How to Defy Expectations with Hope
Proper 9A | Genesis 24, Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
Last week’s terror no doubt lingers. When Abraham took his son up a mountain intending to offer him as a sacrifice. We can imagine the nightmares that followed. For both of them. But mostly for Isaac. He was to be the victim. And in a very real way, he was anyway. For one does not simply move on from such horror without psychic residue. I mean, we try, but doctors’ offices are filled with people who tried to ignore the pain of trauma.
Scripture doesn’t dwell on these things, but it is there nonetheless. It’s unavoidable. You can find trauma responses peaking out through the cracks. We see it in the last line of Genesis 24, “So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.”
This is our only marker of his grief. But it is so telling, isn’t it?
The text doesn’t offer a timeframe for these chapters, but it might be a decade that passes between chapter 22 and 24. From the boy who went up the mountain with his dad to the following chapter, which measures the death of Isaac’s mother, Sarah, and Abraham’s seeking land to bury her on. It doesn’t say that Isaac is grieving his mother, but it doesn’t need to. Nor does it need to explain how strained the father’s relationship to his son has become. How his son turned to his mother for comfort. How her absence is felt so differently by these two men now.
For a limited time, you may find the audio here.
