on sacrifice

When, at our gathering of Bethany Bible School last month, I asked for insights from the students on the meaning of “sacrifice” as it appears in 1 John 4:10, one old man referred me to the story of Abraham offering Isaac (Gen 22:1-19). And so it happened that I began to ponder that story once again.

The old man’s point, I think, was that “sacrifice” is an act of “love”—the main theme of the 1 John text we were studying. That, of course, is also how the author put it there: “Not that we loved God but that God loved us, and sent his only Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).

Many theologians in the West, both professional and lay, would dispute the assumption that sacrifice is an expression of love, that God’s sending of the Son to his slaughter proves not God’s love but God’s cruel detachment. However one interprets the Aqedah, “the binding of Isaac” from Genesis 22, on its own merits, the New Testament’s interpretation of that story—of which the 1 John text may be one example—is a classic example of employing a human story to speak of the mysteries of God. In other words, the story of Abraham offering up his “only son, Isaac, whom [he] loves” became for the New Testament authors a window on the Heavenly Father who offered up his “only begotten Son” for a sinful world. For the New Testament authors, the story of Abraham and Isaac illuminated the story of Jesus, the one whom they “declared to be the Son of God” (Rom 1:4).

The key, of course, is that the New Testament’s declaration of “the Son” does not imply his distance but his closeness to the Father—a closeness so close so as to reveal that they were really One Person. Yet, when that One should appear in flesh—a new realm for the One who is not a human being—he cannot but acquire another human title which differentiates him from the experience of him in the realm of pure Spirit. That title, of flesh married to Spirit within God, is “the Son”.

Once, therefore, the Son is understood, not from the perspective of pure flesh (“from a human point-of-view”) (2 Cor 5:16) but from flesh-in-Spirit, the Son ceases to be a pure object of slaughter, something acted upon by someone else. The Son becomes, rather, both Subject and Object, One who gives himself to the world of flesh. The Son is not simply the human Jesus, sent to his death by Another; the Son is Jesus the “Christ”, the one “in” whom “God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). The “Father” is not detached; the “Father” is in the “Son.”

From the perspective of closeness, therefore, one also begins to appreciate the metaphor of Abraham and Isaac, a father and his son, for the Father and the Son. For, when we read that Abraham heard the word to “take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love . . . and offer him there as a burnt offering . . .” (Gen 22:2), we remember, from knowing the whole story, that this Isaac was the same son of his old age, the one promised him with his wife Sarah before they as yet had any heir. It was this Isaac for whom they waited and scarcely dared to hope, this Isaac who, when announced by angels, was greeted with the laughter of incredulity (Gen 17:17; 18:12). It was this Isaac who, when born, actualized the promise of God that Abraham might become the father of many nations, his descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky (Gen 15:5). This is the Isaac whom God now says to sacrifice, he the long-awaited promise now given up.

It is from this perspective--the story of a human father Abraham giving up his human son Isaac--that 1 John 4 has drawn its interpretation of God in human flesh in Jesus the Christ. In other words, it is not from the characterization of God at the outset of Genesis 22--the God who simply "tests" and commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a "burnt offering"--that the author of 1 John has found inspiration; it is from Abraham's, the father's, "sacrifice" of his "only son, whom he loved." 1 John's inspiration, moreover, comes not specifically from the father Abraham, that is, in isolation, nor from the son Isaac, but from the "sacrifice"--with all its intense relational implications. Abraham the father with Isaac the son approaches, becomes the best available analogy for God in Christ, because the story so vividly "counts the cost" of "offering up", of "sacrifice" (Lk 14:28). Whatever Abraham's reasons for heeding the call to offer Isaac, or however obvious it may seem that Abraham's will to kill Isaac was to deny his love for him, the background to the text--the personal history of father and son and all the implications of their relationship--and the text itself illustrates the complexities, the hardships, the suffering inherent to love. Precisely because Abraham "loved" Isaac is their story a story of sacrifice. Only that which is loved is truly "offered up".

Because the story of Abraham and Isaac is, therefore, a true offering, it invites, for those who know it, comparison with another story of authentic love. Considering the giving up of the son of promise, the one through whom the world was promised to Abraham, we glimpse the depth of the love of the God who "sent his only Son into the world . . . to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins" (1 Jn 4:9-10). We see, that is, that God gave up God's own Self-identification. Like Abraham who gave up his God-promised dreams for posterity in offering his son, so God gave Godself in the person of the Son. The Spirit takes on flesh. The Source of life enters death. The Light confronts the darkness. The blessed becomes the cursed (Gal 3:13). The Righteous One is made to be sin (2 Cor 5:21). In the Son, God denies Godself--everything, that is, but his love. "So that we might live through him" (1 Jn 4:9).

-Joe

a satisfactory word

It was a model of its kind, the most brilliant of scriptural insights: attentive to the narrative, creative, culturally-relevant, pastoral, transformative.

Pastor Ntapo stood at the front with five other students, reporting on what their respective small groups had discussed in this August session of Bethany Bible School. The text: 1 Samuel 28:8-19.

I had chosen the text because it was a potentially explosive text for our students' real-life context. Saul, in a time of crisis as leader of the people Israel, goes against the will of God to seek advice from the dead through a diviner, or a sangoma (Zulu), an igqirha (Xhosa). He disguised himself and went by night to a woman who could call up the spirits of the dead. Against her own wishes--"you know what Saul has done, how he cut off from the land all the wizards and diviners"--she agrees to call up for Saul the one whom he names. Saul is seeking the counsel of his old prophet, now dead, Samuel.

The woman, of course, succeeds in calling up Samuel. She lets out a great cry when she sees him, for she recognizes him as the one who in life was associated with Saul--the very one who has cut off her kind from the land. "Why have you deceived me--you are Saul", she says. Saul, now identified for the first time in the text as "'the king", encourages her to carry on. "Do not fear; what do you see?"

From what she saw, Pastor Ntapo reported on what he sees. "First," he said, "we see that Samuel was wrapped in a robe. From that we take that Samuel was a priest. This shows that one is identified in death by what he was in life. If you were a tsotsi [a gangster, a criminal], you would come back in tsotsi's clothes. This goes to show that the dead don't need anything from us. They are already clothed, so they don't need us to give them a blanket."

I remembered what Pastor Ntapo had explained to me many months earlier. When a Xhosa person sees, much like the woman saw Samuel, "an old man" in his/her dreams, one of the most common cultural assumptions is that the dead ancestor is cold. He is appearing now to his living descendants to serve notice of his discomfort. In response, the living will slaughter a goat for the dead and leave its coat on the floor beside the bed; there the ancestor will sleep in the warmth of the goatskin. But, as the text peers into the spiritual world, it sees that such costly sacrifices are unnecessary, for the dead person is yet provided for in the clothes which he donned in life; he has no need of more. Since the dead person has no need of more, the old cultural assumption is a lie. On the contrary, the dead want to rest as they are, just as Samuel scolded Saul, "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" Consequently, it is for that reason also that Pastor Ntapo does not attribute visitations to the living from the ancestral spirits to the ancestors themselves. Rather, they are "from Satan", pictures of loved ones sent by the Deceiver in order to take sacrifices for himself.

"That is a blue lie," the pastor has said to me on mulitple occasions. "You will find that whenever they do that [sacrifice in response to such a vision], a death will soon follow." People may sacrifice innocently, out of ignorance and even genuine concern for their dead, but the Evil One only wants to take more. Satan will never be satisfied.

God, on the other hand, has given us his word, and God is satisfied in it. Thanks be to God for interpreters like Pastor Ntapo who open that clear word for others in order that it might become flesh in the lives of God's people.

-Joe

how great the father's love: lot and the visitors revisited

"According to the text, is Lot a righteous man or not?"

This was one of the questions we asked students at our Bible school's oral examinations last month.

Not unlike our initial study of the text together last February, most answered in the affirmative: Lot was righteous.

Why?

"God saw him among all the people in Sodom", said one old man.

That seeing, within such a great sea of humanity, must attest to something of Lot's righteousness.

"Lot would do anything to protect his visitors," said another man. "He proved he was righteous by giving his daughters in place of the two men to the men of Sodom."

This answer took me aback a bit, for it is the opposite of what I had argued in the original lesson. Yet this man did make a compelling association in support of his position: Lot's offer of his daughters was like that of Abraham to Isaac, the one whom the story in Genesis 22 introduces as "your only son, whom you love." Thus, rather than an act betraying the daughters' worthlessness in their father's eyes, Lot's offering was likewise of the "beloved".

Another woman was less convincing. In her judgment also, Lot was righteous. However, when pressed, she, unlike other students, did not modify her stance to admit that Lot may have been wrong at least in his willingness "to bring out" his daughters to evil men.

"Lot knew that God was going to rescue him and his family anyway. That is why he offered his daughters."

Although her reasoning is not unlike that which the author of Hebrews offers up with regard--again--to Abraham when he "offered up Isaac" because he "considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead", it elicits one critical objection.

"If he knew," said I, "why then did he not simply give the men his visitors?"

Though through hesitation, her answer amounted to the belief that visitors are more important than daughters--actually, than anyone. That is why Lot would not think of bringing them out.

It is true that visitors are particularly vulnerable people; they can navigate neither the space nor the conventions of a place as its residents, and are therefore at the mercy of the residents. This is, in fact, Lot's primary claim to righteousness in the text: he, as a resident alien among resident Sodomites, alone shows hospitality to the visitors who come to the gates of the city.

Yet there is something else, I believe, that the text invites us to consider.

Guests are not only those who come, but those who are. Long before the two angels arrived in Sodom, Lot the father had charge of guests, whether he deemed them so or not. That he would bring them--his daughters--out for rape is not as much a thing exposed by Lot's righteous impulse to protect those who have come as it exposes his failure to care for those who are daily in his midst.

Lot's dilemma may also reveal an African caveat in the text. Izithunywa, the Xhosa word for messengers--the two angels who come to Sodom--often stands in the context of mediums who divine causes for human misfortune via spiritual messengers, the ancestors. And, not unlike the daughters and the men who have come under the shelter of Lot's roof, the spirits of the dead "compete" with one's living dependents for the attention of present-day Lots, those African fathers and mothers heading households.

"This is the way of keeping us poor," says a young, Xhosa pastor.

How? In a context of poverty, people cannot afford to hold extravagant, expensive feasts in honor of deceased elders (a typical response if one dreams of a given ancestor). Already there is not enough to support the daily, adequate nourishment, not to mention education, of many children.

"Where will that money come from?" says the pastor. "Yet you will find that there is always money for that thing."

There are always children to sacrifice for the sake of important visitors.

"So what do you think Jesus would have done if he were Lot? we asked the students.

"I think he would have offered himself", one brother replied.

How great this Father's love for us, his children.

Therein lies the righteousness in the text.

-Joe

Texts referred to or quoted in this entry: Gen 19:1-14; Gen 22:2; Heb. 11:17-19; 1 Jn 3:1