heaven’s unruly engagement: Genesis 16

We sometimes believe God would listen to us if we could just calm things down a little and finish up the dusting.

The patriarchal narratives of Genesis offer no support to such an idea. Hagar’s remarkable interaction with Abraham’s God is unruly from start to finish. Yet the son of this servant of Abraham’s wife Sarai is named to honor God’s listening skills and the place of Hagar’s encounter with him after his powers of observation.

Nothing about the story escapes the prevailing unruliness.

Hagar comes into the picture in the first place because of an untidy sexual arrangement. Unable to produce for her husband the desired son, Sarai encourages the old man to sleep with her servant so that through this negotiated settlement she might ‘build up’ a legacy. When Hagar does as required and conceives, Sarai makes her life miserable to the point that Hagar escapes into the threatening desert rather than endure her mistress’ hectoring. What is more, the ‘angel of the Lord’ meets her in her distress but then inexplicably orders her back to the environs in which her pregnancy and her persecution had originated. He also intimates the menace that her child will grow up to become.

And the angel of the LORD said to her, ‘Now you have conceived and shall bear a son; you shall call him Ishmael, for the LORD has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man, with his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and he shall live at odds with all his kin. (Genesis 16:11–12 NRSV)

Even the son she carries in her womb, though he be the scion of a great nation, will be a ‘wild ass of a man’ who makes violence his code of behavior.

Still, in spite of the fact that Hagar’s son’s life will constantly overflow the banks of propriety, he will be called Ishmael—’God listens’—to commemorate YHWH’s attentiveness to his mother in her straits.

Supplementing the point about interaction between God and a troubled human being that Ishmael’s name makes each time it is thoughtfully voiced, Hagar adds her own comment about heaven’s unexpected perceptiveness:

So she named the LORD who spoke to her, ‘You are El-roi’ (arguably, ‘the God who sees me’); for she said, ‘Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?’ Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered. (Genesis 16:13–14 NRSV)

So does the narrative that lays down the circumstances in which Abraham’s faith converges with heaven’s purpose to engender a chosen people occupy itself with divine attentiveness to those whose lives unfold somewhat on the margins of that celebrated project.

In a moment the patriarch-in-the-making will venture before his heavenly visitors as they journey on a collision course toward Sodom and Gomorrah a daring question: ‘Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?’

The vignette involving Hagar, more than a moment of narrative indiscipline, prepares the reader already to understand what ‘right’ must mean when the God of Abraham allows human beings a glimpse of himself. On the one hand, heaven’s attention will be drawn often and mercifully to the outcast. On the other, the God who belongs up there seems possessed of a singular focus that allows him to listen and to see when everything down here is noise, blood, and dead dreams.

hope, futility, hope: Genesis 5

In the ‘account of Adam’s line’ that appears in Genesis chapter five, the genealogy’s structure assumes the very shape of the human situation.

The summary of each individual’s history begins with life and ends with death, this for a race that the narrative presents as deathless until they rebelled against the Creator who blessed them as soon as he had breathed life into them. An example establishes the pattern:

When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh. And after he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Seth lived 912 years, and then he died. (Genesis 5:6–8 NIV)

Modern translations rightly tidy up the flow of things with a subordinate clause (‘When A had lived 105 years …). The Hebrew text itself develops the human rhythm to a more austere beat:

And A lived X years and he engendered B … And all the days of A were Y years, and he died.

Always, he lived. Always he played his role in the sustaining of the race by engendering children. Always, he died.

Against this background beat of hope and futility, two individuals provide a hopeful syncopation. Inexplicably, a certain Enoch ‘walks with God’. Whatever this laconic phrase implies about the intimacy this man enjoyed with his Maker, Enoch eluded the grim rhythm of death because of it. The text cries out for explanation but yields none. After registering a second time that Enoch ‘walked with God’, the text beguiles:

‘ … and he was no more, because God took him.’

Then the rhythm of futility resumes. Methusaleh, Enoch’s son, lives a very long time, yet he follows the step of his grandfather rather than his father. He dies without comment, as is the way with his glorious and doomed race.

A certain Lamech interrupts the beat, not by disappearing like Enoch but with a shout of hope. Of Lamech’s son, it is said …

… and (Lamech) called his son Noah (‘Rest’), saying ‘This one will comfort us from the labor and from the painful toil of our hands caused by the ground that YWHW has cursed!’

One wonders what Lamech knew of his fated son, regarding whom the text of Genesis would in time interrupt another drumbeat of darkness by observing with stunning resilience …

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Lamech will not say. Having cried out his reason for hope, he dies in his time. Silenced, unexplaining, he is overtaken by the inevitable.

Yet in chronicling—however briefly—Enoch’s inscrutable stroll and recording Lamech’s cry of hope when a special child is born, the text allows one to anticipate that the percussive insistence of death and futility is but the tonal foundation from which a melody might at some unforeseen moment rise. And soar.

mixed emotion: Zechariah 12

The twelfth chapter of the book of Zechariah is timid about neither the Zion-centered nationalism that it celebrates nor the corresponding defanging of the nations that besiege Jerusalem ‘in that day’. To the contrary, the Lord announces through his prophet that he will make Jerusalem ‘a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling’. Then, via the extravagant mixing of metaphors that is characteristic of the genre, the Lord ‘will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.’

The harassed Judahite city will become the Archimedean point that cannot be shifted while its attackers are levered violently this way and that, their former belligerence reduced suddenly to drunken impotence.

One might expect, especially that reader who blinkers himself by peering exclusively through the lens of modern and post-modern sentimentalities, that Zion’s residents here are merely the righteous victors and her attackers simply the villainous victims of Jerusalem’s vindication from above.

As so often, this slice of prophetic literature has more subtle things to say, its knife cutting with both edges.

On that day the LORD will shield those who live in Jerusalem, so that the feeblest among them will be like David, and the house of David will be like God, like the Angel of the LORD going before them. On that day I will set out to destroy all the nations that attack Jerusalem.

So far, the categories of table-turning vindication are somewhat familiar to us. It is true that the text daringly elevates Davidic leadership beyond normal bounds. Yet the bifurcation of the human protagonists into good and bad is conventional, hardly preparing us for what follows.

And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son. On that day the weeping in Jerusalem will be great, like the weeping of Hadad Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. The land will mourn, each clan by itself, with their wives by themselves: the clan of the house of David and their wives, the clan of the house of Nathan and their wives, the clan of the house of Levi and their wives, the clan of Shimei and their wives, and all the rest of the clans and their wives. (Zechariah 12:8–14 NIV)

Then, as though to weave the whole picture forcibly together so that no one might blanch at this bit of intense mourning-in-victory, the text storms forward:

On that day I will strike every horse with panic and its rider with madness,” declares the LORD. “I will keep a watchful eye over the house of Judah, but I will blind all the horses of the nations. Then the leaders of Judah will say in their hearts, ‘The people of Jerusalem are strong, because the LORD Almighty is their God. (Zechariah 12:4–5 NIV)

It is not difficult to see how the text has flourished in the hands of Christian interpreters, with its unlikely reference to looking upon the Lord, ‘the one whom they have pierced.’

Laying aside that detail for a moment, one finds in this text that curious energy with which the biblical prophets practice their surgery upon the hearts of those who have benefitted from YHWH’s undeserved rescue.

How are we to understand the presence of bitter grief and mourning even as the sights and sounds of YHWH’s vindicating rescue are—in the lavish picture painted by the text—all around?

If one is to take these ‘minor prophets’ seriously, the ‘day of the Lord’ is both light and deep darkness. YHWH’s rescue as it is splayed onto the prophetic canvas in vivid color, is real, worthy, and life-restoring. Yet those who receive it know that it should not have been this way. Joyous relief resolves into penitent grief and then back again. Neither obviates the other.

Each contributes to the dynamic with which the chapter ends:

They will call on my name and I will answer them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.’

ease and unease: Revelation 18, Psalm 146

The biblical witness privileges the anxiety that we resist.

Taking up a motif that is common to the Old Testament prophets, the Book of Revelation celebrates the demise of ‘Babylon’ by mocking the ease in which she had luxuriated.

Give her (that is, to Babylon) as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. In her heart she boasts, ‘I sit as queen; I am not a widow, and I will never mourn. (Revelation 18:7 NIV)

It is often this way when a privileged class of human beings or an erstwhile superpower comes under YHWH’s judgment. Sarcastic irony is deployed against the certainty with which the fallen victim once assumed that his wealth and safety would endure forever. When one gathers such statements together, it appears almost as though presumption itself stands as an indictment again the one who deploys it to ward off the fear of fragility that lesser mortals endure as a feature of everyday life.

By contrast, Psalm 146 dares to suggest that true security consists in YHWH’s attentive care. The very first psalm, with its more famous lyric of trust, finds its final voice by asserting that  ’the LORD watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.’ Taking up that theme, the one hundred forty-sixth claims that YHWH’s gaze falls most resolutely on those who might have been presumed to escape his notice altogether:

The LORD watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Psalm 146:9 NIV)

The alien, the fatherless, and the widow know anxiety of a most immediate kind. Will I eat today? Will I have shelter from tomorrow’s rain? Will my little patch of soil be mine at next harvest or will my powerful neighbor have annexed it to his own expanse?

Such defenselessness is not experienced, apart from the psalm’s and Revelation’s sort of perceptiveness, as security. The careful reader begins to wonder whether it is safe to be completely safe.

Yet Babylon can fall in a moment, leaving its stunned proprietors to fend for themselves among the smoke and ashes. They had so much to lose, and lost it all. Their calamity is loud melodrama.

Meanwhile, in this psalm’s vision, the alien chews his little morsel, hardly noticing the spectacle. The orphan gets through one more day. The widow remembers a husband who brought bread through that door and thinks to herself that YHWH is a bit like that.

speaking truth to power: Daniel 5

Pathetic Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, is that shadowy diminishment of his great father Nebuchadnezzar that is familiar to readers of royal drama.

Our phrase ‘the writing is on the wall’—everyone knows what it means—comes from a frightening incident on the last day of this king’s sad, little life. Yet we struggle to recall Belshazzar’s name.

The storied turning of his father out to the field to ‘eat grass with the bullocks’ and have his bathing reduced to what the ‘dew of heaven’ could do for his body is all lost on Belshazzar, the son. Nebuchadnezzar’s famous recovery after he acknowledged that ‘the Most High God is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and sets over them whomever he wishes’ also seems have been banished to the palace’s section for children’s tales and romantic lore.

Hapless Belshazzar knows nothing of the story line of which his intoxication with wealth and power is a mere footnote.

A hand scrawls a cryptic message on the walls of Belshazzar’s orgiastic, sacrilegious banqueting hall. ‘Mene, mene … tekel … parsin.’

When his hired advisors fail to decipher what turns out to be the sentence both of the king and his misled nation, it falls to someone else to remember that there remains in this kingdom a man who manifests the wisdom of the holy gods. Desperate now, Belshazzar has Daniel brought in.

A lavish reward is of course offered to this Judean sage who was brought to Babylon along with his people’s most precious temple objects, now flecked with the spittle and vomit of Belshazzar’s drunken companions.

Then Daniel answered in the presence of the king, ‘Let your gifts be for yourself, or give your rewards to someone else! Nevertheless I will read the writing to the king and let him know the interpretation.’ (Daniel 5:17 NRSV)

Daniel can speak truth to power without recompense because of the very content of his speech to the petty tyrant’s truly great father. It is the God of heaven who gives that which acquisitive men believe they have taken and made. Back then, in Nebuchadnezzar’s day, Daniel had reminded power that ‘the God of heaven rules in the kingdoms of men and gives them to whomever he wills’.

Who needs the jewels and tunics of a doomed, self-elevated kinglet when such truth lives in the heart and—when summoned by crazed power into its gaudy halls—on fearless lips?

new book!: Dan Schmidt, Our Savior Come. An Advent Companion

From time to time words like those that flow onto this blog find their way into other streams.

I’m happy to announce that my friend Dan Schmidt has just published a book you may want to pick up in print or digital format.

Our Savior Come, An Advent Companion presents a collection of essays intended to walk with you as you navigate the forthcoming Christmas season.

I was delighted to contribute a piece entitled ‘No God in Israel?’.

If you read canter bridge, you’ll likely want to own this book. Get it here.

not many wise: 1 Corinthians 1

The Bible maintains a consistently high regard for those human qualities and actions that are noble, elevated, and good. Indeed, it encourages one to view such things in proximity to that dignity or glory which belongs in its purest form only to God.

Yet the biblical witness remains unimpressed by the tawdry or ungenuine proxies for those qualities represented by—for example—class or economic potency or impressive speech or educational credentials. It is not that any of these things is necessarily bad, just that they are awful measures of what is truly good. Too often, such things elevate what deserves to remain low and blind our eyes from recognizing what is best esteemed.

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:27–29 NRSV)

The news of a crucified messiah—that the Lord of history achieves his highest aims by that reconciliation which depends upon deep paradox—drives home the point. Hearts enlivened and eyes made sharp by this message remain ever attentive to discovering wisdom and strength where a conventional approach—the apostle Paul calls it fleshly—would never think to look.

The world is peppered with such people. Lacking all the accoutrements of achievement, they manifest strength, discernment, and generosity in sufficient measure to remove any glibness from the expression imitatio dei.

Paul is sure that the Lord’s tactic of taking up residence in the humblest of lives once and for all proves other measures of greatness to be the collective fraud that they are. The apostle’s point is hardly that true glory never shows up in the lives of successful and impressive people, only that it so much more frequently shines in and from those who lack those credentials.

Paul shares with his readers in Corinth a demographic insight: their numbers include few of the great and the good, the lettered, the eloquent, and the rich. He hardly gloats upon the scarcity of these, but considers that the demise of the old rules should occasion grateful laughter from those upon whom grace has shone.

no hurry: Proverbs 20

Those well-intentioned stewards of spiritual humility who make ‘the depravity of man’ their first and central principle fall easily into a rigidity that does not characterize the biblical witness which they claim as their source. Scripture’s own assessment of humankind underscores human dignity and potentiality at the same time as it holds tight to the brokenness in which these things are realized.

Yet partisans of human corruption, if it is not unfair to understand their purpose in this way, are on to something.

get up!: Proverbs 20

One could wish, on a sleepy morning’s reading, for something more inspiring, more … um … spiritual.

Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. (Proverbs 20:13 NRSV)

The expression at first seems an exaggeration: Don’t love sleep.

feasting amid foes: Psalm 23

The generative peculiarity of the twenty-third Psalm lies in its refusal to compromise the threat.

The valley of deep darkness (traditionally, ‘the valley of the shadow of death’) and the surrounding enemies remain intact. Their destructive capacity is not underestimated nor is the enemies’ sinister intention disavowed. They are simply left, in the poetics of the psalm, to be what they are.