I was recently watching a documentary series on Meso-American history; the cultures of this region are famed for their monumental architecture, their science, and for their penchant for human sacrifice. While the latter was no surprise to me as I watched this series, I was surprised by the scale of it. It’s hard to know exactly the true extent of it, because Indigenous records were destroyed by the Spanish and the Spaniards’ own records were propaganda pieces more than attempts at honest description. But, the low end of the estimates suggest that at the time of contact, 20,000 people were sacrificed a year in Mexica (aka Aztec) religious ceremonies. (The higher estimates are ten times that.) Stories of human sacrifice tend to shock us; so different is our own religious consciousness from those that practiced it, our first instincts are to recoil in horror and wonder how anyone could possibly do such a thing.
And yet I wonder if we’re really all that different after all.
I’ve been thinking about all this because today’s Old Testament reading is that old favourite, Genesis 22, the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac. (I did an Integral deep dive on this passage a few years ago, so if you’re interested in that, please check it out.) To remind us all, the basic story goes like this: After waiting decades for the arrival of the legitimate son God had promised him (Isaac), Abraham is then asked to offer him up as a sacrifice. Abraham is prepared to go through with the request until an angel of the LORD stops him at the last moment and he sees a ram caught in a nearby thicket to sacrifice instead.
So much of the discourse about this passage is bound up in our feelings of disgust. But as Gil Bailie notes in his wonderful book Violence Unveiled, in Abraham’s cultural milieu, there would be very little shocking about God’s apparent request here. Yes, it would be particularly tragic for Abraham, since so much of his life, and the arena of his relationship with God, had been about the promise of this son, but the fact that a god might demand the death of a child as a show of obedience or faithfulness would not have been surprising at all.
To get a better sense of what God is doing here, then, perhaps we need to think not about our own disgust, but about what deaths or dangers we don’t think twice about in our own culture. For example, how many people — especially young people — die each year in war around the world? We even use sacrificial language for this, saying they died for their country, or they sacrificed themselves ‘for king and country,’ in defense of freedom, and so on. Or during the COVID-19 pandemic, workers deemed “essential” by governments were expected to expose themselves to far higher risks than others in the name of the economy. As the famous saying (often attributed to Stalin) goes, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Now, I’m in no way saying there are easy solutions to these problems. The point is simply that we too, just as much as people in societies with human sacrifice, have individuals whose lives we consider disposable, and to whose deaths we are inured.
What God did on the mountain with Abraham was reveal to him once and for all that he does not demand or want anyone to die in God’s name. But this was just the first lesson in the Scriptures about what God does and doesn’t want. These came to their fulfillment in the resurrection of Jesus, which vindicated Jesus — and, by extension, all of the victims on all of the altars around the world, be they the altars of religion, politics, war, economics, or ‘justice’. (This last one is important since Jesus himself was killed in the name of law and order.)
And so today, this is the lesson I’m drawing from this ancient story: Our religion, our theology, and our lives as a whole, including politics and economics, should not have victims. Instead, we should follow the example of Jesus himself, the Suffering Servant:
Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice. (Isaiah 42.1-3)
Matthew Root 