In his younger days, my father had to work more than 12 hours a day as a shopkeeper to earn a living for the family. When I went to school in the morning, he was not yet out of bed. When he returned from work, I was already sound asleep. I grew up like children from single-parent families. Somehow, I was badly in need of a father-figure in my later life. Even when I became a father myself, my wife kept complaining that I was too emotionally distant from the children. I have to admit that it is something beyond my control no matter how deeply I love my children. Of course, in time I have changed and my children have matured.
I cannot imagine the trauma Isaac suffered when Abraham offered him as a holocaust to the Lord (Genesis 22). Compared with Abraham and Jacob, Isaac was scantly reported. His story is less dramatic, lacks lustre and is rather uneventful. Most likely, Isaac suffered from Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder and led a rather withdrawn life. Isaac experienced no fatherly love from Abraham. Compared with Abraham who had more than 75 years of friendship with the Lord and whom the letter to the Hebrews explains that he believed God would raise the dead (Hebrews 11:19), Isaac suffered more because he was no more than 7 years old, less than one tenth in length of his father's relationship with God. The trauma was too harsh for Isaac to bear. Some theologians brush aside the feelings of both Abraham and Isaac; and try to explain that God wants to make use of this incident to abolish the practice of human sacrifice. Though Yahweh does not demand human sacrifice, other deities do. Even kings burned their first-born sons, who were supposed to inherit the throne, to invoke the help of their gods (e.g. 2Kings 3:27). Therefore, human sacrifice was too deep-seated a custom for an Abraham story to abolish.
I used to explain away the story by arguing that the Jewish author wanted to boast that Abraham their ancestor passed God's test with flying colours. God's test was an occasion for Abraham to show off his faith in God. So, the trauma Isaac suffered was neither the fault of God, nor that of Abraham. It was irrelevant to the story. My thesis gains support from Paul's lips. He said that God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all (Romans 8:32). Why did God not spare his own Son? For a Jewish Paul, Abraham would "defeat" God if God did not outdo him by giving Jesus up to be crucified by the Romans. Therefore, the salvation project was a contest story between God and Abraham. Love is not a crucial element in the equation of this contest story. Faith is. Man's faith in God and God's faith in man. So far, I have not yet discovered a better answer which gives LOVE a more prominent place in the equation.
In Chinese history, there is also a famous story in which a father sacrificed his own son to save the orphan of his lord 趙氏孤兒. The story came alive in drama and was translated into French, L'Orphelin de la Maison de Tchao. Here, loyalty and justice dominate the scene. Love is barely mentioned. In God's story, love occupies the whole scene. God is love. Of course God loves His Son and His creatures, in particular, man the crowning jewel of His creation. The Son also loves the Father and thus sacrifice himself to fulfil the will of His Father. In the human stories, the sons did not sacrifice themselves out of their free will. There is something higher, be it faith or loyalty, than fatherly love in the human sacrifice stories.
Dear Lord, I marvel at how in you, love overwrites justice. Amen.
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