One of my favorite novels is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
The New York Times released a list of the best books of the 21st Century and the The Road was number 13 on their list.
The novel is an intense and sparsely written book.
McCarthy notorious disliked adjectives and punctuation.
Between his sentences there are paragraphs of silence that require the reader’s imagination to fill in.
The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of almost any plant life.
A father and son are trying to survive on what food they can scavenge while also avoiding bands of marauding cannibals.
In the midst of all this struggle and confusion and silence we see this father and son experience love, tenderness, and connection.
It’s an amazing book.
It reminds me of our reading from Genesis this morning.
Like the The Road the story we read of Abraham attempting to sacrifice his son Isaac is intense and sparsely written.
There are very few details and almost no explanation given to what happens in the story.
As readers we are thrown into the action and many of us are likely confused or have some serious questions once we get to the end of it.
The story opens with the narrator telling us that God decided to put Abraham to the test.
This test was a way for God to know Abraham better and to discover what Abraham’s character was like.
Abraham hears a voice telling him to sacrifice his only son.
Abraham complies and tells Isaac to gather firewood.
They walk up a mountain together in chilling silence.
Abraham ties up his child and lays him on top of the firewood Isaac carried.
Abraham grabs a knife and lifts it when a messenger from God tells him to stop.
Thankfully, Isaac is spared.
This is such a perplexing story on so many levels.
Isaac was, it seemed, the linchpin in God’s promise to Abraham that God would grow Abraham’s descendants into a people as numerous as the grains of sand along the seashore.
And now Abraham was being asked to give up God’s promise?
And more than that.
Abraham was supposed to sacrifice his son?
What parent would even think of doing that?
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed that the radical nature of this request was the central point of it.
He saw this story as similar to Jesus’ parable of the pearl of great price where a person gives up all his possessions in order to buy a plot of land in which an even greater possession is buried.
Kierkegaard interpreted Abraham’s willingness to go along with the request to sacrifice his son as evidence of Abraham’s great faithfulness.
Abraham’s faith moved him to give up everything to God and hold nothing back.
Another philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, had a different reading of this passage.
Levinas noticed that God never commends Abraham for going along with the sacrifice of Isaac.
In fact, it is one of God’s messengers that tells Abraham to stop.
Abraham listened to that voice and did not follow through with sacrificing Isaac.
This is what Levinas thought was Abraham’s real act of faithfulness.
For Levinas, the whole drama of Abraham turns on this second voice.
The first voice calls Abraham toward death.
The second voice calls him back toward his son.
And Levinas asks: which voice is truly God’s?
We often assume, almost without thinking, that faithfulness means obeying the loudest, most demanding voice we hear.
The voice that asks for everything.
The voice that asks us to harden ourselves against the people right in front of us.
But Levinas says the test was never whether Abraham would raise the knife.
The test was whether Abraham could still hear the voice that says stop.
The voice that points away from sacrifice and back toward the face of his child.
For Levinas, this is where God truly speaks.
Not in the grand demand, but in the command that says: do not lay your hand on this person.
This person, here, in front of you—this person matters.
Levinas spent his life arguing that we meet God in the face of another human being.
When we look into the face of another person, something holy looks back at us.
This is the voice Abraham finally heard on that mountain.
And it is the voice we are invited to hear, too.
Because here is the thing about our own lives.
We are surrounded by loud voices that ask us to sacrifice the people in front of us for some greater cause.
Voices that tell us our convictions, our causes, even our certainties about God, are worth more than the human being standing in our way.
These voices can sound religious.
They can sound like duty.
They can even sound like faith.
But Levinas reminds us that there is another voice.
A quieter one.
The voice that calls us back to the person in front of us.
Faithfulness, it turns out, is not always proven by what we are willing to give up.
Sometimes faithfulness is proven by who we are willing to keep and care for.
By our willingness to lower the knife.
To unbind the one we were about to harm.
To look, really look, into a human face and to hear the holiness that speaks there.
This week, you will hear many voices.
Some of them will ask you to sacrifice the people who are closest to you on the altar of something that seems urgent and important.
Some of the voices will ask you to sacrifice people on the other side of the globe who you have never met.
My prayer is that, like Abraham, you will also hear the other voice.
The one that says: stop.
Put down the knife.