This is Part 3 of a short series of blog posts on the Feast of the Sacrifice. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Kurban Bayramı, the Feast of the Sacrifice or Eid al-Adha, remembers Abraham's almost sacrificing of his son before he is stopped by the Angel of the Lord. The biblical narrative can be found in Genesis 22. The Muslim version differs slightly and is also a lot shorter.
I don't think I'm alone in finding this account uncomfortable reading. It seems like God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice what he holds dearest and when Abraham is literally about to do so, he is stopped. He sees a ram caught in a thicket, which he sacrifices instead. And later, in the book of Hebrews, Abraham is commended for his faith in offering Isaac as a sacrifice.
A quick look at Wikipedia confirms that there have been many different Jewish, Christian, Muslim and modern scholars who have written about this account. I don't want to get into the details of the account here but I do want to use it as an example of what we can do when we come across parts of the Bible that, even after we've looked at the issue from every angle, still don't give us answers that perfectly satisfy us and might still leave us a bit uncomfortable.
What it comes down to is what lens we view the world through. If we view the world and history through our own personal lens of what we think is right and just, there's going to be a lot of unanswered questions. There will also be unanswered questions about our lens; what right do we have to assume that our perspective is accurate? Where our sense of justice and morality originate from?
The better option is to look at accounts such as Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac through the lens of the cross. I don't really understand why God tested Abraham in this way but I do know that this event points forward to someone else who willingly went to be sacrificed, the Father's own beloved Son. And when he was nailed to a cross, there was no one to stay the Roman guard's hand, no ram caught in a bush. Looking at the account of Abraham and Isaac through the lens of the cross does not give us any magic answers but it does show us that God has already demonstrated the depth of his love for us, a depth that we cannot fathom or understand. So we can have complete confidence in God even while we don't fully understand his intentions and plans.
It also reminds me that God is not my little pet God, who always acts in the way I would like him to and whose every action I can perfectly understand and rationalise. He is the Almighty God, and his ways are not my ways - thankfully, because my ideas, plans and reasoning is not flawless and are usually mixed up with all kinds of motives. But God is love, he is good, he is sovereign and he works all things for his glory and the good of those who love him. When he sent his Son to this world, he proved beyond all doubt how much he loves his children. So we can trust him enough to leave our unanswered questions with him.
