Rev Molly Phinney-Baskette
I hate horror movies. Watching a movie where you spend half your time waiting for something terrible to happen, and the other half watching the terrible thing happen, is not my idea of a good time. I never liked garden-variety slasher films to begin with, but now even the new brand of intellectual, artistic gore-fest is off the table. The Coen Brothers, who I used to love, are forever ruined for me. Quentin Tarantino is in the doghouse. The reason for my newfound sensitivity? I had a kid. Having kids cracks you open in a way you’ve never been opened; it makes you vulnerable, and anything dark or violent in your immediate vicinity leaks into all the new fissures in your soul. It makes it impossible to watch the evening news, let alone The Lovely Bones. I manufacture enough daymares and nightmares in my imagination now, without any help from Hollywood.
I have never understood, in any case, what pleasure there can be in watching the same old horror movie motifs over and over again: the threat of pure evil on the innocent, the foolish choices of that innocent, who goes into the basement when they should go out of the house, into the woods when they should run toward buildings and people and light. T the failure of supernatural help, the ultimate failure of the innocents to live, leaving only one witness alive to tell the tale, to pass it on, as a warning.
Which is why I get why it might be so hard for some of you to open your Bibles. Because you see, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Daniel, it is one horror show after another. The prophet Daniel is thrust into the lions’ den, where many other Jews have gone before, their bone fragments lying about, the smell of blood still heavy in the air. Joshua, the successor to Moses, has his Hebrew soldiers march 7 times ‘round the Jericho city walls. The walls fall down, the soldiers storm in, and they slaughter every toddler in diapers, every little old lady, face to face. And these are just stories we tell our children. What else is in there?
Tamar is raped by her brother. Jael kills her enemy with a tent peg through the skull. Lot’s daughters are sent out to the mob to be gang-raped in lieu of the visiting angels.
But perhaps the worst “texts of terror,” as they have come to be known since feminist theologian Phyllis Trible published a book of that name in 1984, are the Biblical stories in which God instigates the violence. The classic text is the extermination of all but 8 human beings, and most other life on earth, in Noah’s Flood. And then there are two stories we’ll look at more closely today: two children, beloved and wanted, come close to dying because of God’s command. What could be worse than the death of a child? If God is good and merciful, how do we swallow these stories?
A recap, so we know what we’re looking at. In the first story, Sarah is barren, the worst thing for a Hebrew woman. She is less than nothing without children. In desperation, she gives her maid to Abraham as a surrogate, and Hagar becomes pregnant. Hagar is young and foolish, and struts obnoxiously around Sarah as her belly swells. Sarah, embittered, treats her like garbage, and Hagar runs away, but God sends her back. Ishmael, her son, is born. Then in an interesting twist God gives Sarah what she’s wanted all along, and even though she’s an old woman, she gets pregnant. Isaac is born, and there is much rejoicing. But when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac one day, something breaks open in her, and it’s not compassion. It’s rage. Mother-bear, genetic-code-protecting rage. She orders Abraham to send Ishmael and Hagar away, into the wilderness. God agrees it’s for the best, and tells Abe to listen to Sarah. Abe gives Hagar some bread and water, helps her get Ishmael on her back, and they go. They don’t make it very far in the desert, under that North African sun, a young woman alone and her child. Hagar knows what she’s up against. She can feel death, calling for her and for her child. She might as well be running into the woods, or into the basement. Slowly, slowly, she puts Ishmael under a bush, a reflexive act of protection that will do no good. She shuffles a couple of hundred yards away, she sits down, and she wails, loud enough for heaven to hear, because she cannot bear to see her child die.
In the very next chapter, is an echo of child sacrifice. Isaac, this time, the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah, is to be put to death, simply to test the faith of Abraham. This story is a favorite of rabbis and atheists. Each of them use it to prove their point. Imagine Isaac, about 13 years old, going on a hike with his dad. Not only is he clueless about the danger that awaits, chattering on about pokemon cards and making star-wars sounds as he fights imaginary enemies, his dad actually puts the firewood that will burn his young body on Isaac’s own, skinny, pre-pubescent back. He is a young Christ, mounting Calvary.
There are a few different ways to read these stories. The one that brings the most relief is to read them as metaphors, etiologies, made-up descriptions of how things came to be the way they are. This isn’t a stretch, because it’s what, in fact, these stories were. Ishmael is commonly accepted as the mythical ancestor of the Northern Arab peoples—so his exile into the wilderness explains the fact of the Arabs’ wandering, nomadic nature. The struggle for succession and the right of primogeniture between Isaac and Ishmael also explains, and supports, the historic enmity between Jews and Arabs.
We can read the sacrifice of Isaac, and really, a lot of the carnage in the Old Testament, as a gloss on the many pogroms on the Jewish people through the ages, an etiology for why the line must remain ethnically pure, the people absolutely faithful to the Lord, the God of Israel, lest they disappear forever. And Sarah’s ability to get pregnant at the age of 90, foreshadows the rise of IVF in the late 21st century.
All this clever literary criticism might help us to feel better, feel as if we are living in a safe house of metaphor instead of in the painful reality of a world where women are demoted when they are infertile, where women still turn on women instead of on the patriarchal systems that oppress them, where children are still exposed on mountaintops or thrown into dumpsters, where child abuse and genocide still routinely happens.
Another solution to the texts of terror is to say that for Christians, the whole Old Testament exists as a foil for the New Testament—like, isn’t it amazing what God has done? How good of God to change His mind, to stop all that senseless violence, to stop it in the very body, the self-giving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all that nonsense come to an end at last. God is good. All the time. Except before 33 A.D.
But that is cafeteria Christianity, and a little anti-semitic to boot: to leave the God of wrath to the Jews, marry violence to their view of history, and to end up with Jesus, sweet of face, stringing daisies with the children. It’s dishonest, and it’s not true. Phyllis Trible says “to contrast the Old Testament God of Wrath with the New Testament God of Love is fallacious. The God of Israel is the God of Jesus: in both testaments, there is tension between divine wrath and divine love.” Just because God only almost permits the death of two innocent children—Ishmael at the mercy of the elements in the desert, Isaac at the mercy of his father on the mountaintop, doesn’t mean God gets to step in at the last second and play the good guy. “Oh, Hagar, I heard the child crying. Here’s what we’re going to do.” “Oh, Abraham, your faith is sufficient and complete, here’s a substitute.” God let His own son die, painfully, on the cross. The fact that he was resurrected doesn’t take away the pain and humiliation that Jesus experienced, which were real.
There are many tacks we could take to excuse God, and they are all worthy. We could say that the ways of God are inscrutable; that we are to God as the ant is to the human; we can’t possibly understand the fullness of the mind of God, we just have to trust that God knows what God is doing. But we can trust and love God utterly, and still feel that God has some explaining to do.
We could say that, in a sense, God grew up with us—just as in the Great Flood God realized another nature, and promised never again to destroy humankind by flood (gee, thanks God!), that God ultimately realized in the person of Jesus that only self-giving sacrifice would ever end the cycle of violence, so have we too matured, evolved, as a species. We have a better view of God.
We could say that all these stories are fallible, told from a human perspective, and that we attribute dark motives to God when they are, in fact, ours. For all we know, it was Abraham who dragged Isaac up the mountain of his own accord—Isaac, after all, was thirteen, and what parent hasn’t been thrown into a murderous rage at least once by their teenage child? Perhaps God was saving Abraham as well as Isaac.
But it is not our responsibility to make excuses for God to others, or justify these stories to ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, the point of these stories is much more basic. To make us feel, fully and poignantly, the value of each human life. To prevent us from forgetting Rwanda, Darfur, Dachau, to force us to bear witness to the continuing reality of all that Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael represent: the runaway, the stepchild, the single welfare mother, the aging wife made superfluous by the mistress, the bag lady, the refugee, the child dying of diarrhea for lack of clean water in the wilderness. All of these people are real, not ancient, not fairy tale characters; they live, and they breathe, and they fight, and they die. We know because we see these people; and we know because we are these people. Will we be broken open, are we willing to feel what they feel?
Perhaps, Trible suggests, the reason these stories remained embedded in our sacred text is to be a thorn in our sides, a reminder of our own dark natures, until we have finally and completely learned to live together without jealousy, ambition, the eternal violent struggle for resources and land and status.
When I went to worship at other churches this summer, I noticed a curious trend among trendy churches. None of them called what we do on Sunday morning “worship.” It was always “Worship Celebration” or “Gathering of Joy.” All very peppy and upbeat. Except, the thing is, it’s not always celebrating that we need to do on Sunday morning. Sometimes, we need to cry. Sometimes, we need to shake our fists at heaven, and where is the room in a Gathering of Joy to do that? Maybe that’s why these stories are here. Great wracking sobs shaking Hagar’s body, Abraham’s hand trembling above his son, his only son, whom he loved. Sometimes you just have to face the darkness, and live with the sadness. And yes, sometimes, God does swoop in at the last second to make things come right, or at least, more right than they were. As someone put it, “everything turns out all right in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” Will we refuse God’s help, however, and whenever, it comes?
Because another way to read these stories, is to say: we don’t know what would have happened IF. The big IF being: if people hadn’t listened to God, hadn’t trusted God utterly. IF Hagar had stayed with Sarah and Abraham, Sarah might have gone postal on Ishmael one day, a bloodbath. IF Abraham hadn’t raised that knife over Isaac, maybe neither Isaac nor Abraham would have gone on to lead and protect the many people in their care in the precise way that they did. Sometimes, only almost dying will teach you what life is worth. Walter Brueggeman, after he’d read Genesis cover to cover, and tried to make sense of these stories, said, “Faith is nothing other than the trust in the power of the resurrection against every deathly circumstance.”
And maybe, just maybe, the point of the pointy, difficult stories in the Bible is to remind us that we do not live in a tame universe, that our God is not a tame God. The feminist sci-fi novelist, Ursula LeGuin, said it this way: “Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison, and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
