Another Way

There’s nothing quite like marking the end of maternity leave with a story like child sacrifice. Who said God doesn’t have a sense of humour?

But really, it’s hard to see anything humorous about our scripture today. At face value, there’s no way to save it. Many scholars have insisted this be the case — because we’re ultimately left with the horror of a God who tests her beloved, her chosen one, through the way of violence. And not just any violence — the worst kind.

This passage tends to be one of the stories pointed at to justify the thought that the God of the New Testament is warm and fuzzy, and the God of the Old is angry and wrathful. But the reason we’ve come up with a kind of Jekyll and Hyde deity is because we forget that the text is never quite as it appears. There are layers of meaning and context behind each and every word — layers that ancient ears would have been attuned to in ways unfamiliar to our modern ones.

So let’s set the scene.

We’re in the ancient Near East — somewhere around the twelfth or eleventh century before the Common Era. In this world, they worshipped different gods that operated almost entirely on transaction. They would provide, as long as the people gave something costly. And the greater the cost, the better the return. Which is where child sacrifice came into the picture. Giving up the most precious thing imaginable to receive something just as precious back. Think rain in a time of drought. Think healing in a time of illness. Think protection in a time of genocide.

So when God asks Abraham for his only son — the one he loves — to be sacrificed, Abraham wouldn’t have been as perturbed as we might think. But this doesn’t mean he’d be emotionless. He travels three days with his son, holding the weight of Isaac’s fate in his mind and in his heart. A grief no doubt compounded by the fact that Abraham had already lost one son when Sarah asked for Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, to be sent away — as we heard last week. And a grief that would surely be asking: how on earth would God fulfil God’s covenantal promise that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars, if he kills the very thing that makes that promise possible?

And this is where scratching just beneath the surface of our text is necessary.

Our scripture uses the Hebrew word nissah — what we translate as “test.” And nissah is not the kind of test where an examiner waits with a pen hovering over a mark sheet. It is more like the proving of something. The drawing out of what was already there. And to understand what is being drawn out, we need to know who Abraham is.

He is old. Journey-worn. He has already left his homeland at God’s call, wandered, doubted, bargained with God over the fate of entire cities. He and Sarah have waited decades for the child they were promised — Isaac, whose very name means laughter. Not the easy laughter of contentment, but like pregnancy at old age, the laughter that rises when the impossible is birthed. He is not just a son but the living proof that God keeps promises. The embodied covenant. The impossible made flesh.

And through it all, we’ve known this man intimately. Across his story, Abraham has not been a man of silent compliance. We know what he thinks, what he fears, what he wants. Which makes his silence here all the more striking — as though something in him already knows he is no longer the subject of this story, but its catalyst. The means by which something far larger is being drawn out.

The Jewish theologian Jon Levenson argues this nissah is doing something deeply subversive. God is entering the brutal logic of a world where every other god demanded child sacrifice — taking Abraham all the way to the edge of that world’s most devastating ritual, to the very place every other ancient deity would have let the knife fall — and then dismantles it from the inside. And we know this is what’s at play because what follows this story in Jeremiah, in Leviticus, in Deuteronomy, is that God denounces child sacrifice in the strongest possible terms.

And so, as much as this is the nissah of Abraham at face value, it is really about something else entirely. It is not only about how God keeps God’s promises, but whether the God of Abraham is like every other god. And the answer, it turns out, is no.

This God doesn’t hover high above the sky, watching violence play out in woeful ambivalence with a thirst for sacrifice. This God rolls up her sleeves and enters our humanity, our chaos, our darkness and our violence, and sets to work at unravelling it from the inside. This is the way God keeps God’s covenant with her people. And perhaps, just like the way we are invited to read this story, we might have to scratch just beneath the surface to see this truth all around us too.

Because just like the gods that demanded violence around Abraham, we too are surrounded by our own demanding gods. They go by different names now — the algorithm, the news cycle, the political theatre, the never-ending rat race — but their appetite is identical. They may not be asking for our child on the stake, but they are demanding things nearly, if not just, as precious: our humanity, our joy, our peace, our attention, and worst of all, our belief that there might be any such thing as a God who would meet us in our darkness.

And it’s easy to worship these gods because they’re enticing. They offer easy answers in a complicated world. They offer scapegoats so we don’t have to reckon with our own complicity. And they name the truth of the matter: that violence has not only continued but seems to be increasing. In other words, they point to the fear and the reality that the knife is always falling.

But our text is not asking us to pretend that all is well and good — that God sorted the whole human predicament with a ram thousands of years ago. Because even after God provided the ram, child sacrifice continued in the ancient Middle East, and still takes place in our time and place. We just call it different things now — like war, like detention centres, like the incarceration of Aboriginal children.

And yet, God is always at work subverting our death mechanisms. But just like our text, we might need to scratch just beneath the surface.

Just last week, a group of local leaders were invited to gather in Seddon. Different backgrounds, different cultures, different work, different faith traditions. Brought together to ask a question that feels almost naive against the political theatre that relies on our fear and helplessness: what becomes possible when communities, churches and organisations stop waiting for the right government and start organising toward the common good ourselves?

What they were exploring is something that already exists in Sydney, in Geelong, and in Queensland — a model called a community alliance. Not a protest movement, not a political party, not another committee. But an intentional gathering of organisations — unions, schools, faith communities, not-for-profits — who come together in story and in friendship, pool their limited power, and direct it together toward the issues that matter most.

These alliances across Australia have been doing this for years, winning things that no single organisation could have won alone. In one alliance, they looked at an empty plot of land — land that was going to be lining an investor’s pocket — and they pressured and persisted with their local government until it became desperately needed affordable housing their community was crying out for. In other words, they were able to draw out new life where the system, and the powers that be, had decided there was none left to give.

A story that didn’t make the news. A story that wouldn’t be broadcast in our algorithms. A story that wasn’t played out in our political theatre. Because perhaps what’s more frightening than our broken societal systems is the truth that another way is always possible.

Melbourne doesn’t have an alliance yet. But last week, in a room in Seddon, something began.

And one woman in that room named what we were all feeling: that she hadn’t felt this hopeful in years. Not because the problems had been solved or the solution was easy. Not because these alliances would unanimously agree or address all the issues in the community. But because she heard stories of change from across this country — stories of people facing similar pressures who had refused to accept them — and she looked around the room and saw diverse local leaders who may never have spoken with one another otherwise, showing up, sharing stories, sharing food, and, perhaps most audaciously, sharing laughter.

Not the easy laughter of contentment. But the laughter that rises when the impossible is just about to be birthed.

And somewhere in all of that, the helplessness lifted. People who had looked at everything designed to make them despair chose — stubbornly, inconveniently, beautifully — to organise instead.

She called it hope. I called it the God of Abraham — the same God who entered the logic of a world that demanded bloodshed, and provided another way. Slipping uninvited into the places where death has made itself at home. Refusing to let that be the last word.

This is who God has always been — not just in the New Testament but from the beginning of time. From when Spirit hovered over the dark waters before a single word of creation had been spoken. From Sarah’s barren womb, to Hagar seen in the wilderness, to Miriam’s tambourine on the other side of the sea. From the pit they threw Joseph into and called it the end, to Esther walking uninvited into the halls of power, to Ruth building a lineage out of loyalty and loss. So that when we get to the New Testament, these stories of death subversion have already been baked into what God ultimately does with Jesus on the cross — turning the powers of this world’s most efficient death mechanism inside out, so that it becomes the place where the impossible is made flesh.

So.

What is causing you and your loved ones despair? Where can you see God at work? And, most importantly, how might God be calling you to be the subversion?

Because in a world where the knife is always falling, the embodied covenant, the impossible made flesh, means God is always providing another way.