“Take your only son Isaac, whom you love, to the place I will show you, and there offer him up to Me as a sacrifice.”
One of the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Abraham didn’t have the benefit his descendents have, of familiarity with numerous stories that feature phrases of language whose meanings are not immediately apparent.
Abraham might have thought along the way that God’s meaning was clear. He was to kill his son, he might have thought, and might not have imagined any other ending to the story, but that might not be giving Abraham enough credit.
As a friend of God, Abraham would not have mistaken Him for someone easily understood, Whose depths are readily plumbed.
From our perspective, we can see the crucial elements of the phrase, “offer him up.”
Abraham did offer up Isaac to God, Who never actually said, “You are going to kill your son for me.”
As Jesus said, God is not God of the dead, but of the living, and to Him, all are alive.
What did Sarah think about that?
Mothers and fathers are possessive of their children, but parents learn that their children are not their own to keep for themselves.
A father has to offer up his sons and daughters, to God, to the universe, if only as an act of consent, trust, letting go of that which is not his to possess or control.
Parents are mysteries to a child.
Nothing is so predestined as one’s own life, and as certain and nonnegotiable as one’s sense of self is, so is one’s permanent, unbreakable link to his parents.
At some point, the child acquires the insight that a parent is an individual too, who went through every phase of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, who made choices, who got married, and had children.
When the child is married and has a child, then he begins to appreciate the ineffable joys of parenthood.
It’s not only sorrows and misfortunes that break hearts. A heart can break from sheer happiness, I’ve learned from my son.
For all their faults and mistakes, a child owns his parents.
They have no choice but to be his parents. They are the portal to whatever worlds we came from to be born. They are the ones who must allow their children to live their lives as only the child can understand, imperfectly, how he must try to live the life he is given.
That is what children demand of their parents.
That is the demand of humanity to which God consented in the creation of humanity– free will.
That is the sacrifice we offer up in our lives, the lives of our children and parents– to each, a life, lived by one alone, created by and answerable to God alone.