Four Abrahams - Peter Steele

2nd Sunday in Lent Year A

Genesis 12:1-4

As you will remember, the first words in the Book of Genesis are, ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. That has to do with the cosmos, but our first reading today, from that same Book, might also have begun with the words, ‘In the beginning’, since the calling of Abraham is in effect the beginning of something like history we can understand in modern terms.

At that moment, God both summons Abraham, and all his descendants, and blesses them all. A blessing is always an endorsement. It is an underwriting of who one is, a vindication of one’s intimate being.

This is what we acknowledge in our own lives when, for instance, as we say, we ‘bless ourselves’ before grace or at the beginning of the Mass: we trace on our bodies and in our consciousness both the names of our creating God and the memory of our loving Saviour. But, very often, blessings are also summonings—callings beyond our status quo, invitations to growth.

So it was with Abraham. We are reminded elsewhere in the Bible that when Abraham did move out from his country and his familiar relationships, he did not know where he was going. He did this not because he was footloose or crazed, but because it was indeed God who provoked him and called him. And out of that readiness to listen, and that readiness to march, as it were, in the dark, there unfolded the religious history of the Jews, and the coming of Christ, and our very being together when we celebrate the Eucharist.

That was long ago, and far away. Abraham could not speak a word of English, partly because there wasn’t a word of English for him to speak—the very language came later. And Abraham would not know what a telephone was for, or a modern broom, or the fork on the table. But in spite of those gaps, he was essentially where all of us are many times in our own lives. Because we too are blessed, thousands of times, and we are summoned, thousands of times.

To suggest how this is so, let me name three other, much more recent, Abrahams. Each of them was called to respond to what I call a cry—a cry from the others, or a cry from oneself, or a cry from God.

My first Abraham is Abraham Lincoln. I am not trying to paint him, or either of the others, as a saint, which is after all God’s business, not mine. He was not universally admired: the London Times called him ‘The Baboon.’

But nobody could deny that, in all the density and complexity of history, Abraham Lincoln, as President of his savagely divided country, had to respond to the cry of his people. There may be times when people in positions of leadership can coast along, but his was not one of those times. For Lincoln, it was a devil of a business to lead his country. When the Civil War came, Lincoln’s wife had three brothers who fought for the opposing Southern armies: Lincoln offered the command of the Northern armies to Robert E. Lee, who instead took command of the South.

And there were countless other ambiguities and disconcertments. He could no more foretell the future than any of us can: but he was still, genuinely, an ‘abrahamic’ person in his responding to the cry of ‘the others’. This week, somebody, somewhere, will surely offer us just such a cry.

My second Abraham is the American psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow had plenty of experience of human folly and wickedness, but, blessedly as it seems to me, he declined to give in to the standard melancholy view that the human being, the human self, is either vicious or a pawn of forces, internal and external.

Maslow believed that most people have far more creativity—emotional, intellectual and spiritual—than they make use of. It is as if, in my terms, he listened to the cry of the self, the cry of the soul—a cry which is issued not out of greed, or malice, or desolation, but out of hope to grow, hope to flourish, hope to be.
I am certain that Maslow was right. I am certain that the God who brought us miraculously to be at all is intent on re-enacting the blessing given to the first Abraham. I am certain that anyone who habitually wishes to daunt us in our journey through life is doing the devil’s work.

And this week, too, there will be some cry from each of our hearts, a cry against our own timidities, our own harshnesses, our own callousnesses. It will be in God’s name that we will listen to such a cry.

Which brings me to my third Abraham—the Jewish religious thinker, Abraham Heschel. There are many books whose titles indicate that we are seekers, searchers, pilgrims, and so forth: but one of Heschel’s books is called God in Search of Man.

Heschel’s meaning is that, in the actualities of our lives—in just that dense historical weave which Abraham Lincoln had to deal with, and in just those cries of the heart for growth and flourishing—no one less than God is present, and pressing. Heschel loved to use the phrase, ‘human and holy’, since he cherished the fact that it is in the flesh and blood of our lived hours that God can come home to us, and we can come home to God.

Heschel had seen more of the bitterness of life at close quarters than most of us, I hope, will do. He left Poland just six weeks before the Nazi invasion: he called himself ‘a brand plucked from the fire’, and that fire consumed most of his Jewish people. But he went on, for the rest of his life, attesting that God does indeed bless and summon us every day—through the beauty of creation, for which there are no words good enough, and through the undeniable needs of our brothers and sisters, for which there are no words emphatic enough.

For Heschel, God was no mere genial sponsor of our equilibrium: as he said, ‘if God is not of supreme importance, he is of no importance.’

Our presence, whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, points in the same direction. We do what we are doing then, as our Lord told us, to remember the Lord. And whether or not we invoke Heschel’s memory, and the memory of so many other Abrahams, we are indeed in the same place as they were, and as Jesus himself was: at the heart of God’s world, waiting for God’s call.