The Redemption of Dead Ends

I imagine I am not alone in finding it surprising that the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis chapter 22 is one of the appointed readings for the Easter Vigil. Good Friday would be a much more readily understandable day for it, since this story contains well-known archetypal anticipations of the story of the Crucifixion. Why, then, is it selected for a liturgy of the Resurrection? 

Put that aside for the moment, for as perplexing as that question may be, it is, of course, not the most unsettling question that the story raises. Anyone who has received basic catechesis on prayer will know that in determining whether a prompting is from God, the first thing to ask is whether the prompted action is in violation of anything else that God has already publicly revealed, and if it is in violation, to dismiss the prompting as not coming from God. Abraham seems to do the opposite here. He receives a prompting to make a human sacrifice of his son, he believes that the prompting is from God, and he begins to take steps toward fulfilling this prompting. Although Abraham did not have access to as much divine revelation as we do now in the era of the New Covenant, it does seem that human sacrifice would have seemed a dramatic departure from what Abraham had already experienced of the character of God. For instance, there was God’s unwillingness just a few chapters earlier (in Genesis 18 and 19) to destroy even a few righteous persons along with the depraved cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Furthermore, the course of the story confirms that Abraham was right in identifying this prompting to sacrifice Isaac as being a divine command. What are we to make of this?

To make matters more perplexing, there are other passages in the Old Testament in which the Lord is portrayed as commanding violence, and these instances do not all fit neatly into the framework of things like just war, self-defense, or even capital punishment for crimes. In those categories, violence would be happening to a guilty person, and would have some purpose related to public safety. In contrast, take something like what the Lord is said to command in 1 Samuel 15: “I will punish what Am′alek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Go and smite [the people of] Am′alek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” Obviously, infants and animals, and probably some of the others mentioned, were not involved in the wrong that had been done to Israel. There are several things that can be said in interpreting passages like this, but one reality to keep in mind is that hyperboles are a normal feature of human communication, and thus, it would be understandable for God to use it in communicating with humans. This kind of language is especially common when we are dealing with opposition of any sort; we speak of "annihilating" an opponent in court, and even speak of desire to see opposing teams “crushed” or “killed” in sports. We even have a seemingly unmistakable example of hyperbole elsewhere in Scripture, when in 1 Samuel 18, David slaying the one Goliath appears to be described as having “slain…tens of thousands.” Again, it is not unimaginable that God would adapt to a typical human style in communicating with humans. Furthermore, one should not forget that quotation marks (or any equivalent punctuation) were not found in the original languages of scripture at the time, and so the human authors likely were at times putting God’s message into diction common to their literature. With these interpretive tools in mind, divine commands of violence can be understood harmoniously with God’s goodness.

God’s command to sacrifice Isaac is different, however. It is evidently more than a rhetorical or literary hyperbole, because of how Abraham responded. Nor is Abraham’s action discounted later in Scripture as inconsistent with the will of God. In contrast, he is portrayed and praised as obedient to God in this specific instance in at least two places in the New Testament (in Hebrews 11 and James 2). So, again, what are we to make of this?

There are at least three clues in the text of the story. First, when Abraham and Isaac separate from their servants on the journey to the place of sacrifice, Abraham tells them, “I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” The most natural reading of this is that Abraham is telling them that both he and Isaac would be returning.

Similarly, when Abraham and Isaac continue along the route, Isaac observes that they have all the materials for the sacrifice, but no lamb to be the sacrifice. When Isaac asks his father about this, Abraham replies, "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." Notice that Abraham does not say, “You will be the sacrifice.” One could read this dismissively, and say that Abraham was just finding a way not to scare Isaac, but the last of the three clues points away from that explanation. 

This final clue is that in the context of this story in Genesis, we can tell several things about the age of the people involved. First, Isaac is not a baby or small child. On the contrary, he is strong enough to take the long journey on foot up this mountain, and to carry the wood and other materials as he did so – things a small child could not do. Abraham was explicitly stated to be 100 years old when Isaac was born, and so presumably he is well beyond that by the time of this story. Even if one were to take Abraham’s age as a hyperbole, he presumably still was unusually old to have a child, since a hyperbole is an exaggeration, not a fabrication. All of this is to say that Isaac could have easily “put up a fight,” and yet, as far as we are told, he does not do so. On the contrary, the story gives the impression that he allows himself to be bound and laid upon the altar without any resistance.

All of this evidence, taken together, indicates that Abraham and Isaac had foreknowledge, at least in a broad sense, of the outcome of the story. They knew that God had already promised descendants to Abraham through Isaac, and that, as Paul points out in Hebrews, if nothing else, God would be able to raise Isaac from the dead in order to fulfill the promise. However, the fact that Abraham said that the Lord would provide the lamb for the sacrifice suggests he knew even more than that – in particular, that he knew enough of the character of God to recognize that he would not desire this kind of sacrifice to be done in his name. Thus, they realized that the command God gave Abraham must have some other fulfillment. Therefore, they were not morally or spiritually off course in obeying this prompting, because they were able to recognize both that it was truly God’s voice, and that his words meant something other than their most obvious sense. 

There remains one thing that will make an attentive reader of this story uneasy. Namely, that God appears to give a command that he does not actually want to be obeyed. The Lord does not lie, so once again we are left with the question, what are we to make of this? The text of the Lord’s command is this: “Take your son, your only-begotten son Isaac, whom you love, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” Isaac was never burnt, because the Lord sent his angel to intervene. How could this not mean that God either lied or changed – neither of which are consistent with his nature? The answer: it is not for nothing that we still commonly call this story the Sacrifice of Isaac, even though Isaac was not killed. Isaac was still offered to God as a sacrifice in this story. The Lord confirms this when he says to Abraham in verse sixteen, “you…have not withheld your son.” However, God chose to receive the offering of Isaac in life, rather than as a burnt offering. Furthermore, we know that Isaac was truly offered, because Abraham trusts the Lord enough not to prepare any other sacrifice. Abraham acts out an acknowledgement that his son’s life is begun and continued only at God’s will, and that he is not and was never owed that life. The Lord received Abraham’s surrender of Isaac to divine providence.

Now, we can come back to the question of why this would be read in the Easter Vigil. One clear reason is that it shows how God can make a way out of what appears to be a dead end. A command to sacrifice the only son you would ever have would seem like a hopeless situation…a dead end for yourself and your family line. Likewise, for those who begin a new life in the Sacraments of Initiation in the Easter Vigil, conversion is a kind of death…a dead end for their former life. Those who have faced opposition to their conversion know that especially. Likewise, the crucifixion and burial of Our Lord would have seemed a dead end to most of those who had placed their hope on him as the Messiah. And most of all, even though Our Lord had foreknowledge of the outcome of the Cross, willingly facing the apparent dead end of an agonizing death was still a great burden since he was human – so much so that he produced bloody sweat in Gethsemane. In each of these scenarios, there is a surrender of the natural human hopes one would have in life, and a trusting in the Lord to provide when our options have run out. This is what “dying to self” means. 

However, as the Epistle that is read at the Easter Vigil tells it, 

We who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death… We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.

Abraham, Isaac, and the Easter converts to the faith have died to themselves, and Our Lord died to himself by giving his life up on the cross and not using his own power for self-preservation, but the Father has honored these sacrifices and made a way out of their dead ends. He will do the same for all who will die to themselves and rely on him alone, for he only permits dead ends that he intends to redeem.