"Now I know" An Exposition of Genesis 22:1-19 and Matthew 26:36-46

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Mays, James L

THE TESTING OF ABRAHAM

Genesis 22 begins with a blunt, disturbing statement: "God tested Abraham." Occasionally, National Public Radio broadcasts will be interrupted by a harsh, grating tone followed by an announcement from the emergency network: "This is a test." The opening sentence of Genesis 22 is like that. It interrupts and demands attention to what is about to be said: "After these things God tested Abraham." After all that Abraham had been through with God, living a life determined by the call and promise of God, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, here at the end is a test. The test is whether Abraham would finally and totally commit life to the call and promise (and therefore, because the test posed a real alternative to following the call and promise, it was also a peirasmos, a temptation). Abraham is commanded to take his son Isaac on a journey to a mount in the land of Moriah and there offer him as a sacrifice to God. Isaac, his only son, his beloved, the child through whom alone the call and promise had reality. Give up Isaac and be left with the call and promise only, with God only-that was the test.

Abraham made the journey. He built an altar. He bound Isaac and laid him on the altar. He took a knife and raised it over his bound son. At that last moment, God said, "Now I know.. ." Now I know that you fear God and hold to the call and promise beyond all else, that you did not yield to the temptation to withhold your son from me, that you did not enter into that other possibility made possible by the test. Then, and because God knew, a lamb was provided for the sacrifice instead of Isaac. Then, and because God knew, God committed himself to Abraham and swore that his descendants would be numerous and strong and crucial in God's will and way with the world.

There are many aspects of the story that provoke attention. Most of all, of course, our human feelings are stirred and engaged by the drama of father and son with its indescribable terror and tension. This tale of a near tragedy draws the emotions of any who hear it into the space of its unspoken conflicts and crisis. But the story is being described here in a way that puts the primary emphasis on God. If we let the story be Scripture and ask also about its witness to the will and way of God with the world, then attention shifts to the why and what of this test for God. It is precisely when God says, "Now I know that these questions are brought to narrative resolution.

"Now I know"-a phrase easily imaginable on the lips of us mortals. It is the kind of phrase one might use at the climax of some clarifying experience with another person. The mother of an adolescent who has made her the target of his rebellion might say to her father, "Now I know what I put you through." The commander of a platoon might say to the one soldier who through selfless action had saved them all from disaster, "Now I know whom we can count on."

But the Scripture puts the phrase on the lips of God to let us know the what and the why of this terrible test, and so to tell us how it was, as it were, a clarifying experience for God.

What is it God now knows? "Now I know that you are a fearer of God." That you, Abraham, from your side, the side of what you do with your life, so far as it lies in you, to offer, yield, direct the living of your life to the will of God, and leave the work of God to God. Even if it requires the sacrifice of Isaac. Yes, even the giving up and handing over of Isaac who is himself the only tangible reality of God's will and work in your life.

Why the test? "Because," God says. "Because you have done this, I will indeed bless you ... and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice." The purpose of the test was to discover in the obedience of Abraham the way in the world to the will and work of God for the world. To confirm that there was in this human a way for God to work with and for all. A "because" in a man for the "cause" of God.

Of course, if one does not take the story seriously as Scripture, then God's "Now I know" can be read as just a device of narrative art, an anthropomorphic embellishment of a story whose meaning lies somewhere else in its plot. If one's reading is governed by a purely literary interest or a history-of-religion perspective, the phrase will not center thought-and does not in much contemporary interpretation.

But the remark stands at the climax of the narrative. It is the point of resolution of the tension in the plot. Without it, the whole story collapses without purpose. God is left with no reason for the horrifying command. The test was a fraud.

For those interpreters who down the ages did read the story as Scripture, the phrase did center attention-but often as a stone of stumbling. Commentators in patristic and Reformation times wrestled with the questions implied by the phrase on the lips of God. Did God not know in advance what Abraham would do? Would God really depend on the obedience of a man as a reason for committing himself to humanity? Hard questions. So explanations were proposed to protect the omniscience of God from qualification by time and the grace of God from compromise by dependence on human work.