God cared about Ishmael, crying with terror there in the wilderness.
God cares about us, for our Lord is in us and we are in our Lord, and el’s beauty is our beauty and all of creation is an act of creative love.
Toward the end of her book Peter Abelard, Helen Waddell writes:
“My God,” said Thibault, “what’s that?”
From somewhere near them in the woods a cry had risen, a thin cry, of such intolerable anguish that Abelard turned dizzy on his feet, and caught at the wall.
“It’s a child’s voice,” he said. “Oh, God, are they at a child?”
Thibault had gone outside. The cry came again, making the twilight and the firelit hearth a mockery.
“A rabbit,” said Thibault. He listened….“It’ll be in a trap…Christ!” The scream came yet again.
Abelard was beside him, and the two plunged down the bank.
“Down by the river,” said Thibault. “I saw them playing, God help them, when I was coming home. You know the way they go demented with fun in the evenings. It will have been drumming with its hind paws to itself and brought down the trap.”
Abelard went on, hardly listening. “Oh, God,” he was muttering. “Let it die. Let it die quickly.”
But the cry came yet again. On the right, this time. He plunged through a thicket of hornbeam.
“Watch out,” said Thibault, thrusting past him. “The trap might take the hand off you.”
The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.
It was this last confiding thrust that broke Abelard’s heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. “Thibault,” he said, “do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?”
Thibault nodded.
“I know,” he said. “Only—I think God is in it too.”
Abelard looked up sharply.
“In it? Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?”
Again Thibault nodded.
“Then why doesn’t He stop it?”
“I don’t know,” said Thibault. “Unless—unless it’s like the Prodigal Son. I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this,” he stroked the limp body, “is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do.”
God is in it, too.
That was the great difference between the God of the nomadic Hebrew and the multiple gods of the other tribes. Abraham’s and Sarah’s God cared.
But when he told them to leave their comfortable home and go into an unknown country, he didn’t coerce them. They obeyed because they chose to obey, not because God forced them. They could have been like the Prodigal Son, choosing the fleshpots. But they listened, and they obeyed, and they went into the unknown, and God was with them.
God is in it, whatever it is, with us.
That is heresy, Abelard and Thibault were taught, heresy still being taught in some seminaries. But God, in it, with us, is the only God I can believe in. It was the tempter who thought up impassibility and labelled as heresy the idea that God is part of all of creation, and suffers whenever any part of creation suffers. But what else does the Incarnation affirm? How else do we pray, except to the Maker of ourselves who loves us enough to be part of us? What else do we affirm when we do as Jesus taught us to do and take the bread and drink the wine and affirm that el’s beauty is our beauty and that we are in el and el is in us and all, all, is el’s?
So God heard Ishmael crying, as only a small, thirsty, frightened little boy can cry, and in the dry desert wilderness the Master of the Universe brought up a fountain of water.
God broke open a fountain in the dry, parched land of the desert in order to quench the thirst of a child. And after we read this evidence of God’s loving concern for the lost little things of creation, we are taken back to the center of the story of Abraham and Sarah.
Everything is going pleasantly for them. Abraham makes a treaty with Abimelech, also about a well (wells are of crucial importance in any desert land) where Abraham plants a tamarisk tree and worships the living Lord.
It seemed that Abraham and Sarah in their old age had everything they wanted. And then God called, again:
“Abraham!” And Abraham answered, “Yes, here I am!”
“Take your son,” God said, “your only son, Isaac, whom you love so much, and go to the land of Moriah.
There on a mountain that I will show you, offer him as a sacrifice to me.”
There follows no cry of outrage or rebellion. Perhaps what God asked was beyond the bounds of outrage and rebellion. Other gods demanded human sacrifice, or displayed anger that could only be appeased by blood. But those were other gods, gods who didn’t care about their people. The difference between the God of the Hebrews and the gods of the neighbouring tribes was that God does care about el’s people. They matter.
So how could God ask such a thing of Abraham?
Christians have been criticized by other theists for equating the sacrifice of Abraham with the sacrifice of God the Father when his son was crucified. I don’t think God ever tells the same story twice. One story can help us understand another; we know more about human confusion because of Hamlet than we would otherwise, but no other story is the story of Hamlet. From Oedipus we know more about the terrible fact that even an unwitting sin must be punished than we would otherwise, but no other story is the story of Oedipus. The great drama of Jesus of Nazareth is unique, independent of the complex drama of Abraham and Sarah and their son. We may see a pattern that links them, but to equate the two is to show a misunderstanding of the Trinity.
The story of God’s terrible demand of Abraham is unique and has unique things to tell us. How could a loving Lord, a Lord who cares about el’s creatures, for whom the tiniest atom is of the utmost importance, the hair on a head, the fate of a sparrow, how could the Master of the Universe ask such an unnatural, impossible thing of Abraham?
How indeed? The question has haunted us for several thousand years. In the Middle Ages, God’s demand of Abraham was often the subject of miracle and morality plays. In the beginning of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard retells the story of Abraham and Isaac three different ways and still he reaches no conclusion; even today we cannot understand it unless God reveals its meaning to us. Our only proper response is silence, a silence that is echoed following the words from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
In Jerusalem, inside the old city, I went to the great gold mosque which the devout Jew cannot enter because the mosque is built over the place where the temple stood and no one knows exactly where the Holy of Holies was placed.
The Holy of Holies is so sacred that the place where it stood so long ago may not be stepped on, even inadvertently. I went in, with my shoes off, feeling deep awe (Moses took his shoes off before the burning bush, and so must we when we approach God’s holy places), and I stood in front of a great spreading rock, the rock where Abraham laid Isaac and raised his knife to kill his son, and my skin prickled. In my bare feet I stood there, lost in wonder at the magnificent incomprehensibility of the Creator, who loves us so much that he came to live with us and be part of us and die for us and rise again for us and send the Holy Spirit to comfort us. And I was, somehow, comforted by the very incomprehensibility of all that makes life creative and worth living.
The story continues:
Early the next morning Abraham cut some wood for the sacrifice, loaded his donkey, and took Isaac and two servants with him.
How must Sarah have felt? What kind of laughter was there in this? Did Abraham tell her what God had asked of him, tell her
perhaps at the last moment in order to avoid her tears and protestations? Or did he just take the boy and go? Scripture says nothing, but Sarah was a mother. She had known Abraham for a long time, and there was no way he could have hidden from her the heaviness of his heart.
So perhaps she got it out of him. “Abraham, something’s wrong. What is it? Tell me.” And then perhaps he unburdened himself. It is not good for the human creature to be alone. And what a burden that was for Abraham to carry, much heavier than for the boy. He must have told Sarah, his helpmeet.
In my ears across the centuries I can hear the echo of Sarah’s cry. “God! You know nothing about being a mother!”
Our perception of God has grown and changed through the centuries, but we still have learned little about the mother in the godhead, we have focussed so consistently on the father. I understand Sarah’s cry, and the medieval mystics’ radiant affirmation of Christ as sister, lover, All in all. We need that intuitive and casual knowing that as God is in all things, el is also in both sexes, the brittle insistence on God’s femaleness is as limited as the old paternalism.
But Sarah knew about being a mother and, after all she had been through, I doubt if she would have hesitated to tell God where el was lacking.
Abraham started out for the place that God had told him about. On the third day he saw the place in the distance. He said to his men, “Stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go over there; and when we have worshipped we will come back to you.”
So Abraham took the wood for the sacrifice and laid it on Isaac’s shoulder; he himself carried the fire and the knife, and the two of them went on together.
Isaac said to Abraham, “Father!”
And he answered, “What is it, my son?”
Isaac said, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide a lamb for the sacrifice, my son.” And the two of them went on together to the place of which God had spoken.
There Abraham built an altar and arranged the wood. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.
What spareness in the telling of the story! Not an extraneous detail. Here I am quoting largely from the New English Bible, but in all the translations I have checked there is the same simplicity, the same control, enough to keep us wondering for centuries. Did Isaac realize what was happening? Did he scream with terror? Did he beg to be released? Did he try to resist, to escape, to run away? Abraham
took the knife to kill his son; but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
The angel of the Lord said, “Do not raise your hand against the boy. Do not touch him. Now I know that you have obedient reverence for God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
You have not withheld from me. The angel is speaking in the voice of the Lord, elself.
Abraham looked up, and there he saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. So he went and took the ram and offered it as a sacrifice instead of his son. Abraham named the place Jehovah-jireh; and to this day the saying is: “In the mountain of the Lord it was provided.”
Then the angel of the Lord called from heaven a second time to Abraham, “This is the word of the Lord: by my own self I swear: because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you abundantly and greatly multiply your descendants until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea shore.”
Perhaps this story tells us more about the nature of man’s understanding of God than it does about God elself. The story is staggering in its simplicity. It never falters. Its very straightforwardness, its lack of explanation is one of the most difficult things about it.
But the Bible is for me—I repeat—the living Word of God, although I do not need to believe that it was divinely dictated by God in a long beard and white gown (a picture of Moses, again) and written down in a moment of time by an angel scribe. It is a great story book written over a great many centuries by many people. And when I call it a great story I am emphasizing that it is a great book of Truth. It is the truth by which I live. I do not understand it all, but that does not make it any less the truth.
During the writing of this I was asked to tell, during an interview for a Christian magazine, what Jesus meant in my life. I think I know what I was supposed to say, but though most of the things I was supposed to say are true, they don’t sound natural to me; they sound out of context with the God who created everything and everybody and called it all good. So I answered that Jesus taught me about story, the truth of story, and that story is light.
Sometimes the light of the story seems veiled or shadowed, no matter how we struggle to seek for its meaning.
After his terrible experience, we may ask ourselves—could Isaac ever have trusted his father again? Was Abraham’s response to God changed? What are we to understand? How does God’s demand of Abraham fit in with el’s love for all creation? Was Isaac’s fear of as much consequence to God as Ishmael’s tears?
I am still waiting for the telephone call which will tell me that my college friend is dead, and I know that even though those of us who love her deeply may not be near her hospital bed, we are nevertheless with her. And I think of a mutual friend who died a few years ago at ninety-three, a great lady of vision and laughter who never lost her ability to change and to go into the unknown, and I feel that she is waiting at the gates, to hold out her hand and say, “See! El has not forgotten you; you are carved in the palm of his hand. As am I, and all of creation. See! You can be with and pray for those you love even better here than you could before! See! El has created you to be, and it is good.”
Today the great blue spruce which we planted as a tiny seedling, far, far from the house at Crosswicks, had to be cut down. In thirty years the little plant had grown into an enormous tree which not only shaded us from the glare of the hot, setting sun in summer, but whose roots were beginning to undermine the old foundations of the house. It is the spruce our son once used for a ladder when he came home from a late night swim with friends and did not want to disturb his sleeping grandmother. Now there is a great new space of air where the spruce stood; it seems the atoms have not yet gathered together within its outline.
And it is somehow all part of the story. Perhaps one day that rock I saw in the mosque in Jerusalem will be gone, that rock on which Abraham bound and laid Isaac, but the story will not be gone. And I do not have to understand, not Isaac’s ultimate death, after Jacob had cheated Esau out of the blessing which should have been his; not the cutting down of the great spruce (it’s only a tree, they said), not even my own lack of understanding.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes (and now I am turning to the Jerusalem Bible):
He has said, “My grace is enough for you; my power is at its best in weakness.” So [says Paul] I shall be very happy to make my weakness my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me.
And that, too, is what Christ means to me, that God can come to me in my weakness and poverty and still find use for it and say that this, too, is good, is very good.
In Messengers of God, Elie Wiesel writes:
And Abraham sacrificed the ram in place of his son.
Poor ram, said certain sages. God tests man and the ram is killed. That is unjust; after all, he has done nothing.
Said Rabbi Yehoshua: This ram had been living in Paradise since the sixth day of creation, waiting to be called. He was destined from the very beginning to replace Isaac on the altar.
A special ram, with a unique destiny, of whom Rabbi Hanina ben Doss said: Nothing of the sacrifice was lost. The ashes were dispersed in the Temple’s sanctuary; the sinews David used as chords for his harp; the skin was claimed by the prophet Elijah to clothe himself; as for the horns, the smaller one called the people together at the foot of Mount Sinai and the lar
ger one will resound one day, announcing the coming [the first? or the second?] of the Messiah.
Again we confront the problem of free will. Did the ram have to come, to play his part in the drama, to get his horns caught in the bushes, and to be killed in place of Isaac? Did he not have a choice to say Yes, or to say No?
In the parable of the two sons, when the father asked them to go work in the vineyard for him, the elder said, “Of course, Father, I will,” and did not go. The younger son said, “I won’t” and then thought better of it and went.
There is also a legend that Mary was not the first young woman to whom the angel came. But she was the first one to say Yes.
And how unsurprising it would be for a fourteen-year-old girl to refuse the angel. To be disbelieving. Or to say:
“Are you sure you mean—
but I’m unworthy—
I couldn’t, anyhow—
I’d be afraid. No, no,
it’s inconceivable, you can’t be asking me—
I know it’s a great honour
but wouldn’t it upset them all,
both our families?
They’re very proper, you see.
Do I have to answer now?
I don’t want to say no—
it’s what every girl hopes for
even if she won’t admit it.
But I can’t commit myself to anything
this important without turning it over
in my mind for a while
and I should ask my parents
and I should ask my—
And It Was Good Page 17