Lenten blog | February 27, 2024

Through the eyes of a child

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for February 27th:  Genesis 22:1-19; Psalm 105:1-11, 37-45; and Hebrews 11:1-3, 13-19.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

I have a vague recollection of when I was quite young and looking through a children’s Bible.  I think I even remember in which room I was at our house at the time.  The recollection has stayed with me, I imagine, because I was so startled by the experience.  As I flipped through the pages of a colourful children’s Bible, I came across the picture of an older man wielding a knife above a young and defenseless boy.  The man was ready to plunge the knife into the boy, but an angel held back his hand to prevent this atrocity. 

I recall thinking, before I read the text, that this must be a picture of God intervening to stop an evil man from doing an evil deed.  Then I read the children’s Bible account of today’s Genesis passage.  I must have been really shocked and surprised to read that Abraham was only fulfilling God’s command, that God had ordered this old man to plunge that knife into the body of that defenseless boy.  I think that shock and surprise burned a lasting connection of synapses in my brain somewhere so that this memory has lasted all these decades. 

The man I had seen as evil was deemed faithful by God.  The God I saw as holding back the knife so that such an atrocity could not occur was the God who devised this cruel test.  It must have been that reversal that left a lasting impression.  At an age when I was first encountering biblical stories, before I could filter them through a lens of piety, the violence of this act is what captured my attention.  The reaction to the violence of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was visceral.

Tradition and piety would work to edit these instinctive reactions from the text.  For example, Abraham is praised by God for the near murder of Isaac:  “‘Now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’”  The Book of Proverbs are sapiential sayings, wisdom sayings, attributed to the Hebrew Bible’s greatest sage, Solomon.  The book begins with, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” (1:7)  Fear of the Lord equates with reverence and wisdom.

However, before piety and tradition intervene, was the more original context that Abraham literally feared what God would do if he dared to disobey, that Abraham was more terrified of something worse than filicide?  Isaac is passive throughout today’s Genesis passage.  His only apprehension is voiced in the question, “‘Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’”  Then there is only silence as “the two of them walked on together.”  How could Isaac have not been terrified when he was bound by his father, placed on the altar above the firewood, and his father’s arm was raised above him with a knife? 

We hear nothing of how the child’s reaction.  That is until Isaac’s child enters the story.  It is not found in the written record, but it seems that Isaac passed-on to Jacob a literal fear of God that time could never erase.  The trauma of Yahweh’s test of faith left its scar throughout Isaac’s life.  At Genesis 31:53, we read, “So Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac …”  Isaac had passed on to his son Jacob the reality of the name and experience of God, and it was Fear.  This is a father’s lesson to his son that the son never forgot, that God is Fear.  This literal fear is what seems to lie at the bedrock of this story that comes to define faithfulness. 

I ask you to consider these earliest traditions of our faith as we think about Lent.  It seems more plausible that our human perceptions of God have changed over the millennia rather than that God has changed so fundamentally.  The religious experience was once driven by fear of God.  God was the unknown and the powerful, and these were terrifying forces to the ancient mind.  God could be passed on with words of wisdom to a son as simply Fear.  I will leave it to each of us to consider, but what does it mean to the idea of God as Fear when God in Jesus takes on Himself the fear that is the cross?  The once terrifying God behind Abraham’s sacrifice of “your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” is now the Son of God sacrificed on the cross and no one holds death’s hand back.  Isn’t this the complete reversal of God as Fear?  Isn’t Lent an invitation to wonder and marvel at God as love?
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.