ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by the Fr. Gerald Beauchamp during the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, 21st March 2008
Readings: Genesis 22. 1-18; Hebrews 10. 16-25; John 18. 1 - 19. end;
Some years ago there was an exhibition of drawings by the great Dutch painter, Rembrandt at the British Museum. Some were so small that you had to have a magnifying glass to see them properly.
One, in particular caught my eye. It was a preparatory sketch for his masterpieces depicting the slaying of Isaac (1635/6). The glorious thing about drawings is that we're in touch with the moment of inspiration, a moment that is lost when the finished work in oils takes shape.
In the sketch Abraham has Isaac across his lap. Isaac is bound and gagged. Abraham's right arm is raised with the knife. We are in the split second before he plunges it into his son. What he can't see but what we, the viewer, can see is that swirling around behind him is an angel, a mighty and magnificent angel; and the angel has his hand stretched out and is a fraction of an inch away from clutching Abraham's wrist and so stay Isaac's execution.
Abraham doesn't know what we know: that his son, his only son, will live. What is absolutely gripping about this little sketch is the expression on Abraham's face: sheer terror; sheer, bloody terror. With just a few strokes of a pen Rembrandt conveys all the extraordinary power of a man caught between the demands of being a father and the demands of God, the Father. He's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. Abraham is on the cross and he's lost.
How do we react to the story of Abraham and Isaac? I suspect that some of us bring some very tough and possibly unresolved emotions to it. That a parent can harm their child is the stuff of nightmares. If we've never had a child but wanted one; if we've lost a child; if we've been abused as children by those who should have protected us, then the story of Abraham and Isaac can set our guts churning.
And the notion that God, that God the Father, God the Creator, (surely the God of Love, damn it!) can set all this in motion seems too much to bear. This all sounds like sick religion: religion as a sort of sadism; a religion that's vile and repellent.
If we're in touch with some of this then we're in good company because someone who was very struck by the darkness of it all was the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. His first great book was called Fear and Trembling and it's about Abraham and Isaac. The title says it all! He was struck not only by the power of this story but by its silences. Abraham and Isaac go a three days' journey yet they hardly exchange a word.
Kierkegaard set me thinking: not so much about the silence between father and son but between the Father (capital 'F') and the patriarch; between God and Abraham.
Let's think back in the Genesis story. In those far off days in Ur of the Chaldees God gives to Abraham a promise. God promises that Abraham is to be the father of a great nation. His descendants are going to be as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sand upon the seashore. Yet Abraham and his wife Sarah are childless. Then a miracle occurs. Sarah in her old age conceives and bears a son, Isaac. There is a joy.
But the joy seems to be cut short. God now requires that Isaac is slain. Why? Isn't this madness? How can the promise be fulfilled if the link with the future generations is cut? If Isaac is killed then there'll be no descendants of Abraham and Sarah. There'll be no one to tread the sand on the seashore or look at the stars of heaven let alone be compared to them. There's something wrong here.
The story of Abraham and Isaac is often used in the Christian tradition as an example of obedience. Abraham, by going to the brink, proves that he is obedient. The image of the father willing to sacrifice his own son is seen to be a type, a pattern acted out by God; a God who sends his only Son to die upon the cross. Jesus is the new Isaac being offered up in obedience to the Father and who comes back to life.
The word obedience comes from the Latin word 'audire' meaning 'to listen'. The person who is truly obedient is not the person who just does what they're told but the person who listens and who listens deeply; and having listened deeply and takes action.
The problem with Abraham's obedience is compounded if we think beyond the promise to the celebrated debate with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 18 Abraham bargained with God to save the Cities of the Plain if a certain number of righteous people can be found there. Abraham beats God down from fifty to ten.
Abraham isn't reticent about challenging God. He bargains. So if Abraham sticks up for two cities to which he has no ties why doesn't he stick up for his own son, Isaac? Abraham should have resisted God at the outset. When God said "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go up to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you" (Gen 22. 2) Abraham should have said 'No'. He should have called God to account. He should have pointed out to God the profound conflict between his promise and his command.
How do we resolve this?
What we know about God is that he always works through the physical. God is a Creator: God is the Creator. Whether or not God needs us is a moot point but from our point of view, the human point of view, we only know God through ourselves being created and through the physical world. Even at our most spiritual we are still praying within our bodies. We talk about spiritual experiences using the words of space and time.
What's evident from the Old Testament is that God's purpose is accomplished through human beings whether its via Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt and becoming the means of his family's salvation or the Assyrians being the instruments of Israel's fall when the Israelites allow their own hubris to drown out the words of the prophets.
God 'needs' us (I use the term loosely). God 'needs' the physical world and we who are within it are to show him who he is. This is what I think is meant by glory. Glorification is about showing what is worthy to itself. 'Worthy': the word has the same root as the word 'worship'.
Now we've probably all been in situations where we've either deferred to others or others have deferred to us. Every human organization has its hierarchies and protocols. We know about authority and we know the difference between genuine authority and lip-service.
Abraham's lapse, his failure to call God to account when being required to apparently sacrifice Isaac despite his previously challenging God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, is a flaw. Abraham is not being sycophantic but he is not being genuine with God.
So God, in effect, has to take with the one hand (demanding sacrifice) and then save with the other (providing a ram caught in the thicket). But what God 'needed' was to stopped in his tracks before that. God 'needed' to be properly listened to. God 'needed' Abraham to challenge him. But Abraham didn't. What God didn't need was Abraham's silence. God 'needed' a word; speech; honour.
The 'consequence' of Abraham's silence is a sort of 'instability' in God (from our point of view) throughout the period from Abraham to Jesus. We see over and over again in the Old Testament two faces of God: the one compassionate and desiring intimacy with humanity; the other wrathful and wanting vengeance on human sin; our holding back; our missing the mark.
If Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden then God 'stumbled' when Abraham missed his chance to call God on his illegitimate demand to sacrifice Isaac. So God 'needed' something else. God 'needed' something to happen in the world yet was of his very own self. God 'needed' his Son (part of his own Trinitarian self) to show him something. God 'needs' and certainly desires glory, true glory. So God 'needed' an offering that would 'heal' or 'smooth' this ancient wrinkle, this conflict between his wrath and his compassion.
So comes the Son. The Son of God comes not only to humanity but also to God on his cross. The usual language about the cross is about what the cross does for us: it's a sacrifice for human sin; and because God has done so much for us then we ought to do as much as we can for him. Guilty man cannot atone for his own sin so God has to do it for us by visiting his wrath upon his own Son thereby placing us mere weak human beings forever in his power.
Well, yes. But as I pray and contemplate the wonder and the majesty of this day and the vast output of Christian art that it has inspired down the centuries be it Bach's Matthew Passion or Rembrandt's paintings of the crucifixion there seems to me to a power here that is about more than what is happening to humanity. It's about something 'taking place,' an 'event' in God.
'It is finished' cries Jesus from the cross. The Greek is tetelestai. The Latin is Consummatum est. The ancient languages have an abundance of meaning: 'It is completely fulfilled'; 'It is fully realised'; 'It is consummated'.
The marriage feast of the lamb is complete because the wedding isn't just about our communion with God it is also about the union within God. Gone, the seemingly mercurial deity, acting out in creation, swinging between wrath and compassion. Now and eternally God is known to us and to himself as love. This is a God worthy of glory and worship.
Today is Good Friday; and it is good not only for us. It is also God's Friday.