SUNDAY SERMON: The Binding of Isaac

By Rev. Stephen Baldwin,

OT: Genesis 22.1-14

Later this summer, I’ll hit 19 years of ministry and weekly preaching. Which is almost 1,000 sermons and seems completely unreal…but that’s beside the point. 

The point is that today marks the fifth time I’ve preached on Genesis 22.1-14, a story commonly referred to as “the akedah,” and you would think I would have it figured out by now. But I have no idea what this story means. Please take a few minutes right now to read Genesis 22.1-14.

This is the first time I’ve preached on the binding of Isaac as a father, and I’m even more sure that I do not understand it. 

God orders Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, on a mountain as a burnt offering.  Yes, Isaac.  The same son who is the key to Abraham’s nation and the child of Sarah.  The same son who Abraham loves dearly.  The same son whom he chose over Ishmael.  The same young son who follows his dad up a mountain, prepares an offering site, and then asks, “So Dad, where’s the lamb?”  

Dispassionately, Abraham replies, “God will provide the lamb.  Don’t worry about it, son.”  

Abraham then proceeds to bind Isaac. He ties him up and raises a knife in the air. Then at the last minute, just before Abraham kills his son, an angel of God commands Abraham to stop.  And Abraham, so good at obeying commands, stops.  He sees a ram nearby and offers it as a sacrifice instead, just as the angel commands him.  

But what doesn’t happen next is most interesting.  Abraham doesn’t say a word to Isaac.  No apology.  No hint of regret.  No explanation.  And Isaac doesn’t speak either.  No confusion.  No frustration.  No anger.  They simply don’t speak.    

They walk down the mountain, but not together.  Isaac is alone, and Abraham is with the young men who accompanied them on the trip.   

What happened on the mountain that day seems to forever change the relationship between two sets of father and son. Abraham and God were estranged.  Throughout the rest of Genesis, Abraham talks about God but never to God.  

Abraham and Isaac were also estranged. We don’t hear much more about the two of them throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.  Abraham only makes one mention of Isaac ever again, when he seeks to ensure that Isaac gets married and receives his inheritance after Abraham dies. And then as I mentioned last week, Isaac does come to bury his father along with Ishmael. 

What an incredibly perplexing story. Traditionally, folks interpret it to mean that God was testing Abraham’s faithfulness to ensure he was ready to do whatever was asked of him. That doesn’t make much sense to me, as Abraham had already proven time and time again that he was ready to do whatever God or Sarah or anyone close to him asked of him. He was good at following directions, whether it was to father a nation in old age or to have an affair with a slave or kick his first-born son out of the house or take his next son up on a mountain and sacrifice him. 

That’s why some folks think this story was a test Abraham was supposed to fail. He was supposed to say no. God surely would never want him to harm his own son. God would never want any child harmed. This was an opportunity for Abraham to say no. But that doesn’t make great sense to me either, as the story’s author says God had to know that Abraham was willing to go through with it. Which doesn’t fit God’s character, at least to me. 

Jon Levenson is a professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard, and he has an idea about this story which I find very interesting. He says that in Abraham’s time, child sacrifice was not viewed negatively from a moral perspective. He thinks the purpose of the story was to change people’s minds in the ancient world about child sacrifice, encouraging them to sacrifice animals rather than people. 

Similarly, a poet named Jehud Amichi says the real hero of this story is not Abraham or Isaac or even God. Let me read to you from the poem. 

The real hero of The Binding of Isaac was the ram,

who didn’t know about the collusion between the others.

He was volunteered to die instead of Isaac.

I want to sing a memorial song about him—

[5] about his curly wool and his human eyes,

about the horns that were so silent on his living head,

and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered

to sound their battle cries

or to blare out their obscene joy.

[10] I want to remember the last frame

like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:

the young man tanned and pampered in his jazzy suit

and beside him the angel, dressed for a formal reception

in a long silk gown,

[15] both of them looking with empty eyes

at two empty places,

and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,

caught in the thicket before the slaughter,

the thicket his last friend.

[20] The angel went home.

Isaac went home.

Abraham and God had gone long before.

But the real hero of The Binding of Isaac

is the ram.

The older I get, the more willing I am to utter these three words, “I don’t know.” I don’t know what this story means, and I hope I never do. For Abraham, Isaac, and God were in an impossible position. 

Perhaps that’s the point. We will all find ourselves in some kind of impossible position at one point or another. May the Lord be with us when that time comes, and may we address it in such a way that we will be able to maintain the relationships with those involved in that situation afterwards. Amen.