abraham, isaac, angel, donkey, ram (details)

It's not in the lectionary this week, but the Abraham/Isaac saga has the feel of those "deathly encounters with God" that are scattered in the Pentetuch. My painting has a folk quality about it: all the story's particulars are present - the donkey they came in on, the father, the son, the restraining angel, and the ram to be substituted. The fire's already blazing.
How must it have gone?
Abe: I want you to hold still while I tie you up. Thanks for helping me with the fire.
Izzy: What? You were going to do this all along! No way.
Abe: Come on. It'll make God happy.
Izzy: You're looped. I'm outta here.
The reality of two human beings tells me it must have been closer to this. That Isaac, no matter how pious, no matter how much a daddy's boy, must have been put out by this. Perhaps it's our need for clean pieties that makes us imagine it more like this.
Abe: Hold still while I tie you up on these sticks.
Isaac: Sure dad. Say hello to mom.
After all we are trained to think of faith as going along with authority. Following orders. Don't talk back. Go over the trenches and charge.
The Bible has a more contentious working out of faith though. David faces off with Goliath against orders. Elijah and the prophets strike back against the authorities as expressions of their faith. Jonah argues with God, as does Job. All in faith.
Even Abraham, already accounted as righteous for his faith, doesn't really need this further test. Paul writes it as an act of faith. That Abraham considered that God, the creator, could raise the dead and call into existence what didn't exist - and so Abraham was cool with sacrificing his son.
Kierkegaard finds this sacrifice, its very absurdity, the crux of faith. This story brings him into his assertion that faith has an absurdist side. That the absurdity of existence provides the augur where we prove our faith. Something like that.
The person who's really being asked to have faith here though is Isaac. He's the only one whose life is on the line. Or maybe the Faith's God's - whose plan for human salvation is on the line. Certainly what Abraham was doing was common practice among middle eastern peoples of that time. Abraham might of been thinking, "why's God asking me to do what all the other god's would ask?" Perhaps Abraham needed a sign of how this God, with whom he'd covenanted in Genesis 15:6, was different from the gods of the nations.
The angel's intervention says, "no more of this. We're not doing things this way anymore." The story read this way becomes an anti-authoritarian parable. We are breaking with the authority of tradition here, the way things have always been done, and the authority of culture, the power of doing what everyone else does. Abraham is so faithful that he would worship YHWH like everyone else worships their gods - and perhaps this is the test here, and Abraham shows himself to be just like anyone else. He's at least willing to go as far as the nations would go. But God says, "no." We're not going to do things like that anymore. No more of this top down stuff. No more will you assume that I yahweh want what the other gods want, or that I yahweh can be approached like any other god. The faith that you have with me and that I show to you is face to face, not top down.
And so Jesus calls us as a servant. He is lord, but he is servant of all. And he calls us to sacrifice our pretensions to lordship. To break away from authoritarian structures.
The world loves authority. Counter cultures are demonized. The gods of patriotism and market forces demand that we comply: put a pin on our lapel and let investment banks graze on the earth's people without restraint. But the righteousness of God, which judges a nation on how its weakest members (psalm 41, and other places) are treated, is different. In scripture we read that God's wrath is reserved for the most authoritarian of regimes. Regimes that quell dissent, that demand blind allegiance, that use violence to have their way. Authoritarianism would sacrifice the youth, the future, and the promise of God.
Here, in this story, we see God leading Abraham to a different kind of faith. Not an absurdist faith, or a "following orders" kind of faith, but a faith that approaches God as a partner.