Sunday Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons: February 24th 2024

Feb 24th, 2024

Abraham Isaac - Wiki Images

Second Sunday in Lent

The Akedah.

The story of the Akedah is horrible, it goes against so much of what we are told God is, or the experience of God should be and it has given rise to much thought and discussion in Judaism, with no one clear interpretation dominating the explanation. But its terrible story, even with that significant outcome of Isaac being spared death, still ends in a blood sacrifice of a living creature and we might well ask what kind of God is it that demands sacrifice of blood in any case, and for the Christian tradition why did Jesus himself have to die in such a terrible fashion?

I have no clear answer and maybe that is how it should be, why does the God of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and all the rest demand such horrors?

Why indeed to the innocent and just get killed whilst the venal, greedy, and cruel survive?

The story of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the black years of the Holocaust( Shoa) the genocides and cruel tendencies of humans, and recently the dreadful business of Alexei Navalny and others, begin to drain us all of any sense that God is on the side of the poor and little ones.

Will God answer us?

One thing I would ask of God , when we face the Divine One, is that as the Rabbis did in Auschwitz, we are allowed to put God on trial, to demand we are given answers, to tell us why! That I believe is only fair. Yet this terrible story doe have deep resonances with our situation. Life is not a fairy tale, it does not end on this earth as happily ever after, we are bound by time and the advances of time in and on our bodies and lives. There is also a profound silence from God, but perhaps it is this we need to explore more, to listen in another way to the silence of communicating love.

Yet there is a symmetry in our first reading and that of the Transfiguration, it is something to do with the experience and the way humans handle things . I found this rabbinic explanation very helpful:

Rav Soloveitchik said, "The drama of the Akedah is multi-semantic, lending itself to many interpretations. God demands that man bring the supreme sacrifice, but the fashion in which the challenge is met is for man to determine".

In other words it is up to us, as it was with Abraham, to choose the way of God, it is either experiential or physical, we can spiritualise, experience in our hearts and minds the agony of this and others such as Christ's sacrifice, and work things out that way, or we choose to undergo the physical experience of a real sacrifice perhaps a death in front of us as Gods demands. Neither are great choices, but it seems to me we have to work this out with God as a dialogue of trust, a leap into that silence.

The Transfiguration transforms

Does that experience of the Transfiguration help? Possibly, for one thing about this event is that it does not get the accolade of a fanciful dream, a vision maybe, but if we look into the Second letter of Peter we find this: '

Two mountains, Moriah and Tabor, two dramas, both of fear and incomprehension, two different experiences in which the voice of God changes from a demanding being to a loving carer and yes it is Jesus that changes things. They are also two physical moments when we see, feel, touch in reality and yes, hear God in that silence. The difference is that Jesus is not passive like Isaac, but open and active, he takes both routes of experience and physical life and death and he trusts in faith, but he does ask questions.

In the Transfiguration we are given the big hint that all we know now is not everything, and that something greater exists. We shall experience it through hope and faith now, but dive into its new physical expression, that of transfigured, transformed, changed, but very much our own unique bodies, I shall leave it up to you to enter into both scriptural accounts Abraham first, to an unknowing moment, then to Jesus in the cloud of unknowing and in the silence hear where the voice of God reveals not darkness, but the sacrifice of love clothed in light! Amen. .

Lectio Divina

2 Peter 1:16-21

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, "This is my beloved Son,with whom I am well pleased," we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until ithe day jdawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Abrahams Sacrifice, The Akedah

R Joseph B Soloveitchik: Me-Otzar Ha-Rav series, Abraham's Journey: Reflections on the Life of the Founding Patriarch (ed. David Shatz, Joel Wolowelsky, Reuven Ziegler), pp. 10-12

The Akedah

There are two ways in which the total sacrifice is implemented-the physical and the experiential. The choice of the method is up to man. The need for sacrifice was established as an iron law in Jewish history. However, whether man should sacrifice on a physical altar atop some mountain the way God summoned Abraham to do or in the recesses of his personality is man's privilege to determine. Whether the sacrifice consists in physical agony, pain, and extinction of life or in spiritual surrender, humility, and resignation is man's affair. God wills man to choose the altar and the sacrifice.

Abraham implemented the sacrifice of Isaac not on Mount Moriah but in the depths of his heart. He gave up Isaac the very instant God addresses Himself to him and asked him to return his most precious possession to its legitimate master and owner…

There was no need for physical sacrifice, since experientially Abraham had fulfilled the command before he reached Mount Moriah… Had Abraham engaged the Creator in a debate, had he not immediately surrendered Isaac, had he not experienced the Akedah in its full awesomeness and frightening helplessness, God would not have sent the angel to stop Abraham from implementing the command. Abraham would have lost Isaac physically.