Isaac took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother's death.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Isaac is one of the central figures of the Old Testament. We hear the refrain: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as the most common identifier for the One who created the universe and rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, the God who speaks through the prophets, and acts throughout history. And yet Isaac has precious little in the way of character. I would hate to be the actor who had to play Isaac in a movie. He is an enigmatic figure. What we know of him is that he is the child of his parents' old age. Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born. And Sarah was 91, well beyond childbearing age, even in the Bible's extended lifetimes. We know he had an older brother, Ishmael, who had been banished along with his mother, Hagar, when he was a toddler.
Last Sunday's passage, where God tests Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, is our next encounter with Isaac. Genesis does not tell us how old he is, but he can't be terribly young: he walks for three days to the land of Moriah; he carries the wood for the sacrifice up the mountain; and he questions his father about the crucial missing element of their sacrifice -- the lamb. We can guess that he wasn't terribly old, because Abraham refers to him as a boy. Yet there is a strand of Jewish tradition that argues Isaac was an adult. The next thing that happens, after the story of the binding of Isaac, is the death of Sarah at 127 years old. The idea is that the events on Mt. Moriah so horrified her that she died of grief. Sarah's death seems to be the catalyst that moves Abraham to send his servant back to the old country, to find a wife for Isaac from among the extended family he left behind when God first called him.
Today, we meet Isaac again, at the tail end of a rather detailed account of Abraham's servant finding Rebekah and negotiating with her family to arrange the marriage. In this story, Isaac is as tangential as ever. He goes for an evening stroll in the field and sees the caravan coming off in the distance. He takes Rebekah into his mother Sarah's tent. She becomes his wife; and he loved her. And she comforted him.
Isaac seems to me to be a profoundly grieved man. Isaac seems perhaps even on the edge of despair. Scripture is maddening in its silence, so we can only reflect and imagine answers to all our questions that Scripture refuses to address for us. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for Isaac, walking that three-day long journey back down the mountain with the father who had been so close to slitting his neck. Whether Isaac had been a young teen-ager, or a full-grown adult, I imagine that his mother Sarah must have been his rock of safety and pillar of strength for whatever period of time they had together after the trauma of the binding. I imagine that Sarah's death made Isaac an orphan, because in some sense he lost his father on that fateful day. And so his evening stroll in the field strikes me as the wayward wonderings of a lost soul.
And yet, what we know of Isaac is that he loved Rebekah and took comfort in her. He loved her, perhaps with a certain fragility borne out of the depth loss and heartache.
There is a sense in which the promise that God made to Abraham, the promise of a great nation with descendents as countless as the stars in the sky or the sands of the sea, depends upon Rebekah. Not only was that promise so gravely threatened by the great test of Abraham's faith in the call to sacrifice his son, but it seems that it is threatened also by Isaac's own character, or lack thereof. We have not yet seen even a hint of initiative on his part. Isaac has been rather passive thus far. It would not be too great a stretch to imagine Isaac fading into oblivion.
But there's a problem. Isaac can’t fade into oblivion, for the simple reason that God made a promise. And God's promises always come through. God promised to make Abraham the father of a great nation, through his son Isaac. And so, once again, God provides the means for that promise to live on. God called Rebekah, through the voice and person of Abraham's servant, to leave her father's house, and to go to a strange new land, and marry a man she had never laid eyes on. Her response to this call is virtually identical to Abraham's own response so many years before. A simple "I will." And the blessing that her family bestows on her is remarkably similar to God's promise to Abraham. They wish her to become "thousands of myriads" and that her descendents should "gain possession of the gates of their foes."
God's promise to Abraham, and Rebekah's familial blessing belong together; they are, in fact, two expressions of the same truth. And Rebekah's response is no less monumental than Abraham's had been. Rebekah becomes the embodied hope that Isaac seems to have lost. In taking on the yoke of marriage, Isaac finds someone who can relieve the burden of his grief. In marrying Rebekah, Isaac learns from her. He learns to love her, because it was she who first loved him, in gentleness and humility. The love between Isaac and Rebekah is more than a comfort; that love provides a way forward to the fulfillment of God's promise.
Like Isaac, we have had our experiences of grief over the death of a loved one, or the loss of job, or some kind of disillusionment. Grief is a very real part of life, but it cannot be allowed to take over. Grief has a way of laying hold of us, of tempting us to give up, to sink into despair, to look back at all that we have had and can never have again because someone or something is lost to us. Grief has a way of making us passive, of robbing us of our character, of turning us into an Isaac. But grief and all its fruits are not what God wants for us. God wants us to look with hope toward the fulfillment of God's promises and purposes for us. And so God sends us Rebekah. God gives us the strength, and faith, and courage that we need when grief has overwhelmed us. God gives us the power of love that will not rest until we can learn to love, to hope, and to find rest for our weary souls.
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