I'm sure someone must have noticed this before, but it was a new thought for me.
The scripture lesson on Sunday was the extremely dramatic and powerful Genesis text where Abraham is directed by God to sacrifice Isaac. Of course, Abraham follows through with the sacrifice and that's the end of the Bible... okay, only kidding on that part. God, of course, prevents Abraham from carrying out the sacrifice and we get the beginnings of Judaism and, ultimately, Christianity.
As I was listening to the familiar story, I had the usual profound thoughts. God was asking Abraham to sacrifice the one thing he most craved and Abraham willingly did so. I always wonder what the one thing I most crave is and whether I'd be willing to sacrifice it for God. Tough call - one I hope God never asks me to make. Second, I realized that Abraham must have been feeling a little bit strange - God had promised to make a nation of him and here he was sacrificing his ONE chance at that nationhood. But, of course, Isaac had also been God's promise and Abraham had laughed at the thought of Isaac. He wasn't about to make that mistake again. If God said he was going to make Abraham into a great nation, then that was what was going to happen - whether or not Isaac was sacrificed.
But then, I had a new realization. God was asking Abraham to sacrifice his only begotten son - a horrible, horrible, horrible thought for any parent out there to even contemplate. Just the thought of taking that child of yours, the one you brought into the world and raised, and placing him on an altar and then taking a stone knife and... that's where the squeamish usually stop contemplating. God was asking Abraham to do this horrible thing, this thing that nobody should ever have to do. And yet, even then, God knew that he was going to be asked to do the same thing with His own son - that He was going to have to sacrifice Jesus for the sins of us all. Only, nobody was going to stop this sacrifice from occurring at the last second - God was actually going to go through with it.
It seems to me then that Abraham's story of the sacrifice of Isaac - a story central and pivotal to three major religions - only has its culmination in one religion. Without God's sacrifice and death of Jesus and the raising of Him back to life, the sacrifice of Isaac is ultimately about a strangely cruel and sadistic God taunting his subjects to see just how much they really love him. With Jesus' death, however, the story takes on new meaning by looking to the far future and saying, one day, I will do for you what I would not ask you to do for me. I will provide the lamb for your sacrifice.
Like I said, I'm sure somebody thought of this already.
2 comments:
Nicely put. Until Christ's sacrifice which was God himself in the position of Isaac, Abraham's story stood solely for the proposition that God did not condone nor demand the sacrifice of children, a practice which was of course prevalent in that day an age. Worthy, true, but not the precursor to the Ultimate sacrifice of Himself, through His incarnation as Christ.
There's even a line of dialogue in the Bible where Isaac asks Abraham, "I see the firewood and the fire, but where is the sacrifice?" And Abraham replies that "God will provide one." I mean, that's a pretty deeply loaded statement.
If I wrote a novel like this, I would be considered a genius for setting up the later sacrifice so perfectly.
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