This week's readings are Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10:40-end, though we'll be focussing on the Genesis reading at our 10.45am Communion.  It's a tough reading, one of the hardest stories in scripture.  It's the moment that God orders Abraham to offer his only son, Isaac, as a sacrifice.  And Abraham goes along with it.

However you slice it, it's a tricky narrative.  Who wants to believe in a God who asks a parent to sacrifice their child?  Even if that's something that God is willing to do himself... 

But what happens if we turn it around for a moment - as many people have and ask whether that is, in fact, what God was asking Abraham to do.  It is, I think, a valid question because the request makes absolutely no sense.  Abraham has been promised by God that he will be the father of nations, and that this will come about through Isaac.  How on earth is that promise going to be fulfilled if he kills Isaac?  Why would the God who gave him this miraculous son ask for his death and negate his own promise?  

So what if Abraham was meant to say 'no'?  What if Abraham was meant to be righteous in his faithfulness not to an absurd request, but to a long-standing and now  partially realised promise from God?  

I think there's some merit to that idea, but it does leave us with the knot of a trickster God who doesn't always say what he means, and the question of how/who/when to obey God, and when to argue with him.

Can we have our cake and eat it?  Can we have an Abraham who is both righteous in obedience to the command, and in faithfulness to the promise? I wonder if we can. I wonder if there's something in the silent subtext - the gap between God's command to his son Abraham, (Take 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 that I shall show you.), and Abraham's answer to his son Isaac (God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.)  Surely in that answer is the shred of expectation, doubt, and hope that suggests that Abraham is following in obedience, prepared for the worst, but hoping for the best?  That he's walking with God into the darkness, but trusting that somehow, despite the evidence in this moment right here, God is still who he has always been - trustworthy, faithful to his promises, and intending to bless?  

Maybe there is an Abraham here who knows God well enough to follow him even when he's downright ridiculous and uncomfortable, with a faith strong enough to persevere in the midst of doubt, and carry onwards in hope.  Perhaps we're watching a man who's willing to press on until the final piece of the puzzle pops into view, and the whole picture resolves - as, in this instance it does: at the end of the day Abraham's prophecy of a lamb is fulfilled, as he's stood down from murdering a man to instead slaughter an animal.  

It would be a neater solution, of course, if he never put Isaac on the altar and found the ram straight away - but perhaps that discomfort in the text is the whole point.  Perhaps the challenge to us is to not expect our faith to be easy, nor our growth in knowing God to be straightforward - and to gather the courage to lean into our doubts and difficulties, and in the company of our fellow pilgrims to the high places to ask the difficult questions, and to share the answers of hopes yet only glimpsed.