Chosen

     For the second Sunday of Lent readings at Mass included the story of God’s demand that Abraham offer up Isaac as a sacrifice. The homilist presented it as a mystery, impossible to understand. I’m glad somebody else has trouble with that passage. I went back and read Abraham’s whole story again for the umpteenth time and I have to say I don’t understand any of it. Abraham is usually portrayed as a paragon of faith and obedience but that isn’t how I see him at all. I see him as a man of profoundly weak character who was blessed far beyond anything he deserved. He had that in common with Peter. God seems to have a distinct preference for shaky characters.
     I’ll start with Abraham’s offering up Isaac. He wasn’t the first son he had been willing to sacrifice. That would have been Ishmael, the eldest. If you recall Sarai (Sarah) had decided she would never have children and insisted Abram take the Egyptian slave Hagar as his concubine. That apparently was not an unusual practice in those days. Sarah wasn’t the only woman in Genesis to sanction such an arrangement.  But when Isaac was born Sarah became jealous of Hagar’s son and insisted that they both be banished. Abraham meekly complied, sending them into the desert with only some bread and a skin of water. The text is confused on the details, Ishmael was apparently a fourteen year old infant, but God intervened, led Hagar to a well, and promised her that Ishmael would found a great nation (today’s Arabs believe they are that nation, Hagar’s well is the oasis at Mecca.) God had already made the same assurance to Abraham. I suppose we could conclude that he showed a remarkable degree of trust but the whole episode is just one more mystery to me.
     There are others. Sarai was a beautiful septuagenarian when Abram took her to Egypt and had her pretend to be his sister for fear that someone would kill him to get her. Sure enough Pharaoh heard about her, took her into his household and rewarded Abram with livestock and slaves. When Pharaoh discovered she was already married he expelled them from Egypt but Abram got to keep his property. They repeated the deceit again years later with another king. Sarai must have been one gorgeous old woman. I can’t fault Abram for doing what he had to do to survive but today we would call someone like him a pimp.
     It’s a short story really, taking up only a brief section of Genesis, but what a plot! Faith and obedience seem to be Abram’s only virtues but that is enough for God to make him a man of great wealth and to promise him over and over again that his descendents will be too numerous to count.  Maybe the message is that if God can do that for someone as flawed as Abram there must be hope for the rest of us.
     As an adolescent I gave up trying to read Genesis literally but I still read it regularly, probably more often than any other scripture. There is a theme there that despite its inconsistencies seems to be trying to say something about us and our relationship with God that I would really like to understand better than I do. At one level the stories are simple and straight forward but the more I think about them the more confused I become. What can this message really be? In the end I suspect my homilist was right. It’s a mystery, impossible to explain.