Biblical
Words [665]
Genesis 21:8-21;
Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17; Romans
6:1b-11; Matthew 10:24-39.
Great separations come about, for petty or profound reasons.
Yet God goes with the separated.
The theme uniting the readings for this Sunday is separation. There are separations between
tribal clans (Ishmael and Isaac) and faith traditions (Judaism and Islam),
separation from the former self now dead (Romans 6), and separation of lesser
things from the one supreme value (conflict within families).
Genesis 21:8-21.
The Torah reading
is the separation of Ishmael, Abraham’s first son, from Isaac, the later and
more favored son. The thrust of the
passage is that Ishmael, too, will have a blessing and will be the father of a
mighty people. Abraham’s sons do not go
without God’s blessing.
The destiny of nations may be worked out through
petty human motivations. In our story it
is Sarah’s jealousy and envy of the slave woman’s son that leads to the
separation and the need for a special blessing from God for Ishmael. Sarah sees the boys playing together and she
wants none of this mixing. “So she said
to Abraham, ‘Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave
woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.’” (Verse 10, NRSV.)
Abraham is upset by this, but he receives assurance
from God that this separation is OK, because the first son too will have his
destiny. Abraham goes to Hagar,
Ishmael’s mother, loads her with supplies and sends her out into the
wilderness.
The rest of the story is hers. (The basic
Hagar-in-the-wilderness story is used twice in Genesis, in chapter 16 as well
as here. The story in both places
assumes that Ishmael is a small child, not a young adolescent male as the
chronology of chapters 17 to 21 makes him.)
When the water is exhausted, she despairs, casts the boy under a bush
and waits desperately for the end. God
hears the crying of the child and intervenes to show Hagar where there is
water. He assures her that the boy will
be saved because “I will make a great nation of him” (verse 18).
Ishmael
is the father of the Arabic peoples, and when
they become a great people they will receive the prophet Muhammad and become
muslims (those who submit [to the only God]).
This story of the separation of Ishmael and Isaac is
the ancestral link between Judaism and Islam.
In the Qur’an Abraham and Ishmael rehabilitate the holy place in Mecca and anticipate Islam as the service of the true
God.
We [Allah] enjoined Abraham and Isma’il
[saying]: “Purify My House for those who
circle it, for those who retreat there for meditation, and for those who kneel
and prostrate themselves.” And
[remember] when Abraham said: “My Lord,
make this a secure city and feed with fruits those of its inhabitants who
believe in Allah and the Last Day.” (Qur’an,
2:125-126, trans. Majid Fakhry, An
Interpretation of the Qur’an, New York University Press, 2002, p. 23.)
And while Abraham and Isma‘il raised the foundations
of the House, [they prayed]: “Our Lord,
accept [this] from us. Surely You are
the All-Hearing, the Omniscient. Our
Lord, cause us to submit to You [i.e., become muslims], and make of our
posterity a nation that submits to You.
Show us our sacred rites, and pardon us.
You are, indeed, the Pardoner, the Merciful. Our Lord, send them a Messenger from among
themselves who will recite to them Your Revelations, to teach them the Book and
the wisdom, and to purify them. You are
truly the Mighty, the Wise.” (Qur’an, 2:127-129, ibid., p. 24.)
Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17.
The Psalm reading invites us to hear the cry of the boy Ishmael as he
is on the verge of death in the desert.
Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me,
for I am
poor and needy.
Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you;
save your
servant who trusts in you. …
Turn to me and be gracious to me;
give your
strength to your servant;
save the
child of your serving girl. (verses 1-2,
16, NRSV)
There is even a hint of the themes that will
dominate Islam.
There is none like you among the gods, O Lord,
nor are
there any works like yours.
All the nations you have made shall come
and bow
down before you, O Lord,
and shall
glorify your name.
For you are great and do wondrous things;
you alone
are God. (verses 8-10, NRSV)
The brothers Ishmael and Isaac may be separated, but
they have a common voice in the prayer of the needy before God.
Romans 6:1b-11.
The reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans is about the believer’s death to the old life of
sin.
There is a separation from the old that is complete. In this teaching the Christian ritual of baptism re-enacts the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ. The old self dies as one
submerges below the water. The person
who emerges from the water rises “to walk in newness of life” (verse 4, NRSV).
What one is separated from in this passage is
Sin. Here, especially, Sin represents a cosmic power that binds and enslaves a person beyond all capacity
to master it – until its power is broken by an intervention from the
outside.
The power of Sin here is like that of addiction, as many recovering people have come to know addictive bondage in
their lives. Some have come to hear this
passage in such terms as these, substituting their addiction for the word
“sin.”
We know that our old self was crucified with him so
that the body of our addiction might be destroyed, and we might no longer be
enslaved to our addiction. For whoever
has died is freed from the addiction.
But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with
him. We know that Christ, being raised
from the dead, will never die again; death [from the addiction] no longer has
dominion over him. The death he died, he
died to the addiction, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to
God. So you also must consider
yourselves dead to the addiction and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Verses 6-11, NRSV adapted.)
Matthew 10:24-39.
The Gospel reading
is most of the later part of Jesus’ discourse on the sending out of the
disciples. The disciples are to take the
good news and the good works of God to the needy folks of Israel – and later, as understood by the end of the
Gospel, to all the nations. This section
of the discourse emphasizes the costs of discipleship, the separation of
the disciple from the conventional values of
the society.
(This passage has close parallels in Luke. See my
essay on Luke 12, the section entitled “Seven Sayings in Twelve Verses.” Use the Blog Archive for November 2019, click here Luke 12 .)
The first point is what to fear and not fear. Do not fear the persecutors (described in the
previous passage, verses 16-25), because they can only imprison you, beat you
up, and take your life. Fear the one
who can not only kill your body but cast your soul into hell -- destroying your inner integrity and the eternal value of your
life (verses 26-31).
The second point is the eternal value of what you
stand for. Who (or what) you proclaim
and confess in the public realm will determine how you will be registered in
the annals of heavenly renown and glory, what your life truly represents for
the ages (verses 32-33).
Not peace but a sword. Finally, one of the hardest sayings in
all of scripture is the declaration by Jesus that he came not to bring peace
but a sword – a sword which cuts apart and separates. This passage (verses 35-39) insists that the
ultimate issues of life do create conflict, and the emphasis here is on
conflict within the most intimate groups, the family.
Put most sharply, “Whoever loves father or mother
more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than
me is not worthy of me” (verse 37). This
is nothing less than a totalitarian claim that must be an absolute scandal to
those who place “family values” above all else.
This apocalyptic mission of Jesus pulls persons out of their natural
social matrix and makes them absolute instruments of God’s service. (It makes them an apocalyptic commune, as in Luke 12.) The image is similar to the Elijah and Elisha
roles in the days of old Israel. The commitment is for life or death.
The disciples addressed in this passage had to
expect intense division within their society.
They are told at the beginning to go only to the “lost sheep” of the
house of Israel, not to the nations or the Samaritans
(10:5-6). The conflicts within families
are conflicts among Judean people, conflicts precipitated by the claim that
Jesus was the Anointed One (the Messiah), who had already come and had now
received heavenly authority to call all nations to be baptized and learn his
teaching (28:16-20).
The Gospel According to Matthew was dictated in a
Syrian world in which Judeans
and Christians were separating. They were beginning seriously to go their own
ways, at the cost of intense and agonizing separations – separations of family
members, and of two great religious traditions of the Western world.
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