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How About Those Family Values? | June 30, 2002 |
This reading is paired in today’s lectionary with the Genesis account of what the Hebrew tradition calls “The Binding of Isaac.” This is the story of Abraham hearing God’s command that he take his son Isaac, the long waited for Isaac, and offer him as a sacrifice. (Perhaps this is a story that the parents of rebellious teenagers identify with. It is more likely that they will quote the injunction in Deuteronomy 21.18 “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of the town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town ‘this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.” Well how about those family values? The next time someone tells you that you ought to take the Bible literally, ask them if they have this passage in mind.)
The binding of Isaac story is a very disturbing one. It seems awful and simply unbelievable that a God of love should say to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” How many of us who have a children’s picture Bible have quickly skipped over the picture of Isaac bound on a stone altar and Abraham with a knife in his raised hand. We have tried to soften the story by pointing out that Abraham came from a background in Mesopotamia and so he mistakenly believed that God wanted such a sacrifice. So the point of the story is that God will not permit it. Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian/philosopher examines this story in some detail to see how it presents Abraham as the father of faith. He asks, “What can Abraham say?” What does he say to Sarah? Nothing. Keirkegaard made up a series of different endings. Abraham ignores what he hears and pretends that he is insane. Abraham tries to plunge the knife into himself as the only sacrifice he can make.
The modern writer, Naomi Rosenblatt suggests the only approach to the story that makes sense to her is to consider that the entire drama takes place in Abraham’s dreams. She points out the many dream like (or nightmarish) elements: eerie time references, the surrealistic nature of the journey to the mountain, the abrupt arrival at the mountain, Sarah’s absence. She claims that “Abraham is wrestling with his doubts and anxieties–about the vulnerability of his young son, about the demands of his covenant with God, and about the possible risks to Isaac of inheriting this weighty commitment.” Armed only with his faith in the future and his trust in God, Abraham confronts his worst nightmare–the death of his clan at his own hand, that somehow his own commitment to his faith will destroy his child.
We know about that fear. Elizabeth Achtemeier, a professor at Union Seminary in Virginia, recounts that she had two brothers who were stationed in the Pacific during the Second World War who were both assigned to be among the first wave of troops to invade the Japanese homeland. Both had a brief leave on the West Coast before they shipped out and their mother flew out to tell them both goodbye. “What,” she writes, “do you say to a son when you know he has to die?” All that Abraham can say is “the Lord will provide.”
Last winter when a former colleague of Martin Forward’s from Cambridge was on campus at my University, he suggested a very interesting take on the Abraham/ Isaac story. Edward Kessler says he thinks Abraham failed the test. In other instances Abraham has been willing to argue with God. Such argumentation became a part of the Jewish tradition. So Kessler wonders why Abraham did not stand up to God and refuse this request as something God ought not demand. Abraham ought to have argued rather than acquiesced. I rather like this interpretation for then the test is more of Abraham’s character than his obedience.
Whatever our view of the Old Testament story in today’s reading, we still have the Matthew passage where Jesus says that he comes to set one family member against another. Now, really isn’t that the last thing the beleaguered family needs? Certainly the American family is so fragile, so fractured that we do not need another reason to be set against each other. I suppose most of you noted that Eppie Lederer who wrote the Ann Landers advice column died over a week ago. Perhaps you saw that the feud between her and her twin sister who wrote Dear Abby, which prevented them from speaking to each other for several years, seems to have moved to the next generation. Ann’s daughter, Margo Howard, has accused Abby’s daughter, Jeanne Phillips, of trying to “make hay” from Ann’s recent death and garner new clients for her own advice column. Mary Schmich, in her column, says that 25 years ago she would have found it freakish for relationship advisors to be tossing verbal tomatoes at each other. But now it seems, in an odd way, interesting because it is universal. She writes, “the average family feud doesn’t make the front page, but in most families, it seems, there’s always somebody who’s not talking to somebody.” (Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune, June 28, 2002.)
Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Whether it is rejection by your family, or rejection of your family, the rejection itself can consume you, so that you begin to define yourself by it, spending so much time either holding yourself apart from your family or trying to get it back together again that there is precious little time left for anything else. No one knows how to hurt each other the way family members do. The knowledge of one another is so great, the shared history so powerful, the memories so deep–all of them heavy weapons in the arsenals we use against one another.” (God in Pain)
Schmich, in her column, says “most feuds boil down to a single question: Who got more?” Who got more love from mom or dad, or more attention, or money for college, or more toys, or more in the will. And indeed such questions can consume us. And then there is the love in a family which controls. Anna Quindlen wrote a column on Father’s Day one year which was talked about the simultaneous blessing and curse of being her father’s first child. “I was raised as my father’s oldest son,” she says, detailing his high expectations of her and how she learned to value herself in the way her father valued her: for her mind, for her achievements, for her reflection of him. Then one day she stopped, realizing that he and she were two separate people, not mirror images, and much to her surprise she found that she loved him more after that revelation. “His expectations were hard on me,” she writes now, “but they took me places I would never have gone otherwise. A curse, a blessing, all in one. We might as well have a universal support group: Adult Children of Parents.”
Jesus knew the power of families. In the ancient Mediterranean world, family or kinship was the central social institution, just as economics is in our world. The prevailing mentality was “our family” against “everyone else.” To marry someone who had no connection to your family or clan was unthinkable. The consequences of leaving one’s family were dire indeed. One not only gave up the basic claim to honor and status but also lost all of the family’s economic, religious, educational, and social connections as well, and worst of all connection to the land. That is one of the reasons the prodical son’s leaving home is so scandalous.
No doubt one reason Matthew includes this saying of Jesus is because in the community to which Matthew writes many of them were already estranged from their families. In his time, it was the custom for whole households to adopt the faith of their heads. Everyone in the house was compelled to believe what that person believed–spouses, children, servants, everyone–so if one of them elected to become a Christian it was nothing short of mutiny. There were many in Matthew’s congregation who had already been kicked out of their families for believing in Jesus.
The consequences of believing today are far different from Matthew’s day. But we still have the deep desire for kinship. The good news of the Gospel is that our fundamental kinship is in the family of God. Following Jesus is where our basic identity is to be found regardless of who our relatives are. When we really come to know that we are first and foremost a child of God we can survive any family feuds and we will not be swallowed up by a family whose love has a little too much control in it. Indeed, when we really believe that we are a child of God we can withstand those times when our children or friends are in harms way, those times where we cannot rescue those we love, those times when we feel we are the sacrifice. We can say with Abraham, “God will provide.” And believe the promise of Jesus that what we lose for his sake we shall find again.
Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2002 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |