The Rock That Is Higher

by Madeleine L'engle

  What is the difference between those who attack me, and me, myself? Perhaps the main difference is that my faith is not seriously threatened because it is not literal but remains open to question and revelation. It is not always a comfortable faith; it prods and pushes me. I am a little wistful about the faith of some of my friends which is deep and strong and simple and—yes—literal. And I would never wish to shake it. That would be a kind of faithlessness on my part. But I also don’t want anybody to try to take away my faith because it is not exactly like someone else’s.

  And I would be quite content, I truly would, to have Mrs. X and the other attackers come to my dinner table and share a meal, because surely we are all children of God.

  I do not feel that I need to protect God as the attackers that night in Wheaton seemed to feel the need to do. I don’t think God needs our protection! God is All in All, and all that Love’s radiance asks is our love in return, not our protection. Indeed, in him there is no darkness at all, but there is darkness in us whenever we turn our backs on love. If I am secure in God’s perfect love I will have no fear, for love casts out fear.

  Knowledge is changeable (as Adam and Eve found out), but truth is eternal. Therefore, any change in knowledge does not in the least threaten or affect truth. So let us trust truth, that truth that was incarnate for us in Jesus.

  5

  STORY AS SCRIPTURE

  My parents gave me the great gift of faith in God who is a God of love, total love. It is ironic that because of my father’s precarious health and his late hours as a drama and music critic, I went with my parents on Sunday to a late church service or to Evensong and did not go to Sunday school. Unlike many people I have encountered, I have not had to spend a lot of my adult life unlearning the horrors of an angry God, horrors that are often taught in Sunday school, so that it is difficult for some people to understand that God is a God of love and forgiveness, not one who is out to punish us as harshly as possible for all our wrongdoings.

  Another misconception is of Jesus as a sad, self-pitying man who is not the wild and powerful and often unpredictable Jesus of Scripture. He was, as Isaiah prophesies, a man of sorrows, yes, but he was also a man of great joy, humor, and formidable authority.

  Perhaps it is because I was never fed platitudes in Sunday school, or taught about God’s wrath toward our total depravity, that I approached the Bible with no preconceptions. I went to the Bible as I went to any storybook, and it is indeed the greatest storybook I have ever encountered, far more exciting than The Arabian Nights! The story of Joseph and his dreams was a favorite from Hebrew Scripture, and in the New Testament I especially loved Jesus’ appearing to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection.

  When I was a child God was God. Because the eight- or nine-year-old child does not think in terms of sex in general, neither did I in particular, and certainly not about God. God was All in All. God filled every single human need, be it for father, mother, lover, sister, brother, friend. Even when I became a “grown-up” I never thought of the God I prayed to as exclusively male.

  And because I read the Bible as a storybook, not a moral tract (which it is not), I read it with pleasure (surely God’s Word should be pleasing to us!), and I read it for fun. I read it as play, not work, and surely that is how it ought to be read. Jesus had a marvelous sense of fun, of play. It is one of the sorrows of the Fall that work has become drudgery, rather than play. My actor husband and I were blessed that our work was also our play.

  I also read the Bible stories for comfort. I was not a successful child at school. At home there was constant tension caused by my father’s war-injured lungs and his long years of dying. I took my grief to the Bible for healing. I cannot think of any human grief that is not expressed for us in the Bible, from the very beginning stories in Genesis.

  Misunderstanding between husband and wife: Adam and Eve. And, of course, Hosea, though Hosea was not one of the books of the Bible I read as a child. I had to be older before I could understand Hosea’s grieving for his unfaithful wife and loving her nevertheless. His whole book is a hymn of mourning, an icon of that healthy grief that makes whole rather than destroys.

  Anguish over children: Adam and Eve again. Even worse than Abel’s death must have been knowing their firstborn child to be a murderer. This, too, I was going to have to wait to understand. All I knew as a child was that I often disappointed my parents, and that brought them grief. But their focus was more on the things I did that pleased them than on my faults, and I am grateful for that affirmation. Some parents define their children by negatives, by who they are not. (“Why didn’t you call me?” “Why aren’t you more like your sister?” “Why can’t you be more polite?”) My parents defined me by who I was (“You have such pretty handwriting.” “Thank you for waiting for me.” “I’m glad you enjoyed dinner.”), and that helped me to grow in a healthy way.

  King David’s children caused him much grief: Amnon, his firstborn, with unbridled lust raped his half sister Tamar; Tamar’s full brother, Absalom, was outraged and had Amnon killed. Then he turned against his father, and Absalom’s death pierced David through the heart.

  Childlessness: Three women of the Bible—Sarah and Elizabeth and Hannah—went through many years of being barren. So did my mother. I was a child who came late to my parents. Being barren in biblical times carried with it an onus that it doesn’t have today. Sarah, Elizabeth, and Hannah not only mourned their inability to bear a child, but had to bear the scorn of their friends and neighbors and even their husbands.

  It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I understood my mother’s joy, Sarah’s joy, and Elizabeth’s, and Hannah’s at the birth of a child. Moses’ older sister, Miriam, is a heroine, given less credit than she deserves for her courage in putting Moses in the basket of bulrushes, offering him to the Egyptian princess, getting her mother to be his wet nurse; for her dance of joy; for the wisdom she shared with her brothers.

  There is also Moses’ rage at the golden calf, his wild expression of grief and anger at the faithlessness of his people and their lack of obedience to the God who had saved them and led them out of Egypt.

  The grief over faithlessness is sounded over and over again in the Psalms and all through the story of King David himself. There is also grief at untimely death: David’s nephew, Asahel, cut down by Saul’s captain because he will not turn aside when warned. In Certain Women Nik, the playwright, shows Asahel’s mother’s grief in the scene where the elder brothers bury their youngest brother. Then there is David’s grief at Saul’s madness and folly, his grief at Saul’s and Jonathan’s deaths. Much of the grief and anger are worked out in the Psalms, yet always there is the final affirmation that God can forgive us and love us no matter how faithless we are, if only we will stop and turn to our Maker.

  And who is our Maker? I have trouble with the God in Deuteronomy who is far too often the God we think of as the God of the Old Testament, the tribal, local god who wants his people not only to take over the land, but to get rid of everybody in it, and if they don’t do it he will curse them:

  The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin….The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching hat and drought, with blight and mildew….[Y]ou will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you.

  I shudder. That is not the God who so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son, because we are so beloved. The God of retribution is a limited, primitive, human view of God, as our view of God is always limited, and human, and probably still pretty primitive. Moses, Miriam, and Aaron lived in a very primitive world of people and gods vying for power, and sometimes we seem to have learned little from their stories.

  So it is all the more extraordinary that Jesus renounced personal power. He made it
very clear that the power was his heavenly Father’s, not his.

  Once when I was in England I saw a splendid TV series on the life of Jesus. When the Pharisees were trying to trap him by asking whether or not it is right to pay tribute money to Caesar, the actor playing Jesus laughed heartily and said, “Give me a coin!” turning away anger with laughter. Turning things upside down and inside out as usual.

  To some people it is terrifying to look at any Bible story in a way different from what was taught in Sunday school (and are all Sunday school teachers truly and fully qualified to teach the Word of God to children?), but Jesus did that all the time. Matthew quotes Jesus:

  You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.

  What do we think of that? Do we obey the old Law, or the law of Jesus?

  A recovering fundamentalist said to me that she had been taught never to question anything that anyone in the Bible did or said, because they were all holy people of God and could do no wrong! There are many of them who were holy people of God, but they did much wrong! God’s people then and now are human and fallible. Both Abraham and Isaac passed their wives off as their sisters. Jacob, with his mother’s prompting, cheated his brother out of his birthright and their father’s blessing. Joseph’s brothers tried to kill him, and Joseph treated them like a cat playing with a mouse. Moses murdered and lost his temper. God’s chosen people worshiped the golden calf. David committed adultery with Uriah’s wife and then had Uriah killed. All the disciples ran away from Jesus in the garden in his hour of desperate need.

  And so it goes. The people of God are not all good and moral people. They do terrible things. But they know that they are utterly dependent on God, and if they do anything that is good, it is because God pushes them into it and helps them every inch of the way. They do not feel that they have to protect God from other people; they know that they fail God but they pick themselves up (with God’s help) out of the mud and try again. And they rejoice. David danced for God, leaping with joy around the ark.

  There are many fascinating women in Scripture, as complex as the men, and many of them break all our preconceptions of what women ought to be. (Whose “ought”? It does not seem to be God’s.) In Matthew’s genealogy, four women are listed as being Jesus’ forebears, and all four break the accepted patterns of their society. Rahab the harlot: outside society. Tamar: Tamar gave birth to twins after she had lain with her father-in-law, completely breaking all societal rules. Ruth: Ruth was a Moabitess, and the Moabites descended from Lot’s daughters who, after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, got their father drunk and slept with him in order to preserve his bloodline, an act that was and is abhorrent. Bathsheba: Bathsheba, the fourth, is referred to as the wife of Uriah, the man King David had killed after he and Bathsheba had committed adultery. All four of these women from whom Jesus came were outside society, beyond the pale. Someone examining the family genealogy would be shocked to find forebears such as these.

  What does this have to tell us? God is constantly breaking human rules in order to offer the greater rule of love, speaking through people shunned by society. Was Mary of Magdala socially acceptable? There is no indication whatsoever in Scripture that she was a prostitute, but she did have seven demons, demons that Jesus drove out of her. It was to this Mary that Jesus first showed himself after the Resurrection. Mary of Bethany and Mary of Magdala probably came closer to understanding the nature of Jesus than anybody else, able to expect from him the unexpected, and to accept it with joy.

  The stories in the Bible have nourished me all my life, as has the poetry, the long lists of laws, the history, and even the begats. (In my little play The Journey with Jonah, I named the three little rats on the sinking ship Huz, Buz, and Hazo, out of the begats!) During my morning and evening reading of Scripture I do not skip. If it’s there, it’s there for a reason, and I read it all, every bit of it. If we read Leviticus with an open heart we will see that the message is not to burden people with an overwhelming number of laws, but to call us to be God’s holy people. The laws are there to help us, not to hinder.

  But it’s the stories that have always drawn me. When I was a child (as now) there were stories I found difficult, such as that of the workers in the vineyard, where those who had worked only an hour were paid as much as those who had worked all day in the heat of the sun. It wasn’t fair! Like most children, I wanted things to be fair, even though life had already taught me that unfairness abounds. I think many of us still feel like the child stamping and crying out, “It’s not fair!” Those who have worked all day long should certainly be paid more than those who came in at the last minute! But Jesus is constantly trying to make us understand that God’s ways are not our ways, and that God’s love is far less selective and far greater than ours. “Is thine eye evil because I am good?” God asks in Matthew’s Gospel after he has finished paying all the workers the same wage. When God blesses those we deem unworthy, does our jealousy make our eye become evil? Are we, like the elder brother, like Jonah, upset at God’s forgiveness? Daily I need a deep and penitent awareness of how much greater God’s love is than my own.

  It is not coincidence that Jesus so often uses Samaritans as protagonists for his stories, knocking out our exclusiveness by bringing the social outcasts into the inner circle and showing them as warmer of heart than the socially acceptable.

  The story of Gideon was a favorite fairy tale for me, with Gideon being the least of his family, and his family being the least of all the tribes (somebody else socially unacceptable). And I have always loved the world of Ezekiel, with those incredible whirling wheels and the dry bones that God brought together to live again. The story of Esther is full of excitement and beauty, and violence, too, and I anguished over Jephthah’s daughter. Yes, a vow is sacred, but wasn’t this young girl’s life even more sacred? And what about Herod having John the Baptist beheaded because of a casual vow he had made when Salome’s dancing pleased him? People don’t make that kind of vow nowadays, do they? At least not in the Western world. At least not often. Haven’t we learned that God does not want to be bargained with?

  A story I found especially troublesome was that of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac. How could a God of love demand the sacrifice of the son he had promised to Abraham and Sarah? What kind of cold-blooded testing was that? Did Sarah know about it? Surely not! No mother would let her husband take her child to be used as a holocaust. If I felt a hint of that when I was a child, it became stronger when I was a mother myself. Sarah would say, “No, Lord, there are things that even you do not ask.”

  If there is more than one way of interpreting the parable of the Good Samaritan, there may well be more than one way of interpreting God’s strange demand of Abraham, and I came across a completely new exegesis one winter when I was conducting my annual writers’ workshop at a beautiful Episcopal monastery overlooking the Hudson River.

  One year my first assignment was for the participants to pick any woman in Scripture (with the exception of Mary) at a time of crisis and decision, and write a story about her. We got some wonderful stories, and then I asked the writers to pass their stories to the person on the left, and that person was to rewrite the story from the point of view of someone else in it. At the end of the class one young woman came to me complaining, “Madeleine, I got Sarah and Abraham and Isaac, and you know I’ve written and written about them, and you’ve told me never to write from the point of view of God.”

  I laughed. Indeed, it is not a good idea for the finite human being to try to write from the point of view of the infinite God. But I knew that this young woman was well grounded in Scripture, that she was a fine writer, and I trusted her ability to meet a challenge. “Go for it, Judith. Write from the point of view
of God.”

  The next day she came in with a dialogue between God and the archangel Raphael, the physician of God. Raphael is very pleased with Abraham’s response to God’s demand, and begins extolling Abraham’s virtues to God. And God is not enthusiastic. The more Raphael praises Abraham, the less enthusiastic God gets. Finally Raphael says, “But God, you put Abraham to the test and he passed.”

  God replies, “He did not pass. He failed. He chose law over love.”

  And all kinds of lights flashed on for me.

  (Of course. Abraham failed, and God kept right on loving him and gave Abraham everything he had promised. We all fail God’s tests over and over again. We failed most horribly when God came to live with us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.)

  The dialogue between Raphael and God continues until God tells Raphael to go, and Raphael says, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Perhaps it does take the feminine in the Godhead to understand that Abraham failed.

  I told this story at a parish weekend, and some people were scandalized. Why? This interpretation does not change a line of Scripture. And the writer, a Jewish Christian, grew up in the tradition of the Midrash, stories written to explicate Scripture. One of the wonders of story is that it is alive, not static. A story that meant one thing to me when I was forty may mean something quite different to me today. Certainly I understand Sarah better now than I did when I was a child, or even when I was a child-bearing woman, having my babies during the normal age-span. We bring our own preoccupations and preconceptions to story, our own wounds, our own joys, and therefore our responses are going to vary. That does not invalidate them. The stories of Jesus’ healing are particularly poignant to me right now, while I am still in the midst of my own healing. I was not able to reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, but those who loved me touched it for me.