Armadale Uniting Church

Sermon for 13th Sunday 

Abraham & Isaac
“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

Sermon for the 13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Martin Wright

Armadale Uniting Church, 29 June 2008

Genesis 22:1-14, Matthew 12:1-8

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”  Twice in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus quotes these words from the prophet Hosea, and they can be taken as a summary of his attitude towards the law and prophets of Israel.  In Matthew, Jesus is presented as the great teacher of the law, a new Moses, and it is quite clear that he has come not to cancel the law, but to fulfil it:  not one jot or tittle of the law will be set aside, not one letter, even from the nasty bits.  But the whole of scripture, the law, the prophets and the writings, must be interpreted in a way that is consistent with their purpose, as God’s gift for the building up of life, not taking it away.  When the law is interpreted as a legalistic code inhibiting life, imposing sacrifice rather than desiring mercy, it is being misinterpreted. 

Take for instance the sabbath laws.  Jesus and his disciples were hungry on the sabbath, so they plucked some grain and ate it, as you do.  Trouble is, plucking grain counts as “work” and so it’s forbidden on the sabbath.  Now there was good reason for this law—those who worked in agriculture, as so many people did in the ancient world, had to be protected from labour on the sabbath, so it could be a true day of rest for the honour and glory of God.  The purpose of this law was never to prevent hungry men from eating.  But to the Pharisees, Jesus and his disciples have literally transgressed, so they are guilty of sacrilege.  Jesus responds that they have not understood the true meaning of the law, that God desires mercy and not sacrifice. 

By “sacrifice” he means the idea that God is pleased with suffering.  It is always wrong to imagine that our suffering is in itself pleasing to God, or can win God’s favour.  This is not to deny that Christian discipleship will not often bring us to suffering, as it brought Jesus himself—sometimes it will lead us to joy and contentment and a lively sense of the fullness of life; sometimes it will lead us to loss and suffering and death.  But suffering is never an end in itself; if our faithfulness to God brings us to suffer, God will be pleased with our faithfulness, but not our pain.  Also this is not to exclude the possibility that we may voluntarily accept certain disciplines that involve suffering, for instance fasting at particular times.  But the purpose of such discipline is to help us to pray more readily, and perhaps to give away the excess that we save by our moderation.  It is a great temptation to think that what we suffer by fasting is in itself pleasing to God—it isn’t. 

By “mercy”, on the other hand, Jesus means that basic attitude towards one another of forgiving love, which is characteristic of his whole life and teaching.  It’s similar to the answer he gave when asked which was the greatest commandment—firstly, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and secondly, to love your neighbour as yourself.  (One verse from Deuteronomy, one from Leviticus, just as today he quotes Hosea.  Jesus had no compunctions about taking a verse out of context and saying “That’s what it’s all about”.)  The whole of scripture, which for us means Old and New Testaments, must be interpreted in a way that is coherent with this central teaching, because that is how Jesus interprets it. 

So we come today to the last of the lectionary’s instalments of the Abraham story, in which Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac.  There is more at stake here than Abraham’s paternal love.  Once again, as in previous weeks, the whole of God’s promise is under threat—the new nation that is supposed to spring from Abraham rests on the prosperity of Isaac, and now it is called into question once again.  This is a story that I suspect we resile from.  How could God possibly ask Abraham to do such a thing; even though it is only to test him, surely it is unconscionably cruel? 

Well, with this as with all scripture, we have to read carefully, with one eye on the foreground, on the story told us by the text itself, and another on the background, the ideas and practices that were taken for granted by the first readers and writers, but which we don’t necessarily see today.  Amidst the background to the Old Testament is the canvas of religious ideas among the Ancient Near-Eastern peoples who were Israel’s neighbours, ideas which often seep into what has become our scripture. 

One such idea is that, whatever god you worship, Baal perhaps or some harvest god or sun god or whatever, this god has a claim to all your firstborn:  the firstborn of your livestock, perhaps the firstfruits of your harvest, and even your firstborn son.  Your god had a claim on the firstborn as “their share”, and certain ritual offerings of that share were made to keep your god happy.  That’s in the background to today’s story, as to a number of other episodes in the Old Testament. 

Why, we might wonder, would God choose such a ghastly idea through which to speak his holy word?  We have to bear in mind that, when Israel borrowed the religious language of her neighbours, it wasn’t to show how Yahweh was like the other “gods”, but quite the reverse, to show how he is unlike them.  Never does an idea or story make its way into Israel’s scripture without being totally turned on its head, to show how the true God is different from the popular religious opinion.  (The New Testament does the same thing with its contemporary religious ideas, both Jewish and Greek.) 

So let’s remind ourselves of what’s obvious—none of this stuff about the heathen gods having a claim to the firstborn was actually true.  They had no claim because they did not exist.  The whole system of sacrificing to bring sun or rain or harvest or whatever was false:  it was what Paul might have called groping in the dark for God, but not quite finding him.  In contrast to this is the God of heaven and earth who brought life into being out of utter darkness.  If ever a God had a claim to a life, surely Yahweh has a claim to Isaac’s life, Isaac whom he had brought out of the emptiness of Sarah & Abraham’s barren old age?  The point of this story is that the one God who does have a legitimate claim to the sacrifice of our life is the one who chooses not to make it. 

In this the story is not unlike that of the woman who is brought to Jesus after she is caught in adultery.  You know it well—the scribes and Pharisees want Jesus to condemn her to death by stoning, as the law requires.  He responds, “Let whoever of you is without sin cast the first stone”.  Silently, one by one, they slink away, leaving the woman alone with Jesus.  He does not say “You are innocent”, but rather, “I will not condemn you either—go and sin no more”.  The only one who could justly have condemned her is the one who chooses not to.  “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

I want to conclude by reading a poem by Wilfred Owen, a soldier in the First World War who wrote his most famous poems from the trenches, where he was eventually killed like so many thousands of his brethren.  This is another version of the Abraham and Isaac story, entitled “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”. 

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”—may we learn what these words mean.