A sermon by Pastor Joel Christian Glenn, 14 May 2017
We have been looking at how the life of Abraham reveals the heart and mind of Jesus Christ. Today’s story will reveal something about the big question that hung over all of Jesus’ life and continues to be relevant today: how do you unite Humanity and Divinity together in one person? Humanity and Divinity seem mutually exclusive: almost by definition to be one is to not be the other. Yet that was one of the main goals that Jesus had: to unite Divinity and Humanity together as one. This process is referred to as the glorification, a process that Jesus began in childhood and completed at the very end of His life.
We have talked about parts of that process the past two Sundays:
1. First, when Jesus was a child, He received the purest heavenly love possible, a love that He carried with Him His entire life. This step is reflected in God’s call to Abraham to enter the Promised Land, into the heart of what would one day become a great kingdom.
2. Second, last Sunday we talked about Jesus’ love as He matured and began to grasp just how badly off the human race was. This step is illustrated when Abraham bargains with God to save as many of the people of Sodom as possible, reflecting Jesus’ desire to save all, even those caught up in the worst of evils.
Today’s story, the sacrifice of Isaac, reflects the end of the glorification process, as Jesus continued to put His love towards the whole human race into action, in spite of all opposition, thus fully bringing Divine Love and Humanity into one.
Before we get to the actual story, we have to understand what each character represents. Abraham represents Jesus Christ, and God -- Jehovah -- represents Jesus’ inner divinity. When “Abraham” receives directions from “God”, it's an image of Jesus receiving guidance from His own inner Divinity. And now, into the story comes Isaac. Isaac is Abraham’s son, the one that God promised would allow Abraham’s lineage to continue and to grow. He stands for the very first or deepest thing that makes someone human: the rational mind. (Secrets of Heaven 2767).
You can get a grasp of what the rational part of your mind is with a thought experiment:
Right now you are having thoughts. If you want to, you can think about those thoughts. So what is it that is thinking about your own thoughts? Who is that observer that you can’t quite rise above and observe because it’s you? It’s your rational. That thing that you just experienced is also what makes you human. The ability to consider your own thoughts, to reflect on them, to embrace some and reject others, to consciously bridge the gap between physical things and spiritual things, and to even make rational choices at all, is what makes you a human being. That is what Isaac represents in Jesus: His rational, conscious mind.
We now turn to the story as told in Genesis 22:1-14. Note that this story can be hard to hear because it seems to ascribe cruelty to God. We will address that apparent cruelty later in this sermon.
"Now it came to pass after these things that God tempted Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then He said, “Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. And Abraham said to his young men,
“Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.”
So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together.
But Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, “My father!”
And he said, “Here I am, my son.”
Then he said, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”
And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.”
So the two of them went together. Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the Angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!”
So he said, “Here I am.”
And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 And Abraham called the name of the place, The-LORD-Will-Provide; as it is said to this day, “In the Mount of the LORD it shall be provided.”
The first thing we need to address is the issue of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham going along with it. Why would God test Abraham in this horrific way, and was Abraham right to carry out God’s order? The sacrifice of a child is clearly an abomination. In fact, even in the Word some of the worst condemnations are reserved for those who sacrifice their children to other gods. The only way we can understand this story is if we dive deeper, and leave behind the literal sense. But even if the inner meaning is good, why did God have to use this imagery to depict it? There are two reasons: one, because temptations are of things to which a person is inclined. Child sacrifice was a thing back then because of what people thought about atonement. They thought the more painful the sacrifice, the more God would bless them. That was true even of Abraham. So God used this imagery because Abraham was already inclined to experience temptations this way (Secrets of Heaven 2818). The second reason is that the visceral horror of the story conveys the severity of Jesus’ temptations.
Ultimately that is what this story is designed to convey: not a fickle God cruelly testing his follower’s loyalty, but the inner struggle of one Man as He strove to save all of humankind. So, if the sacrifice that Abraham was asked to make was his beloved son, what sacrifice was Jesus asked to make? What would it mean for Jesus to take the "Isaac" part of His mind, his rational, and to prepare it, bind it, place it on an altar and all but kill it? And why would this sacrifice on the part of Jesus be so traumatic as to be represented by child sacrifice? The answer to these questions lies in the concept of temptations. A temptation is a kind of test of someone’s love: God “tested” or “tempted” Abraham to see how loyal he really was [God never actually leads anyone into temptation; see Secrets of Heaven 2768, 2816]. Spiritual temptations always put someone’s love at risk. The more you love it, the more difficult the temptation. Consider Abraham again. What makes the story so hard is that he was not sacrificing some animal that, while expensive, he had no personal connection to. He was being asked to sacrifice his only son, whom he loved dearly! That is what made the test or temptation so hard.
In Jesus’ case the love that was at risk was even greater, infinitely greater in fact. His love was for the salvation of the entire human race: every human being who ever had or ever would live, including you. That love was his entire life. The teachings for the New Church describe it this way:
All temptation is an attack against the love present in a person, the degree of temptation depending on the degree of that love. If love is not attacked there is no temptation. Destroying another person's love is destroying his very life, for his love is his life. The Lord's life was love towards the whole human race; indeed it was so great and of such a nature as to be nothing other than pure love. Against this life of His, temptations were directed constantly, and this was happening, as has been stated, from earliest childhood through to His last hour in the world. (Secrets of Heaven 1690)
Jesus’ greatest love was saving people. The temptation then was the fear that He would fail; the fear that humanity had so far removed itself from Him that there was no longer any hope for them. This temptation centered on the question we began with: how do you unite Humanity and Divinity together in one person? If humanity and divinity cannot become one, then there would be no bridge between God and people, no way for us who are mere mortals to have anything to do with God the Divine. Just as Abraham had to choose between God and Isaac, Jesus felt like He had to choose between His Divinity and His Rationality, the seat of His Humanity. To all appearances becoming Divine required the death of what made Jesus Human. The Lord at any time could have just snapped His fingers to fix everything, but then that would defeat the whole point: in doing that He would be implying that His Divine ideals cannot be lived by mere mortals. It would imply that Divine ideals can only be lived by God, not by people.
To glorify His humanity, that is, to make it Divine, required the internal Divine to live out its own purpose and Love in a human way. Not only did He have to do that, but He had to do that in a time when abuse was being heaped upon truth, when walking in the image of God was scorned and rejected. If we had been able to see into Jesus’ mind we would have seen the dilemma of Abraham: would remaining true to God destroy the things He loved? Would remaining true to God destroy His identity, His sense of self, His conscious and free mind, His humanity itself? Nor was that concern for His own sake. Like Abraham, Jesus faced losing something precious, but it was not one of His sons: it was all of His children to eternity. He risked humanity turning away from Him, unable to return the love that He was pouring out to them. That was what was at risk if He could not unite His own Humanity with His own Divinity.
But Divine truth is not just a Divine Ideal, naïve in its simplicity. It can be lived, on a human level, against all odds. To be spiritual does not mean leaving behind humanity, nor does being human mean falling short of the Divine. The Divine and Human can be made one, and that is what Jesus accomplished. In facing what He faced, He did let all of His human failings die, and He did submit Himself entirely to the Divine within Himself. Yet in doing so, He did not lose His humanity. He did not become some unknown and unknowable God. Instead, because of His human suffering and His human life, He become more knowable, more relatable, more personal, and more human than ever before. He proved that to be human is not to be forever failing, or that to be Divine is to be far off and distant. His life proves that Divine ideals can be lived here and now in this limited world.
Jesus’ experience mirrored Abraham’s. Despite taking His devotion to God to the point of nearly killing his beloved son, Abraham was not left childless: God spared his son, and Isaac went on to father children of his own. Likewise, Jesus took His devotion to love and truth to the ultimate place, to the point that even in being killed on the Cross He continued to act from love. Yet, in the death of His body He did not lose His humanity. Instead, He had succeeded in making His humanity divine, perfect, and complete, and yet still, in the end, perfectly and completely human.
Jesus’ victory was not won for His own sake: His goal was to show us a way that even in our own fallible humanity God could be present. This is reflected in the story of Abraham. When God stopped Abraham from killing Isaac, He provided a ram for Abraham to sacrifice instead. For Jesus, that ram was us: all the people that He wanted to dedicate and join to God. In making Himself Divine, He gave humanity a way to understand Divinity, and so to have a piece of that in themselves as well.
Much of what we have talked about today has been about God and who He is. It has not exactly been a clear-cut or simple topic. Yet what we have talked about has crucial implications for our own lives. There are direct consequences of these ideas that transform us and our view of what it is to be human. So even if you feel that you haven’t been able to grasp everything we’ve covered, hopefully the conclusion will give you something to hold on to.
So here it is: We are in the image and likeness of God. His story is our story. What Jesus went through, what Abraham went through, all of it, speaks to our own experience of life. For Abraham, following God put his beloved son at risk. For Jesus, living according to His Divine conscience put His rational humanity at risk. For us, it is our sense of self that we feel to be at risk if we submit to God; and in fact if we were to experience the Divine in its fullness and power we’d lose ourselves; we wouldn’t be us anymore. The Lord provides a way that we can completely submit to Him and let ourselves die, but then we are given a new heavenly self that continues to live. That is what the incarnation allows. We cannot become Divine as Jesus did, but through Jesus that Divinity can exist in human beings. To be human is to have the potential to be joined to an all-loving God. It's a potential that no human being lacks. Jesus Himself spoke to this reality, and we will end with His words. This is a prayer that just as He became one with His Father, or His inner Divinity, we may become one with Him, and so be united to God. It is possible for God to be with you:
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. (John 17:20-23)
Read 'Finding Jesus in the Life of Abraham - Part 1 of 3, Beginnings'
