In the Nick of Time

Genesis 22:1-14

I’ll bet you have heard the line. “I don’t believe in a God like that.” Maybe you’ve said it before yourself. I know I have, in weaker moments of frustration, or horror, or despair. I think I may have told you before about the woman I know who grew up atheist after her grandmother was forced to leave Austria with nothing but the clothes on her back, ala “The Sound Of Music”, only without the singing. The family wisdom at the time was “There is no God who could allow such cruelty. Therefore, God does not exist. We are utterly and completely on our own.”

I’ll never forget the day when we translated this passage from Genesis in Hebrew class. The particular lesson or grammar point we were supposed to learn that day is lost to me now, but I remember my teacher Alex. While we Hebrew students were taking turns working on verses, Alex was getting a little impatient. It’s hard, slow work to translate from an ancient language that is mostly dead—a language that serves only one practical purpose to us today. By the time we got to the part where the ram is making noise off stage, Alex was practically dancing, he was pacing so animatedly across the front of the room. And when finally, haltingly, we finished verse 14 Alex looked up from his Biblia Hebraica with such a look of expectation on his face. He looked up at us to see if we were as excited as he was. Of course, all Alex saw on our faces was sweet relief, that we had finally figured out the last verse for the day, and could now move on to the new vocabulary words for the next class session.

So Alex looked at us for a moment with this kind of disappointed look and said, “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see the beauty? Look at how the writer starts with a wide lens on the scene, and slowly sharpens the focus and gradually increases the detail until you can see the knife in Abraham’s hand! His son is lying there, at the same time waiting to die, yet not really knowing what is about to happen, and just in the nick of time, in a split second, everything changes. It’s so beautiful…”

I wanted so badly to be as excited about this passage as my teacher Alex was. The truth was, it all seemed a little hokey to me. Like some urban myth. I found the idea that God could ask a man to sacrifice his son--after the man and his wife waited almost 100 years to get the son in the first place-- well, just a little repugnant. This story just didn’t fit my idea of who or what God was or is, and so I tried to dismiss this story as some mythical attempt to explain why bad things happen (or almost happen) to good people.

There is a danger in preaching this passage. In fact, there is a danger in just reading it out loud. Part of me doesn’t even want Genesis 22:1-14 to be part of the public discourse. Haven’t we all seen and heard enough stories of parents who sacrifice their children, to their jobs, to their addictions, to their other interests? Doesn’t something die a little inside the hearts of decent people when we hear that another child has been victimized, by the system, by the neighborhood, by the church? So retelling a story where a young, completely naïve child—who simply thinks he is going up the mountain to help his father complete a religious ritual—comes this close to perishing, well, re-telling this story is dangerous. It has to be told cautiously, so as not to even imply a Biblical endorsement of child- exploitation. Maybe that’s why for so long I thought of this passage as nothing more significant than urban legend. Maybe I was protecting myself and my image of God. Because, well… if God could allow something like that to happen…

One thing that makes this story stand out in the canon, besides the incredible events in the story, of course, is that we are invited into the story in such intimate detail. If you read this passage enough times, you just might come away feeling a little like a peeping tom, peering in through a very tiny window into the events of this father and son, seeing things you aren’t meant to see. As my teacher Alex tried to get us see, the picture created is so sharp, you can almost see the glint of metal on the knife in Abraham’s hand. There are plenty of gory, bloody stories in the Old Testament, but few so rich in detail, few told so up close and personal.

There is another danger in encountering this story. To do so is to encounter God—to stand toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball with the Creator of the universe, knowing that we will be the one to flinch, every time. And oddly, that can make us feel weak and ineffectual, instead of strong and brave.

Maybe it’s that feeling of confusion over this story of Abraham and Isaac and our difficulty finding our place in the story that makes us want to gloss over it. Because really, who wants to think about a God who would give and take?

William Willimon tells a story about leading a Bible study he conducted on this passage:

“The film that my wife and I decided to show was the dramatization of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Afterwards, my wife would lead the children in a learning activity related to the story, while I would discuss its meanings with the adults. Patsy had some misgivings about showing so ancient and strange a tale to the children.

"It’s only a little Bible story," I said. "What harm can there be in it?"

The group watched silently as the story unfolded. Abraham was played superbly by the Israeli actor Topol, and the dialogue, in Hebrew with English subtitles, added authenticity to the film. What an austere sight it was to see old Abraham struggle up the windswept, dusty mountain -- Moriah -- a knife under his coat and his son trudging silently behind him. Finally the bronze blade is raised, the boy’s black eyes flash with horror; then the voice stays the knife, the ram cries from the thicket and it is over.

I stopped the projector, divided the group in half by age, and the learning began -- began for me, that is.
"Who knows what the word ‘sacrifice’ means?" my wife asked the children. A few hands went up, a definition was attempted here and there.

"But what does sacrifice mean to you?" she continued. That’s when the trouble started.

"My Daddy and Mommie are doctors at Duke," said one third grader. "They help sick people to be better. Every day they do operations to help people."

"And how is that a sacrifice?" Patsy asked. But the little girl was not finished.

"And I go to the day care center after school. Sometimes on Saturdays too. Mommie and Daddy want to take me home, but they are busy helping sick people -- so lots of times I stay at the center. Sometimes on Sunday mornings we have pancakes, though."

And everyone, from six to 11, nodded in understanding. They knew.

"But what does this old story mean to us?" I asked. "I daresay we moderns are a bit put off by the primitive notion that God would ask anyone to sacrifice his child like this. Can this ancient story have any significance for us?"

"God still does," interrupted an older woman, hands nervously twitching in her lap. "He still does."
"How?" I asked.

Quietly she said, "We sent our son to college. He got an engineering degree, and he got involved in a fundamentalist church. He married a girl in the church; they had a baby, our only grandchild. Now he says God wants him to be a missionary and go to Lebanon. Take our baby, too." She began to sob.

The silence was broken again, this time by a middle-aged man. "I’ll tell you the meaning this story has for me. I’ve decided that I and my family are looking for another church."

"What?" I asked in astonishment. "Why?"

"Because when I look at that God, the God of Abraham, I feel I’m near a real God, not the sort of dignified, businesslike, Rotary Club god we chatter about here on Sunday mornings. Abraham’s God could blow a man to bits, give and then take a child, ask for everything from a person and then want more. I want to know that God."1

Is that the God we want to know? That God gets a bad rap. The temptation, when we even think of God in these terms, is to conjure up a God who comes off as a petulant tyrant. That God is one we feel the need to apologize for to the rest of the world.

Sometimes when I look at the arm of Christianity that is very loud and vocal about the call to personal piety and uses self-proscribed morality yardsticks to assess a person’s dedication to Christ, I wonder who they are defending. Does God need Gods’ own PR firm here on earth? Does the God who declared, “Where were you when I hung the stars, where were you when I formed the mountains?” ,does that God need us to defend what God does? Or does that God know what God is doing? For example, does that God know what God is doing by calling men and women to ministry that maybe don’t fit the traditional mold?

I think maybe the reason that I felt a little defensive about this story from Genesis and wanted to make it into a myth, a legend, anything but the Word of God is that there was a big part of me that was afraid of what God would ask of me. A part of me that thought I should maybe rescue God from the PR disaster that would happen if I started talking about what God did that day on that mountain with Abraham and Isaac.

You see, my reaction to this story is what happens sometimes when the focus is on the fire and the knife, the gathering of the wood, and the long trudge up the mountain; when the focus is on the binding up of the things we love and the hoisting them up onto the altar. This is what happens when we overlook the thing that happens in the nick of time. This is what happens when the noisy bleating of the ram offstage—that sweet sound that signals grace—is overlooked.

But this story is the Word of God, and that Word is grace. We must remember the story, we must tell it, we must write it on our hearts. We must listen carefully for that quiet note of grace in the story.

The challenge, then brothers and sister in Christ, becomes listening for the thing that brings our face-to-face encounter with God full circle, that moment of grace that allows us to see the face of God and live to tell the tale. For those moments, for the chance to experience God in the nick of time, for the courage to allow God to know what God is doing, we pray, saying, thanks be to God