Genesis 22:1-18
Easter Vigil – Years A, B, C
Heroic intentions are a dime a dozen. Making a promise not to be attached to a current source of meaning is one thing and quite another to enflesh.
When tested we find out all we would lose. In that hangs an important balance—the weights of the past and the lightness of the future.
Unless in the depth of despair, we will salvage all we can. As broken as life may be, it seems somehow preferable to carry it on as a jockey’s handicap.
Transformed minds lose their ability to leap tall buildings and speed blessing onward when laden with the detritus of past significance.
Imagine the relief when an abundance of provision can be seen. It changes the calculus of what is possible. A zero-sum game of required sacrifice is erodible with a choice of sacrifice which sets up an eventual choice of no sacrifice—a blessed legacy.
It was not easy for G*D and Abraham to settle on a sign of blessing—a child, no child, many children. All three signs have their importance.
As we vigil for a “second-calling” we sometimes call resurrection, may your relationship with creation bless many.
As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience
There's a song popularized by the Mills Brothers:
You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn’t hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall
You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can’t recall
So If I broke your heart last night,
It’s because I love you most of all
What strange things we project onto love. Can you really love sinners without really simply loving sinners. Can you love G*D and go all the way to hurting a loved one in your heart (if not in deed – stopping one ram short of sacrifice).
“Love me more (and more and more and more)” is an appeal to betrayal of other loves.
In an Edenic garden no slack was given, G*D sacrificed G*D’s own image. At the beginning of this story, still no slack is given, Abraham is to sacrifice his own image. This is either profound counterintuitiveness or its just dumb. What have you found about losing your life for the sake of another? What have you found about the cost of not losing your life?
Have you found the shifting point that moves from “prove your love to me by betraying another love” to “stop that”?
Here is a slightly modified comment from the online Midrash lectionary list. Thought you might be interested:
…a caution.... we can get all kinds of self-righteous about the text (and yes, it is a horrible story – it is supposed to be!), but at some point don’t we want to see what it brings, instead of reading ourselves into it? (Have you ever noticed how quickly mainliners and progressives can turn into Biblical literalists?)….
It does no good to require of Abraham the sensibilities of a 21st century, college-educated social worker. He lived 3,000 years ago as a primitive tribal chieftain at the edge of pre-history, where … child sacrifice was not uncommon among other peoples in the area. Here’s an ancient piece of oral history, told and re-told for a reason. Probably to discern who God is – and turns out God is NOT the one who demands child sacrifice. … it illustrates an evolution in our understanding. Seems to me Abraham is not the one who says “No”, but God is the one who says “No.” … Abraham had it wrong, and God intervened.
How is that illustrative to us? All the ways we still sacrifice our children, even down to sending them to war for what turn out to be questionable reasons. Does God not still say, “No.”?
This story pushes me into the territory of personal heresy, because if it is true and remains true, then God’s intention in sending Jesus among us was NOT substitutionary blood atonement, but that we might listen to him and be reconciled. And the accepted doctrine that Jesus had to die for our sins turns out to be a strange twist on a sad set of events. What if, what if, we were to say that God became incarnate in Christ Jesus, the Word became flesh, and (like Abraham) we misunderstood and killed the messenger, the reconciler, instead? And the Resurrection was God’s way of saying, “NO! Stop it!” (?)
And instead of killing the Son through whom the future was promised, we back away from the knife, the Cross, and come down from the dark mountain, chastened?
S.W.
Thanks, S.W., whomever you might be. Sometimes we need to simply pay attention to the words without noting their authority.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_06_01_archive.html
Creation stories come in a variety of guises. There are those that build and those that transition. Here is a creation story in reverse.
A chaotic deep is not a given. Here chaos comes as a deliberate test, not a state of affairs. Promises have been given. Life is moving along.
Then come G*D, like Mary Poppins, with chaos in her wake. Delete your promise. Kill your son, your gateway to a multitude of descendants (forgetting Ishmael, of course). This command bring dissonance, chaotic and a way to madness.
Who is resurrected here? G*D? Abraham? Isaac? It would be easy to see this as a new beginning for Isaac. We can even see it for Abraham (except for those tales that have Sarah giving him the silent treatment because of what he was willing to do)? Can you see this as a resurrection of G*D who had forgotten showing steadfast love and, instead, demanding it of another.
Finally G*D comes around. G*D also plays an excuse game saying they can see that Abraham intended to kill and that was good enough. Sometimes a resurrection is simply to get back to square one.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2014/04/genesis-221-8-18-vigil.html