24.09.06 Michael Abraham and Isaac or the Strange Divine Bias Toward Children
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The
story of the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham is what feminist
scholar Phyllis Trible calls a ‘text of terror’. It is a story
which tells us of a man who is so obsessed by his religious beliefs
that he is prepared to kill his only son in sacrifice according to
what he believes to be the command of his God. Abraham is worse than
a suicide bomber. He is not prepared to sacrifice his own life, and
that of strangers, to his terrible faith; no he believes God requires
his much beloved son be killed, the son for whom he and Sarah had
waited so long and treasured above all things.
It is hard to imagine the terror, to say nothing of the incomprehension, that Isaac must have felt when his father tied him on the altar and raised a knife to kill him. It is even harder to imagine what he told his wife Sarah about the incident when he eventually returned home with Isaac physically but surely not mentally unscarred. And yet this story is one of the foundational stories in the history of the Abrahamic faiths, embraced for its religious power by Jews and Muslims as well as Christians.
Those who believe that religion is a force for ill rather than good in the world - Richard Holloway for example or Dan Brown - will find in this text a powerful exemplar of their conviction that all religions are bad and that monotheism may be the worst of them all. For Holloway Abraham is a crazed child killer who is little better than the monster portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the Silence of the Lambs.
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard had a different reading of it. For the great Dane the passage poses the central conundrum in human life - do we pursue what we understand to be the good, or the command of God, regardless of the consequences or do we base our actions, as the English philosopher John Stuart Mill proposed, on our judgement of the consequences.
To put this another way for Kierkegaard the story of Abraham and Isaac poses the question is an action or a practice good because God makes it so or do we only know about its goodness from its effects. If the latter then what need have we of God, since we can know and pursue the good without God.
Clearly the story indicates that the good is not obvious or self-evident. Only those who take a leap of faith are able, like Abraham, to pursue the command of God wherever it leads. And only the faithful will understand that their attempts to pursue the good do not depend on their own efforts or their own wisdom but on the incomprehensible power and providence of God.
There is a central truth in what Kierkegaard tells us of this story. We are encouraged by our civilisation to imagine that when we are in control of our lives, and base our actions and choices on our careful estimates of their consequences, that we are pursuing the good as God intends. But we live in a culture which is so devoted to the statistical estimation of consequences that no good cannot be sacrificed on the altar of consequentialist or cost benefit sums.
A good example of the effects of these sums was raised by Rowan Williams last week when he called for the banning of advertisements aimed at under 12s on TV and elsewhere. They have already done this in Sweden but the UK corporate response is the predictable one that it is an unjustifiable infringement on their freedom to market and sell their products. The difficulty with this argument is that this freedom comes at the price of the loss of freedom of those whose desires are shaped by the incredibly powerful medium of modern advertising, a medium which young children especially just do not have the rational faculties to easily resist.
The Children’s Society last week launched an inquiry into the state of childhood in Britain arguing that there is growing evidence of mental unease and stress among young people as a consequence of commercial pressures, pressures from constant school tests, from a loss of parenting time as both parents increasingly work outside the home, and from family breakdown. It seems the simple pleasures of earlier childhoods - family meals, walks in the park and the countryside, games of tag, fairy stories - are increasingly displaced by electronic entertainment and other kinds of commercialised activities.
There are other losses of freedom for children. The constant media attention to child molestors and killers creates fear in many parents who will not let their children out on their own. Equally undersupervised children in some parts of our cities roam the streets looking for trouble - like the children who stole three bicycle wheels and a saddle off our bikes a few nights ago. Cars are also a cause of a loss of freedom. I can remember going off cycling on my own down into the hinterland of London in Kent and cycling for miles with a friend without feeling threatened by speeding cars in the 1960s. Nowawadays it is rare to go on a bike journey on road where speeding cars or trucks do not come too close or a taxi driver or a gang of teenagers do not hurl abuse. Some drivers these days increasingly view cycling as a blood sport, and not the least Jeremy Clarkson and his mates, one of whom nearly killed himself indulging in extreme speed earlier this week.
And at this point do we not turn full circle. The terrifying story of Abraham and Isaac is ultimately a story about the contest between the religion of Israel and the other religions in the ancient near east where human sacrifice, and child sacrifices were the norm. Abraham is represented in comparison to these other religious peoples as just as devoted as they to his God for he is prepared to follow the command of God where ever it takes him. But when the occasion approaches God provides an alternative sacrifice and saves the child.
As a culture we are increasingly sacrificing social peace and the flourishing of the next generations on the altar of the market and consumerism. The moloch of our day - what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the infection of trade - is no less an idol than the moloch of Abraham’s time but its demands are just as insidious, though its sacrifices less evidently bloody.
In a sense then this great story has the same function in the formation of those who hear it as the fairy tale in the formation of the child. Tales of abusive adults, dark desires, evil deeds, horrendous monsters, and of the courage and persistence in goodness which are required to resist them have an enduring effect in the formation of children, as Bruno Bettleheim argues in his Uses of Enchantment. The world of the fairy tale is one in which conventional values and virtues are constantly held up to challenge and scrutiny and where heroic deeds in the face of terror are often performed by the most unlikely kinds of heroes.
Abraham too is an unlikely hero, and in this story he looks more like a monster. But the story ultimately is a tale of providence overcoming wickedness, of harmful desire being reordered by divine compassion and of the love of a father for his child being ultimately vindicated as divinely blessed.
Our Gospel this morning also gives us a powerful key to the meanings that are hidden beneath the surface of the story. The disciples are arguing about power and leadership - something which is common in groups of every kind and not least among those who exercise political rule. And Christ tells them that not only are those who rule to act like servants, rather than to use their governorship to coerce their fellows. And he then puts a child on his knee and suggests that whoever welcomes a child welcomes God into their lives.
When we first came to Edinburgh from Malaysia in 1989 it was the most child unfriendly place we had lived in. I well remember one of our children saying to us - why is it that adults only talk to children here when they want to tell them off. This was a highly observant comment from someone who had spent much of their childhood in a culture where children were constantly welcomed into adult society - in conversation, at evenings out, and in restaurants. Things have improved somewhat since then but there can be no question that the threats to childhood in our culture are still very real and that they are the reverse side of Christ’s saying. Just as those who welcome children welcome God into their lives, so those who sacrifice the welfare of children to commercial profit and the desire for wealth are acting out their atheism and devotion to idols other than God.
If the world were able to make the welfare of children the central issue in all its decisions it would come closer to the Kingdom of heaven than to Babylon even if it did not acknowledge Christ as Lord. It would also commit its citizens to a different vision of the future since it is the children who will literally inherit the earth and who ought to be given the opportunity to live on a planet as rich in species and as stable in climate as the one they were born into.
I heard about a wonderful example of this at the AGM of Traidcraft in London, the original fair trade organisation and of which I am a trustee. The Chief Executive of the PLC, Paul Chandler, told how in a visit to a jute handicrafts project in Dakka, India, he asked the mostly women workers what difference thirty years of fair trading with Traidcraft had made to their lives. They were after all still living in very simple huts with very little of the comforts and daily conveniences we enjoy in our homes. And they said to him that the difference regular payments for their handicrafts had made was that they had been able to afford school fees and because of that they had been able to get their children an education and get them out of poverty and now their children had real jobs and were helping to support their parents. Traidcraft is massively expandfing its range of products – a lot of an average weekly shop can now be bought online from Traidcraft – and it is also facing growing competition from other fair traders like Nestle and Tescos. Traidcraft is in fair trade because it is a Christian response to poverty and its relationships with its producers are therefore long term and sustainable and it is already having multigenerational effects on the children of fair trade producers.
St James too is a place where our shared prioritization of our children is making a difference. The greatest change that I have seen in St James in the last 15 years is more than anything else the welcome given to children and their central place in the life of the church. In giving children A Welcome At the Centre - to recall the words of my favourite LDL song - we are indeed modelling the servant leadership of Christ. Just as the story of Abraham ultimately resists the child sacrifice of the old religions, and Christ in his style of leadership resisted the imperious power of Rome, and the sacrifices it visited on his people, so when we put children at the centre we model our community on Christ’s example and resist the atheism of a materialist society.