Address 8: Sacrifice
by Sarah Coakley
Salisbury Cathedral, Good Friday, March 29, 2013
A reading, first, from the book of Genesis, ch. 22
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here am I’. He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing that you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, The Lord will provide; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided’.
A reading, secondly, from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ch. 8. 31-34a:
‘What then shall we say …? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn?’
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‘He who did not spare his own Son’: now we finally cannot avoid the sacrificial ‘why’ question in all its force. If Jesus’s death was not simply an unhappy outcome of his confrontation with a sinful world, but something God fully intended, how can we explain it? In our own lives suffering and pain mean the blind human horizontal perspective, not the divine vertical perspective of order and providence. We might like – on our human level – to order our pain by fiat into that divine perspective; we might like to fantasize about how much good it is doing us, like so many minutes on one of those impressive modern torture machines at the gym. But then it would not be the suffering we know as humans. For suffering, as we have acknowledged again and again in these meditations this week, brings precisely an initial crash of meaning, a loss of human hope, the end of our resources, and the overwhelming sense of divine abandonment, or – worse, at times – of divine sadism, of God assaulting and rejecting us.
The story of the ‘sacrifice’, or ‘binding’ (akedah), of Isaac, traditionally set to be read alongside the Christian Passion narrative for today, Good Friday, raises this issue in an acute form. For it is the most pointed reminder in the Jewish heritage of this same irreducibility of human suffering: of what it is to be at the wrong end of Abraham’s knife, against all justice, family honour or moral order. Here, again, ‘religious’ meaning dies.
When I taught a class on Genesis to the 13-year-olds of my parish in Boston, MA, a few years ago, our week on the ‘binding’ of Isaac was by far the most memorable moment of the term, not least because – doubtless through a regrettable Episcopalian lack of thorough biblical training – it was I think the first time that many of these adolescents had even heard the story. Whilst the crucifixion may already have lost something of its shock value to them in a Christian context, by dint of sheer repetition, this was something new. As the story of the ‘binding’ of Isaac was read out by one of them, I glanced around the room and realized that, by a trick of fate, every young person in the room was a beloved eldest, or only, child – whether boy or girl; there was a shocked silence as the story came to its climax. The boys looked at their feet, puzzled and embarrassed. But two of the young women, more articulate, spoke up with passion: ‘There must be some mistake’, they said. ‘It was just a try-on, wasn’t it? God didn’t really mean it, and surely Abraham realized that all along? And what about Isaac? It can’t have been that he really thought he was going to die.’
I was touched by their righteous desire to move this story quickly back into a realm of human order and meaning. I was more especially touched by these two young women’s (one might say) emerging feminist insistence that God could not desire the death of a child at the hands of a father, could not condone, let alone demand, such abuse and violence. We spoke then of the shock of the narrative – both from Abraham’s perspective and from Isaac’s. We spoke of the ‘fear of God’ that is being tested in Abraham – we asked whether he should have said ‘no’ in the first place, as Kant and the liberal modern Jewish tradition insists, or whether he should indeed have responded in blind obedience. Then I told them of some of the intriguing ways that the rabbis had attempted to give the story fresh and more bearable meaning: making Isaac a grown man who binds himself willingly on the altar; or ‘spiritualizing’ his offering - making it a sacrifice of ‘soul’ rather than of body; or even having Isaac actually die, and rise again out of the ashes, as a vindicated martyr. But we also spoke of the story’s essential human meaninglessness – how, rather than condoning child-abuse (as a dangerous and too-‘pat’ reading goes), it more truly breaks our human hold on what God is. It breaks our sense that we can do business with God in the normal human sense: by negotiation, deals, manipulation. And thus it breaks our idolatries of control. It breaks those idolatries by facing out a complete loss of human meaning: we no longer understand this God, who seems to disobey his own ‘rules’, to play tricks with us. The dislocation between love and justice is complete. The story sunders, or smashes, some image of God that we have righteously made. And as such, it breaks our minds as well as our hearts in order to undermine idolatry, as Rabbi Abraham Kook taught of it earlier last century, even before the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. From now on we come to God with only shards of meaning, but in the shock of the events and the angel’s merciful stay of the violent human hand, our sense of God has to be cleansed, purged, removed from what we can control or predict - down here on the ‘horizontal’ level of suffering.
Is not this then the heart of this story of sacrifice, a sacrifice that precisely breaks and interrupts the normal ordering of manipulating sacrifice, by staying the human hand of the sacrificer? The interruption by the third, the angel, invites both Abraham and Isaac into a different, divine exchange beyond manipulation, beyond control, beyond even filial obedience. This is the higher, divine exchange of love.
At the heart of the extraordinary story of the ‘binding of Isaac’, then, onto which has been laden the profoundest hopes of Judaism and Christianity alike, and which also has become one of their deepest points of division, is this crash of meaning. Jewish tradition attempts to explicate the akedah in many, and richly, different ways; Christian tradition, from the time of Paul on, reads it of course as supersession: Christ as Isaac, or Christ as the ram in the thicket - sacrifice done better. But both traditions, at their deepest, acknowledge that here they are pushed to the end of their interpretative resources. Here, in fact, we might even say that they meet, where the mystery and pain of the presence of God in sacrifice or cross appears to condone the world’s violence and sadism, but actually and insistently propels us beyond them – if we could only see the divine perspective - to a place where idolatry is rebuked, meaning re-embraced, and love re-made.
I have spoken so far in the third person, but let me in closing these meditations be more daringly concrete and even autobiographical. There is, I believe, in the adventure of prayer, in our intimate relation with God, a point of breakthrough that takes us straight into the heart of the akedah story, the heart of the cross. It can only be called a moment of authentic spiritual terror; it comes when one allows God to invade one’s vulnerability in such a way that one sees that one’s polite, manageable image of that God has all along been an idol – a very big ‘something’ that can be relied upon to protect one’s good undertakings and worthy religious projects, and above all one’s acceptable image of oneself. The smashing of this idol, whether through patient prayer or personal disaster – or both – is a crisis of huge spiritual significance: I can walk into the dread, in which, seemingly, God has become nightmarish threat, or I can retreat. But at the heart of this nightmare is the same irresolvable conundrum of the ‘binding of Isaac’, or of the cross: for this new God who magnetizes me and allures me and demands of me nothing less than everything, and whom I desire above everything, is the same God who also seems to turn on me and slay me, even as he ‘binds’ and hands me over, with Christ in the Passion, into a new posture of pure, passive love. The contradiction is, in human terms, seemingly unbearable. But the point about this moment, if the great spiritual guides of both Jewish and Christian tradition are right, is that it is also purposive, purgative and transformative. It is, in fact, the very death of violent, ‘patriarchal’ religion, a touch of God infinitely gentle and caressing, if only we could attain the ‘vertical’ perspective. As John of the Cross puts it in one of the more intense chapters of the second book of his Dark Night of the Soul (II, chapter V), describing what he calls the ‘night of spirit’: ‘A thing of great wonder and pity is it that the soul’s weakness and impurity should now be so great that, though the hand of God is of itself so light and gentle, the soul should now feel it to be so heavy and contrary, though it neither weighs it down nor rests upon it, but only touches it, and most mercifully, since He does this in order to grant the soul favours and not to chastise it’.
So the religious problem of the binding of Isaac, and the religious problem of the cross of Jesus, are not ‘solved’ by any theory or cleverness, but ‘mediated’ in the story, lived out, sweated out, in the lives and prayer and waiting of those willing to be taken into un-meaning and beyond idolatry. Here is the true sacrifice, the ‘binding’, the cross, where human control fails, though divine meaning does not, if we could but glimpse the ‘vertical’ dimension, the exchange of ecstatic love in the inner life of God, the touch of infinite tenderness in the Father’s receiving of the Son’s suffering for the sake of the world’s salvation.
But today, Good Friday, and tomorrow, Holy Saturday, we can only wait for that return of meaning. We wait on the mystery. And so we stay for these hours, with the women, where we began, at the foot of the cross. Amen.
Silence
Prayer: O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favourably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of your salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
