Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run” …
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
I’m showing my age by quoting from such an ancient text! In my childhood the other place I experienced the amazing story of God’s testing of Abraham, our Old Testament lectionary reading for this coming Sunday from Genesis 22, was at the cinema. You can find the clip on YouTube: George C Scott in a mesmerizing performance as Abraham, in the 1966 epic, The Bible, stopped at the last moment from killing his son Isaac by the voice of an invisible God speaking from the sky. I was shocked then and I’m shocked still now: how can we countenance a God who would command such a terrifying ordeal?!
The truth is, however, that we humans are the real terrors – we put God to the test, rather than vice-versa. We put our natural love for ourselves, for our loved ones, our friends, our sporting and media heroes, our community, our nation first, barely giving a thought to the possibility that we don’t really know what love is. It’s the great confusion of our language and our culture: we use the same word, “love”, to describe things that are as different as chalk and cheese. The ancient Greeks, happily, distinguished natural forms of love such as philia, eros and storge from the very unnatural agape, selfless, unconditional love – I recommend another ancient text, CS Lewis’s The Four Loves (1960), on the topic.
The bottom line is that we cannot expand, intensify, extrapolate the natural capacities for love we are born with, to become selfless, agape love. Rather, we can only acquire agape by downloading it from a divine source outside ourselves, outside of human life and culture: Abraham’s invisible God in the sky, the holy Spirit of God. Unless we allow our natural human loves, even those for our closest loved ones, to be informed in this way, by regular infusions of divine agape, they will inevitably become possessive, controlling, destructive, in reality more akin to hatred than real love.
Indeed, the road to agape always requires first a letting go, if only for a moment, of our natural, human loves – that was the painful lesson Abraham was learning back in the day. When, by grace and through faith, we are able do that, a creative space opens up inside us, divine love pours in, informing our behaviour and actions, enhancing our relationships, making us more capable of truly loving. It’s a beautiful thing!
Uniting Church in SA eNews Reflection 23/6/26
Featured Image: Abraham’s Sacrifice – Peter Koening (1970) – Vanderbilt University Divinity Library
