Sunday’s readings include Genesis 22:1-14, the story of Abraham (nearly) sacrificing Isaac. It’s a hard text, to say the least, and when faced with it, or others like it, we tend to grasp at solutions—a reading that will “fix” the problem. Ironically, by handling the story as a problem to be solved (rather than a wonder that solves and dis-solves us) we end up doing exactly that—making a problem, and making it stick.
What follows is excerpted from the Ash Wednesday chapter in All Things Beautiful, and it attempts to take the story (and Hebrews’ reading of it) on its own terms.
Odysseus’ Scar and Abraham’s Sacrifice
Christian readers, even the most skilled and learned ones, struggle to read this story the way I believe it wants to be read. Aquinas, for instance, raises the question about the rightness of Abraham’s obedience only to insist that it should not be asked, not because hard questions should be avoided but because it is analytically nonsensical. God’s command makes right, right and wrong, wrong. So, whatever God says should be done is by definition rightly done. It may seem, Aquinas admits, that slaying the innocent is always wrong, as adultery and theft are always wrong. But God requires exactly that of Abraham, just as he required Hosea to “take a wife of whoredom” (Hos. 1:2) and Israel to plunder the Egyptians (Exod. 12:35). He insists, therefore, that Abraham was right to obey God without question, because by God’s command “death can be inflicted on any man, guilty or innocent, without any injustice.”
Kierkegaard’s more famous, more daring, reading is no less problematic. For Aquinas, the sacrifice itself was good because God had commanded it. Or, more to the point, Abraham was right to be willing to sacrifice his son because God had commanded it. For Kierkegaard, it was Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son that can be called good. Indeed, it was sublime— and precisely because he did what was asked of him without deliberation, even though it was unthinkable, unconscionable, abhorrent. Aquinas wants to insist that what Abraham was willing to do was not wrong. Kierkegaard wants to insist that Abraham’s willingness is impressive precisely because what he willed so daringly would otherwise have been wrong. Abraham is justified by his faith, but only because he refuses every grace.
The Augustinian scholar, James Wetzel, rightly rejects both of these readings. And he suggests a shocking alternative:
Does Abraham remember Sarah when raising his cleaver? I can’t help but think that he does, that he is more knowing than a knight of faith, that he is shrewder than an unquestioning servant to a divine patriarch. He is an awakened Adam. It seems to me that the choice at the heart of the Akedah is finally not Abraham’s but Yahweh’s. This God can claim his share in the life of his son by making the woman’s share his own, or he can let the woman be his otherness and have his son with her. When Abraham raises a cleaver and forces the issue, it is not Abraham’s faith that keeps him from becoming a murderer but his prescience.
God, in other words, is the one who is tested. Now, Abraham knows God will let nothing, not even his own commands, keep him from fulfilling his promises.
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