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On Obedience and Sacrifice
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 26, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 22:1-18 Mark 9:2-9
What monsters would we be were we not to rail against the God who tests, even as we bow down before the same God who provides? We live, those of us who struggle to believe, before evidence of these two truths by day and have wrestled beneath the weight of the violent lie blind obedience and innocent sacrifice have underwritten in the night watches. To wit: have any of us wakened lately to a morning that does not herald this unholy alliance--of obedience and sacrifice--embodied in a distant land by soldiers and suicide bombers alike; or played out down the avenue amid the crossfire of drugs and race; or endured behind the closed doors of a covenant gone awry? So we beseech the God who sacrificed his Son, his only Son, his beloved for our redemption from the very violence by which we were redeemed. Intervene, we pray, as once You intervened to spare the innocent on whose seed the future depended no less than on our sons and daughters. Intercede, we plead, as You interceded once for all in Him who is the Lamb of God, the Son sacrificed to save us from whatever sin we cannot quit. This may be, in part, the angle of vision we bring to our text today, a text known as the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. This is not, however, the angle evident in Benjamin Britten’s editing and consequent setting of the 15th century Chester Play we are about to hear. “A distinctive ‘fifth-less’ arpeggio begins Canticle II,” writes medieval scholar Allen Frantzen, “prefacing God’s first words to Abraham, and God’s voice takes the form of voices moving in unison, or octaves.” What is not obvious to those hearing Britten’s libretto apart from it source is that Britten omitted almost every line from the miracle play that speaks of Isaac’s pathos. In other words, Britten’s angle of vision slants the canticle toward the suffering of Abraham engendered by his obedience. “Britten’s reshaping of the [story] is clear,” Frantzen goes on to say, “in his exploitation of musical language. Abraham’s assent [to God’s command] begins on the same note as that on which God’s speech ends, growing in volume and rising powerfully in pitch. In the passage in which Abraham tells Isaac he must die and Isaac pleads for his life, Abraham’s vocal lines are firm, strong, and ascending, while Isaac’s lines descend in broken, almost stuttering fashion….” It has been said that Britten “seemed to be amused by Isaac’s attempt to wriggle out of what is coming.” He wrote to a friend “I don’t think there will be a dry eye in the place,” anticipating tears not for Isaac but for Abraham. From the angle of Britten’s Canticle which lauds Abraham’s obedience, we see faith through the lens of a community reconciled to God by the death of a scapegoat, be it the ram in the thicket or Christ on the cross. God provides and we have only to be obedient, no matter the carnage. What follows from this angle is a community that glorifies and cannot critique the innocent sacrifice which issues from obedience, a community that values the very sacrifice which Britten’s later War Requiem—set to the poems of Wilfred Owen--rejects. Written just four months before he is killed at the front in 1918, Owen’s angle of vision on the Akedah becomes the libretto that alters Britten’s own hearing: “Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,/A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead./But the old man would not so, but slew his son,/And half the seed of Europe, one by one.” Owen’s critique of prideful obedience and its bloody consequences is surely the angle of vision missed by the communities that would claim Christ’s name. To be sure, it is a reading of the text that sees prefigured in both Abraham’s obedience and Isaac’s innocent suffering the Passion of God’s Son, God’s only Son, the beloved. But here we must listen as if we have never before heard this tale. For whereas in ancient Israel the Akedah, some say, was told to signal not the glorification but the prohibition of the sacrifice of the first born son to Israel’s God—an anti-sacrificial tale--so also may we hear prefigured in Abraham and Isaac the anti-sacrificial death, once for all, of God’s son, God’s only Son, the beloved. Christ dies “not as a sacrifice,” writes philosopher and theologian Rene Girard, “but in order that there may be no more sacrifices.” Christ’s Passion incarnates in his flesh the Word of God [which declares]: ‘I wish for mercy, not sacrifices.’ “Forgive them” he says from the cross, seeking not vengeance but mercy for his executioners. “In the Passion,” Girard says, “the Christ of the Gospels dies against sacrifice, and through his death [makes] sacrifice unworkable, at least in the long run, bringing sacrificial culture to an end.” Yet if this week has revealed anything, it is that sacrificial cultures, our own included, do not die, will not die without a fight! Moreover in the throws of death they take with them more victims than our minds can comprehend. So how, in the meantime, are we to live? This morning we are Peter, James and John on a mountain with no ready response to the God whose revelation unfolds clean counter to our culture. “This is my Son, the Beloved,” a voice says from out of the cloud. “Listen to him!” Listen, then, as the community whose angle of vision is redeemed by the God who desires not sacrifice but mercy, is saved by the Son who sees the carnage our obedience has wrought from the height of a cross, from the darkness of a grave, and from the depth of a Father’s love. Thanks be to God. |