Wrestling with the Word by Jamie Harrison

Author:Jamie Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2016-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Genesis 22.1–19

GEOFFREY STEVENSON

‘After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”’ (Genesis 22.1)

No parent should have to bury a child. Think of the entrance of Shakespeare’s Lear in Act V, carrying the body of his beloved Cordelia, made all the more poignant by foolish repudiation when she had failed to offer glib declarations of filial love. No parent should have to bury a child. Or Tolkien’s King Théoden grieving over the death of his son. Or, in the recent film Interstellar, the hero travelling into the future by passing through a black hole. Although he is 125 years old, he looks 40 when he then meets his daughter, now old, on her deathbed. She sends him away, so he won’t have to see her die.

No parent should have to bury a child. There is such profound grief in that loss: grief that time may dull, but never heal. Such a loss can split a marriage, with blame games or emotional retreat to where the other is not admitted. At every family gathering there is that sharp, gnawing awareness of the one who is absent and will never return. No parent should have to bury a child. And that tragic injustice is at the heart of the story of Abraham and Isaac, one that has engaged artists and resonated with believers down the ages.

A tricky text

Yet for moderns this is a difficult text. As soon as one takes even a tiny step away from the context, the story of a man commanded by God to take a son on a three-day journey to sacrifice him is almost impossible to hear. So many questions erupt. What father would even consider killing the son ‘whom he loved’? What God would require that of a father and faithful servant, one to whom that very child had been promised to found a people? What child would willingly submit to being bound and readied for slaughter? And why is it only male characters involved? The listener has every right to ask such questions, but must do so within the great sweep of the biblical narrative and its teaching, and by attempting to understand the historical context and the early cultures of the biblical texts.

Progressive revelation

‘Cosmic child abuse’ is a phrase that has reverberated through contemporary theological debates, and with reason. This story, with other biblical stories of the offering of the firstborn, has been used, implicitly or explicitly, to support practices now unacceptable. One modern response is to say that the God of this text is not the God of the Christian faith. Or that at best, while the understanding and representation of the revelation of God was profound and perhaps even progressive for the founding stories of the people of Israel, that revelation has been refined and, in important ways, superseded by the revelations given to the Prophets, found in the teaching and example of Jesus, and in the writings of Paul and the Church Fathers.

Child sacrifice as a means of worshipping other deities is condemned and forbidden elsewhere in the Old Testament.

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