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Where Is the Lamb?
A father and son were hiking up a mountain together. Their intention, upon reaching the peak, was to complete a religious ceremony such as the father had experienced in his homeland many years before and many miles away. The son knew this ceremony would end with a sacrifice from his fatherâs large flocks of livestock. As they climbed, however, he became increasingly puzzled and concerned.
Finally, he asked, âDad, where is the lamb?â
âGod will provide what we need,â his father answered.
We can only guess what the son thought of this answer. It was the kind of thing his father was always saying. In fact, the son knew that his mom and dad had tried to have a baby for a long time without success, and that, despite their very advanced age, his mom had finally become pregnant with him. He knew how much he meant to his parents and how they considered his very existence a miraculous gift to them.
But he must have wondered what would happen on the mountain peak. Would they actually find a lamb there? Would his dad be disappointed by unrealistic religious expectations?
The answer turned out to be far more frightening that his fatherâs potential disappointment. His father had meant to sacrifice him, Isaac, all along.
I have worked as a pastor all my adult life. This means my kids grew up listening to me preach every Sunday. My daughter has always said that she would prefer to hear me speak than any of the other preachers she has heard. I receive this compliment understanding that it mostly has to do with familiarity and affection. But about the time she was finishing high school, I gave a sermon about Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God.
On the ride home she blurted, âDad, I hate it when you talk about that story!â
âWhat? Why?â
âDo you know how disconcerting it is to hear your father describe someone willing to kill their kid for God? When I know you love God and think you should try to do what he says!?â
Point taken. This is truly an awful story. For a very long time I missed the point.
Abraham had grown up in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the ancient empire of Mesopotamia. He had grown up among people who came to believe in an angry and cruel god named Molech. To appease this Molechâs anger and earn his favor, Molechâs followers offered sacrifices. If a worshiper really wanted to impress Molech, they would offer a human sacrifice. The highest, most significant sacrifice one could offer was oneâs own child.
On top of that mountain Abraham was only doing what he had seen performed by deeply religious people when he was younger. He was following sacred tradition.
This is precisely why God had called Abram to leave his nation, his home, and his family. God meant to launch an entire movement of human redemption through Abram. All the violence and anger of the world was to be replaced by blessing and love. To do this, God would have to wean Abram from the beliefs and religious practice of his youth. The point of this old story is not that a father should be willing to kill his child for God, but that God would never want or accept such a sacrifice.
The Bible is an honest record of a community of people who tried to understand, love, and obey God. They didnât always get it right. But through their efforts, even mistaken efforts at times, God was showing them who God really is and what God really wants. Abrahamâs aborted attempt to sacrifice Isaac is one of these learning and reframing experiences God designed to clarify what it means to believe in and serve God.
The Old Testament is full of prohibitions against human sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of children. Psalm 106 goes so far as to suggest that such sacrifices are not inspired by God but by demons, and that to offer such a sacrifice is to make demons into gods. Only a demon would have such a wickedly destructive agenda as to require so unloving an act.
That God prevented Abraham from killing Isaac did not entirely mitigate the destructiveness of Abrahamâs willingness to do so. After this incident Abraham and Sarah, his wife, never appear together again. Sarah moves elsewhere, and when she dies Abraham has to travel to Kiriath-Arba to bury her there.
The Midrash is a collection of writings that fill in gaps or provide explanations that careful reading of the Torah, the Old Testament, requires. Jewish scholars regard these ancient commentaries as sacred text. The Midrash relates how Sarah moved to Kiriath-Arba, where she died of a broken heart because, in a sense, she stood to lose both her husband and her son on the same day. The mournful sound of the shofar, the Jewish horn, is said to contain the tears of Sarah.
Upon hearing of her husbandâs intent to sacrifice their beloved son, Sarah could no longer bring herself to live with him. Sarah saw eye to eye with my daughter on this matter.
How would you judge the morality of sacrificing a child?
I once had a congregant whose son was drafted into the US Army during the Vietnam War. She begged him to flee to Canada, where she held citizenship. His name is now engraved in the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. It is difficult to imagine sending a child to war. But I can understand a parent being willing to do so out of loyalty to a worthy cause. Nevertheless, even though I recognize his religious history and culture, I truly cannot understand on any kind of personal level Abrahamâs willingness to offer his son as a sacrifice to God.
It might be argued that God is not bound by the moral values we have developed. While this is true, it is also true that the moral values that should guide people of faith are based on Godâs own character and behavior. The consistent principle of holiness is summarized in the law of Moses, âBe holy, for I am holyâ (Leviticus 11:44 NRSV). Jesus reiterates this principle when he rejects the wisdom of his spiritual ancestors:
Many families develop their own games to play on long road trips. One of the games my family enjoyed was writing new verses to a song my dad used to sing us at bedtime. I have no idea where he learned it. The chorus went:
This was followed by a humorous or satiric retelling of a Bible story. One of our favorites was Moses thinking he was going to drown all the while he was floating in a basket down the Nile. Another was about Daniel surviving the lionsâ den because he was a dentist and he pulled the lionsâ teeth. Of all those my father had learned, our favorite of all was one we composed for ourselves on a road trip to see our grandparents.
My point in reciting thisâpossibly irreverentâditty is that I am always astounded how we drop our moral filters when we read Bible stories. If someone in your church came to believe God was telling them to kill one of their children as a sacrifice to God, how would you respond? If you heard on a news broadcast that someone had killed their child in a religious ceremony, what would you think should happen to that parent?
Does the fact that an incident took place many years ago or that it was recorded in the Bible make any difference to its morality? It further astounds me that it is often those people who protest most loudly against moral relativity who most readily assert the moral validity of things that happen in the Bible and defend biblical characters for doing things we would jail the...