In our readings over the last couple of weeks, we have been hearing about some of the challenges of being a disciple of Jesus. Sometimes they have not made for easy reading.
Let’s just recap for a moment. Jesus sends out his disciples with no money in their purses and no spare clothes in their bags… not least because he sends them out without bags. He tells them that they will be handed over to councils and flogged in synagogues, dragged before kings and governors, disowned by their families, hated by all. He concludes by saying that, in order to find life, they will need to be prepared to lose their lives. Challenging words indeed…
But it was ever thus. Jesus’s disciples would have known the stories of the Hebrew Bible very well, stories of struggles for survival, of wandering in the wilderness, of imprisonment, slavery, exile. Stories of corrupt kings and prophets who go unlistened-to. Stories of brave, faithful women and men, who choose to follow God through thick and thin, despite the challenges. Stories of women and men like Sarah and Abraham, who hear God’s call and respond in faith, even though it takes them far from their homes, even though it imposes on them an itinerant and uncertain existence, even though – as we heard today – God seems at times to be testing them in the most brutal way imaginable.
In our first reading, we hear that God tested Abraham. We are not told why God decides to do this. Abraham has been faithful to God’s call over many years, and has, in his old age, received his reward, a son, the beginning of the fulfilment of God’s promise that Abraham will be the father of a great nation, and that, through him, all the families of the earth will be blessed. In the passage we heard last week, in which Abraham banishes Ishmael, the son borne to him by his servant Hagar, God makes it clear that it is through Isaac’s line that Abraham will become the father of a great nation. This is God’s promise…
So it is unthinkable – as well as cruel and inhumane – that God would, apparently at random, tell Abraham to take Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering, and this before he has had children of his own, before the promised line of Abraham has been established. It is equally unthinkable that Abraham would simply acquiesce, that he would take wood and the wherewithal to make a fire, a knife and his only son, his beloved son, and head for the mountains to do as the Lord commands. And yet this is – we are told – what happens. What on earth could be going on here? What are we to make of this story?
On the one hand, this story could be read as pointing to the need for absolute obedience to God. If God says ‘jump’, you ask ‘how high?’. Except that we have just been shown that this kind of blind acceptance of God’s will is not really Abraham’s style. In chapter 18 of the book of Genesis, we see him arguing with God over God’s planned destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, pleading with God to reconsider, if just a handful of righteous people can be found there. Is Abraham, who pleaded with God for the salvation of strangers, unwilling or unable to do the same in the case of his son, his only son, whom he loves? Surely not…
For a Christian, it is almost impossible to hear the story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac without thinking of Jesus. As soon as we hear the phrase ‘only son […] whom you love’, we are reminded that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3.16). And the parallels do not end there. Three times, in our Old Testament passage, Abraham says ‘Here I am’, reminding us of Mary who gives her assent to the bearing of God’s Son by saying ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord’ (Luke 1.38). And Abraham’s confident assertion that ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering’ recalls John the Baptist’s recognition of Jesus, at the start of John’s Gospel: ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1.29).
Isaac, the beloved son, born miraculously to a mother well past childbearing age, is offered as a sacrificial lamb, but saved at the very last moment by divine intervention, and thus points us to Jesus, the beloved Son of God, born miraculously to a young woman still a virgin, who is offered as a sacrificial lamb and who – unlike Isaac – does die, but is raised by the Father to eternal life, opening up the possibility of salvation also to people like us….
Isaac, like Jesus, is a gift. Long after Abraham and Sarah have given up all hope of having a child of their own, he is born, a gift of God, a reward for the obedience that Abraham has already demonstrated and a promise – a promise for all the nations of the world, and not only those directly descended from Abraham – a promise that stretches across generations and comes to fulfilment not in a boy bound and laid on an altar, but in a man nailed to a cross… a cross that will not be the end of the story, any more than Isaac’s putative pyre will be.
Isaac, like Jesus, is a gift. And this passage might perhaps be read as a sort of parable about how we use the gifts that God gives us. God tests Abraham. Abraham is free to respond as he sees fit: free to say no, to resist; free to question, to bargain (as he had done on behalf of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah); free, too, to obey, to show that he is prepared to do the unthinkable, to return the son whom he had received as a gift from God as a gift to God.
Abraham uses his freedom well and is rewarded, but the book of Genesis has demonstrated from the very beginning that freedom comes with a risk… the risk of making bad choices. Adam and Eve also receive a gift from God – a garden of abundance, containing all they need and more – and yet they use their freedom to throw that gift back in God’s face and their choice results in exile and loss for themselves and their descendants.
Abraham’s faithfulness stands, in the book of Genesis, as a sort out counterweight to the disobedience of Adam and Eve; and the peoples of the earth, banished from Eden, have God’s blessing restored to them because, in Abraham’s freedom, he chooses the path of obedience and trust.
All of which brings us to our Gospel reading, which comes right at the end of chapter 10 of Matthew’s Gospel and at the culmination of the instructions, exhortations, and dire warnings that we have heard Jesus sharing with his disciples over the last few weeks as a prelude to sending them out to teach and heal and to proclaim the kingdom in his name.
‘Whoever welcomes you, welcomes me’, Jesus tells the twelve, ‘and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me’. In the light of the passage from Genesis that we have been exploring this morning, we might rephase this: ‘Whoever receives you as a gift from God also receives me, God’s ultimate gift to humankind’.
Abraham, of course, knew all about welcome. We heard, two weeks ago, about how he welcomed the divine messengers sent to bring him news of Sarah’s pregnancy, washing their feet before bringing them bread to eat – and, yes, that too sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it? The writer of the letter to the Hebrews draws out the implications of this for us: ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some – that is, Abraham and Sarah – have entertained angels without knowing it’ (Hebrews 13.2). Being a disciple is (or can be) challenging. Sometimes we may even feel as if we are being tested. But the story of Abraham and Jesus’s words in our Gospel reading for today remind us that, in the face of challenge, we are called, above all, to love… to love and to welcome in God’s name, looking for God’s good gifts in all those whom we encounter, recognising and receiving God’s gifts for ourselves, and using them in God’s service.