with the thought “Obviously God would never have let Abraham go through with killing Isaac, his only son.”  Still, it feels difficult to let God off the hook for setting up a scenario that simply feels cruel on multiple levels.  And anyway, even if an omniscient God wanted to test somebody, surely there were avenues available that were far less shocking and gut-churning than the suggestion that a child sacrifice was in the offing.

The story has other oddities we preachers need to see.  One is that Abraham does not come off that great here either.  What?  You get a command like this and don’t even ask God to repeat his words to make sure you were not hearing things?  No questions asked?  In the face of THIS command from God?  And then we see an almost robotic and meticulous following of the divine command almost right down to the moment when a blade was about to be thrust into the boy’s chest.  No hesitation.  No questions asked.  No running off screaming into the night and then sobbing over the very prospect of this.  Or if any of that happened, the text does not tell us.  It does not even hint at any hesitation or doubt on Abraham’s part.

If anything, the narrative doubles down on the sorrow of this whole spectacle.  We are told several times in the story of how, as they set out to the unknown place of child sacrifice, Abraham and Isaac are “together.”  All by itself this portrait of Abraham and the son finally born to him in old age could come off as almost sweet.  “Together.”  Father and son.  Together.  It has always reminded me of the opening of the old Andy Griffith Show with Sheriff Taylor and his boy Opie joyfully walking down the road to go fishing.  Father and son.  Together.

Ah but the heartbreak of it all is that if things don’t change radically, they will not return together.  Abraham will go back home alone.  The way the story gets told twists the knife (sorry for the pun) in making an already fraught and scandalous narrative even more deeply affecting and sad.  And then there is the repeated phrase, “Your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love.”  Bang, bang, bang the text hammers our hearts.

Genesis 22 is relentless.

As the climax of it all approaches and as the boy Isaac—sensing something was up or amiss or both—starts to ask questions.  In reply Abraham gives answers that come a far distance from full disclosure.  Maybe suggesting God would supply the sacrifice is the only hint here that Abraham was thinking he would actually not be asked to go through with it and maybe he had better reasons to harbor this hope than we might think.  Maybe that would explain the robotic ways in which he seems to be following all this right down to the lethal letter.

Maybe.  And “maybe” is the best we get here.  Yes, in the end it pans out just that way.  God intervenes at the last second.  Like James Bond defusing the nuclear bomb with only 2 seconds left on fuse’s timer, so this story runs us up to the edge of the cliff before in an act of brinkmanship God puts a halt to it and supplies a ram instead.  “Now I know how faithful you are,” God says.  Again, however: there had to be a better way to figure this out.

Of course, the story serves a pretty big function in the long run of Scripture.  Of course God would not require Abraham’s son but at the end of the cosmic day, he did have to let go of his own Son in order to make the universe turn the corner from darkness back to creation’s first light.  God did what none of us have been asked to do or are capable of doing.  God sacrificed his Son, his Only Son, Jesus, whom he loved to save us all by grace.

Who knows how this affected Isaac’s outlook from that time forward.  Frederick Buechner once suggested that it probably made Isaac pretty wary, particularly around his father.  Maybe after all this went down, Isaac always kept half-an-eye cocked on his father, being on guard against seeing that weird look to return to his father’s eyes.  If ever Isaac saw so much as a hint of that old Mount Moriah glint in his father’s eyes, he would have been out of there.  Perhaps.  And maybe for whatever years Abraham had left to him, whenever God came calling again, perhaps Abraham took the posture of a dog getting ready to get hit with a rolled-up newspaper.  “What’s he going to ask for this time!?”  Maybe.

In the end Abraham may well be seen as the epitome of radical faithfulness for following an outrageous command that threatened to undo the whole covenant that defined his life.  For a man who had once lied about Sarah being his wife just to grease life’s skids a little for him, he surely has come a long ways since those early days.  But the tale that reveals all that is raw.

The Lectionary has us stop reading in verse 14 but it is good to go up to the last verse of 19.  Because there we read that after all the dust had settled and Abraham and Isaac came back down off the mountain, they set off back for home.  And the text makes sure to tell us that they did so “together.”

Illustration Idea

Twice in this story when God calls out to Abraham, Abraham’s reply is the crisp single Hebrew word הִנֵּֽנִי,  Hinaynee or “Here I am.”  Until he has to answer Isaac’s question, that lone word in Hebrew is the only thing Abraham says in this story.  It’s the first word he speaks in verse 1 and the last word he speaks in verse 11.

It puts me in mind of one of the final songs of Leonard Cohen.  It is the title track of his last album “You Want It Darker.”  So much of this song captures the sorrow of Genesis 22 and the wondering of where God is in the midst of so much suffering just generally and for the Jewish people in particular (“If you are the dealer, then I’m out of the game.  If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame.”)  But then there is the repeated refrain line Hinaynee, Hinaynee.  I am ready, my lord.

Listen to this haunting song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nmHymgM7Y