“What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

Pity Abraham.  

After all that he and Sarah went through to finally welcome an heir, God now tells him to offer Isaac for sacrifice. 

What?????????

It makes no sense. It’s as if God is pulling the divine rug out from underneath Abraham.  What kind of a God would take so long to fulfill a promise and then in short order undermine it?  Would a loving God actually ask Abraham – or any of us – to follow through with such a thing? To choose God over loving a child? 

To discern what God asks of us is never easy.   It’s not like God sends us a text message, email, or postcard with clear instructions.  God doesn’t knock at the front door or tap us on the shoulder.  

Our sense of God’s voice is always mediated.  It comes to us through scripture, story, and song; through nature and other people; through our own dreams and intuition.  Through our limited ways of seeing.

Discerning God’s voice from a parent’s voice, from the culture’s voice, from an authority’s voice, from a church’s voice, from our own voice is not simple.  It is so easy to get wrong. 

In fact, we ought to be wary of anyone who claims with certainty that they know what God wants, especially to justify violence. 

Today’s reading begs a question: Could a loving God actually demand that we act in a way that is contrary to love? 

Notice: when God calls to Abraham, he responds, “Here I am.” In other words, “I am ready, open, and available to serve you.”  When Isaac calls to Abraham, he says the same thing, “Here I am”… “ready, open, and available to serve you.” Abraham desperately tries to hold onto love of God and love of his son.  

He wants a “win, win” solution.  He just doesn’t see how it is possible right away.

Remember, in the Ancient Near East, human sacrifice was a given; something practiced by all known tribes as a way of pleasing the gods. It’s not like Abraham would have thought God’s request was out of the ordinary. The first people to hear this story would not have found it as shocking as we do. What would surprise them wasn’t that God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son; but that God stopped him from doing it. Some commentators see this story as a turning point, an evolution in religious thought. 

We are told from the very first line that God was testing Abraham.  Maybe the test wasn’t just Abraham’s love of God…but also his love for Isaac?

The central tension in the story is one that continues to this day: Could a loving God actually want us to act in a way that is contrary to love? 

When 32 year old Kelly told her Christian parents, Rob and Louise,  that she was marrying her Jewish boyfriend,  they were beside themselves.  “How can you turn your back on the faith? On our family? On Jesus? You will be ex-communicated.  Because when we get to heaven we want to know that you will be there someday, too, we forbid you from marrying Alex.”

Kelly answered, “Mom, Dad… I love Alex and he loves me.  I’ve always wanted a relationship like the two of you have – and it is what Alex and I have.  He is kind, loving, and supportive.  He is good to his parents and grandparents.  He values all of the same things we value. I’m going to marry Alex.”

Rob and Louise said, “We cannot support this.  It is against our religion.  We will not be going to the wedding.  We will forbid your siblings from attending the wedding.”

Kelly was crushed.  From that point forward her relationship with her parents suffered. 

Her parents believed that they were doing what God asked of them. But, were they? 

In 2018, the year after Australia legalized gay marriage, Lachlan Hall told his mother, Vanessa, that he and his boyfriend, Paul, were making plans to marry. 

Vanessa, a Christian, was beside herself. 

“Late one afternoon I got down on my knees and prayed like I had never prayed before. I was sobbing, and said to God, ‘You know I love you, and you know I love my son. What I don’t understand  is why you are asking me to choose  between the two of you.    But if this is an Abraham and Isaac moment, and I need to sacrifice my son in order to stay true to my faith, as much as it would grieve me, and as much as I don’t understand it,  you know I would, but please, please tell me that is not what you want from me.’”

“In that moment,” Vanessa writes, “an almost audible voice spoke these words to me: ‘I gave up my son so that you don’t have to.’”

A few months later, she walked Lachlan down the aisle, wearing a rainbow sash.

“Because in the end,” she said during her toast. “Love wins.”

When we are trying to understand a seemingly inscrutable scripture passage, when we are trying to discern God’s voice in our lives, when we are trying to decide how to navigate a moral dilemma, we can not go wrong if we use a “hermeneutic of love” – that is, if we use love, mercy, and compassion as our interpretive lens. 

In recent months, Pope Leo has offered a corrective to those who attempt to use God to justify a different type of human sacrifice, war.  Drawing on the Book of Isaiah in his Palm Sunday remarks, he said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

Pope Leo is drawing on a tradition from St. Augustine that insists, without exception, on the primacy of charity and mercy in all use and interpretation of Scripture. For him, any prayer that asks God to sanction violence against one’s enemies represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God.

This is an immensely helpful perspective for us when we are trying to understand confounding scripture passages or our own moral dilemmas.  Love is always the standard.

And it seems that it was Abraham’s standard for understanding God, too.  He had experienced God’s love and faithfulness so many times throughout his life that when faced with a command that did not make sense, he still expected a good outcome.  Before he goes up to the place of offering, he says to the lads, “we (meaning he and Isaac) will return to you.”  Abraham was confident that God’s love would not let him down. 

Friends, we will all face experiences in life that seem to test the goodness of God – illness, accidents, loss of all kinds. We may find ourselves in what seem like impossible situations where taking moral shortcuts or resorting to violence seem like the most expedient option. May we be like Abraham and presume that our loving God is worthy of trust; and that our God will never ask us to act against love. Amen.