Description
Twelve Months of Sundays – Year A
Ordinary Time
Proper 8
Genesis 22.1–14
Romans 6.12–23
Matthew 10.40–42
Perhaps precisely because it is one of the darkest of all Bible stories, the tale of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah has left deep imprints in Judaism and Christianity. Child sacrifice was as abhorrent to pre-Christian Jews as it is to us.
So the old questions arise: did God really tell Abraham to kill Isaac? Did Isaac really consent (as one Jewish tradition claimed), so that his readiness for martyrdom became a kind of proto-atonement? Our own day has added other questions: what would that experience do to Isaac? What did Sarah feel about it? And, once again, what is this story saying about God?
Part of the answer, as often, lies in the larger narrative. Ishmael has just been banished; is this chapter part of God’s response? Is it, in other words, not so much a sudden arbitrary demand, but rather a way of ascertaining whether Abraham is really interested in founding a pure clan of his own rather than trusting God to fulfil the promises in his own way?
Early Christian tradition offers answers from other angles, too...
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A by N T Wright
Published by SPCK