Abraham and Isaac

Sermon Notes Pentecost 28th June

Genesis 22:1-14, Matthew 10:40-42 by Doug Bannerman

There is a Yiddish folk tale that goes something like this: Why did God not send an angel to tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Because God knew that no angel would take on such a task. Instead, the angels said, “If you want to command death, do it yourself.” 

God’s fourfold command begins, “Take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac” (Gen. 22:2).

The medieval commentator Rashi quotes a midrash [see End Note] that explains God’s curious command by imagining these words to be one-half of a dialogue which, fully developed, goes like this: 

God said, “Take your son.” And Abraham said, “I have two sons.” He [God] answered him, “Your only son.” He [Abraham] said to him, “Each is the only son of his mother.” God said, “The one whom you love.” Abraham replied, “Is there any limit to a father’s love?” God answered, “Isaac.” 

The midrash endows the verse with dramatic tension: a resistant Abraham does not know and does not want to know which son he is to take. God spells it out for him: take the son that you love; take Isaac. But is Isaac, in narrative fact, the son whom Abraham loves? Is he the son whom Abraham loves best? If he is, should God have to tell him so? In short, is it Abraham, or God, who favours Isaac? 

Let’s go back a bit in the Abraham storyline to when Abraham was called Abram. 

God promises Abram a child, his own biological child (Genesis 15). Sarai, Abram’s barren wife, knows nothing of this promise because neither God nor Abram shares the news with her. Sarai is desperate to give Abram a child, and so she proposes that Abram father a child with her Egyptian maidservant Hagar. Abram and Hagar produce a son, Ishmael; but is this the promised child through whose descendants Abram would one day become a great nation? Abram did not consult God before about this, nor does he turn to God after his child is born. The child Ishmael, as it turns out, is not the child God promised Abram. 

Subsequently, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s name to Sarah, and tells Abraham that he will have a son with Sarah. Abraham’s response is odd. His immediate response to the wonderful news of a second son is, “Would that Ishmael live in your sight” (Gen. 17:18). 

But God persists: “Your wife Sarah is going to give birth to a son; you will call him Isaac …” (Gen. 17:19). In due course Isaac is born. Now, although the promise was made to Abraham, we are told that this second child is born because God “remembered Sarah” (Gen. 21:1). God, it seems, knows that it is not Abraham who longed for this child. 

The first verse of today’s OT reading (Genesis 22) tells us that “God put Abraham to the test.” What was God testing? Were Abraham’s faithfulness and obedience to God in doubt? Or was God perhaps testing something else? God might well have been testing Abraham’s love for Isaac, for Abraham does seem to exhibit a measure of emotional distance from Isaac. 

Abraham rises early in the morning to do God’s will. He “gets up and goes” to the place that God has told him. No resistance or reluctance is reported. Indeed, “get up and go” connotes some degree of alacrity. Furthermore, although the narrative itself consistently refers to Isaac as “your son” or “his son”, Abraham calls Isaac “the lad”; he says to his young servants, “Remain here with the donkey, while I and the lad go on ahead …” (Gen. 22:5). Abraham’s anonymous servants are also called his “lads”. 

When father and son arrive at the designated place, Abraham builds an altar, arranges the wood, and binds Isaac his son, and immediately takes the knife to slaughter him. No hesitation is recorded. This total lack of affect in Abraham is stunning, particularly compared with his distress when Sarah insisted that he send Ishmael away. 

The angel of the Lord intervenes, telling Abraham not to put his hand forth to “the lad.” Now hitherto, God has referred to Isaac as “your son”.; but now, God, through the angel, acknowledges Abraham’s perspective that Isaac is “the lad”, and Ishmael, his son, is his favourite. But in this, God is distancing from this strangely compliant patriarch. God has at last acknowledged that Abraham does not now, and will not ever, favour Isaac. Abraham may love Isaac, but Isaac is not the son he loves. 

God is surely disappointed in Abraham. In fact, God says nothing more to him here, or ever again. Indeed, the last words God speaks directly to Abraham are the ones with which He tests him: “Take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac.” There is no further personal contact thereafter. That God and Abraham never do see eye to eye on which son is worthy of favour might well underlie this final rift between them. 

The preference for one child over another is a theme that pervades Genesis, beginning with God’s preference for Abel over Cain. Isaac is destined to repeat the sin of his father, as children often do. His preference for Esau over Jacob is contrary to both God’s preference and Rebekah’s; it leads to deception. Jacob, in turn, will prefer the son of the good-looking woman he loved, a preference destined to have calamitous consequences.  

How sad. The heart in its desperate yearning for a child, the eye in its helpless attraction to beauty, determine and sometimes pervert human choices and preferences. People favour whom they favour, not necessarily those who merit favour nor those whom God would favour. 

Doug Bannerman 2026 

Post Script (Who have I left out?)

Judaism refers to story of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac as the Akadah, meaning the “Binding of Isaac”. There is a poem by Yehuda Amichai, entitled “The True Hero of the Akedah” (translated by Chavatzelet Herzliya). 

The true hero of the Akedah was the ram
Who did not know about the pact among the others.
It was as if he volunteered to die in place of Isaac.
I want to sing, for him, a memorial song,
About the curly wool and the mortal eyes
About the horns that stood silent on its living head.
After the slaughter, they were made into shofars
To sound the blast of their wars
And to sound the blast of their base celebrations.
I want to remember that final image –
Like a pretty photograph in a fancy fashion magazine:
The tanned, pampered youth in his finest of frocks
And by his side, the angel, dressed in a long silk gown
As if for a festive reception.
And the two of them, with desolate eyes,
Looking out to two distant desolate places. 

And behind them, as a colourful background, the ram
Entangled in the thicket before slaughter--
The thicket, his final friend. 

The angel departed homewards
Isaac departed homewards
And Abraham and God had parted ways a while back. 

But the true hero of the Akedah
Was the ram. 

End Note

Midrash: Genesis Rabah 55.7: A midrash is the classical rabbinic mode of exegesis, interpretation or study of a given text. They reimagine dominant narrative readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside, not replace, former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions.

Source:  Roslyn Weiss, “The One You Love? A Case of Divine Disappointment”, Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2022)