Reading: Genesis 18:1-15
There is PPS series Bill Moyers “Genesis-A living Documentary". The pertinent episode for this week is called 107 - The Test.
After the Creation story, this week's Narrative Lectionary drops us into Genesis in an interesting place. We arrive at Abraham and Sarah without first hearing some of the stories that shaped the world before them.
Genesis stories often narrate what happens and God’s response but leave out the why. This “narrative gap” invites wrestling with their meaning. Focusing on these other "gap" moments can provide context for the story presented in this reading (which has its own gap moments).
First, there is Adam and Eve's Temptation. Is disobedience what God wanted or expected from his creation? There are consequences for their defiance, but the word ḥaṭṭāʾt (sin) is not used.
Then there are Cain and Abel’s offerings, where God looks with favor on Abel's. There is no reason given as to why Abel's gift is favored over Cain's. When God speaks to Cain before he kills Abel is the first explicit mention of the word “sin” appears in Genesis 4:7, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you timshel (which either means must, shall, or may) rule over it.”
In the Flood story, why is Noah spared and not others? Scripture only states that he found favor in the eyes of the LORD, but doesn’t explain how Noah's righteousness was defined in comparison to others. And the explicit problem God sees with the construction of the Tower of Babel is left mostly to the reader to conclude.
All of these stories matter. They set the stage. They remind us that before God called Abraham, human beings were already struggling to live faithfully, already wrestling with violence, already longing for God’s promise to take root in a fractured world.
We know this story about Abraham and Sarah. Scripture also tells the story of Hagar, Sarah's handmaiden, and Ishmael, and the human plan to fulfill God's promise. How God views this plan has everything to do with faith, but it is not directly addressed.
Their joy at Isaac’s birth is not simply the joy of new parents. It is the joy of watching God bring life where life seemed impossible. Isaac’s very name means laughter, and it is holy laughter, laughter that carries disbelief, grief, resistance, and ultimately joy. Sarah’s laughter is more than comedy; it is her voice. It contains agency, resistance, and a reminder that God’s covenant is not grim obedience but deep, surprising joy mixed, perhaps, with a "realistic" sense of disbelief.
That joy is what is at stake when we turn the page to Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, or the Akedah. This story has haunted generations of readers. There is even a famous Jewish midrash (Rabbah Bereishit Rabbah 55:7 ) where there is an imagined dialogue as Abraham questions God over each part of what God commands:
“Take your son.”
“But I have two sons.”
“Your only son.”
“This one is the only child of his mother, and that one is the only child of his mother.”
“Whom you love.”
“I love both of them.”
“Isaac."
However, this emphasis on Abraham’s internal struggle and uncertainty, while making him achingly human, is not written in the Bible. Too often, then, this sacrifice becomes a call to faith that focuses on blind obedience. Yet the real movement here is not primarily about God demanding violence; it is about God interrupting violence. This God of Israel is not like the gods of many nations, who have demanded child sacrifice. The ram caught in the thicket is a sign that God provides life, not death; mercy, not destruction.
Yet we should not be tempted to sanitize this story. Isaac is portrayed as silent while bound, and his silence is a reminder that faith is not only a part of Abraham’s story, but also his son’s. Shouldn't Isaac's faith in God and, maybe Sarah's also, be considered and central in the Akedah?
The vulnerable often bear the cost of religious obedience. Abraham, too, in Genesis, is silent. He once argued with God for the lives of strangers in Sodom. Yet in this account, he says nothing for his own son. Does the dialogue of the above-imagined dialogue change anything in the perception of Abraham's faith?
What if Abraham had protested? What if faith had meant protecting Isaac, the child of promise? Might that, too, have been an act of radical faith?
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw in Abraham a “leap of faith”, a paradoxical trust that defies reason. But we are left to ask: "Does true faith transcend ethics, or is faith found in standing for life and compassion?" The prophets, and Jesus himself, show us that faith and protest, faith and mercy, belong together. There are many parallels with this story and what Jesus was to go through.
However, this story will not let us escape its discomfort. Maybe that is a gift. For in the horror of Abraham’s knife, in Isaac’s silence, in Sarah’s laughter, we are asked: What kind of God do we worship? What kind of faith will we claim?
The binding of Isaac turns us toward a God who provides, who interrupts cycles of death, who calls us to resist violence in God’s name. Faith is not simply submission; it is also wrestling, questioning, and even laughing. And perhaps true worship is found not in silent obedience but in daring to trust the ways that God’s promise must find some to overcome death.
God’s command stops Abraham's sacrifice, “Do not lay your hand on the boy.”. That’s all God (through the angel) explicitly says. The ram appears providentially in that Abraham sees it after God’s intervention, but this is not verbally acknowledged by God. Abraham sacrifices the ram in place of Isaac. God gives Abraham his choice of responses.
Finally, I close by quoting the haunting poem. The author is a World War 1 and this is cited in Moyer's The Test episode.:
"The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" by Wilfred Owen
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
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