Abraham 5: The Christian Abraham

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, because when you were baptized into Christ you put on Christ like a garment. Therefore there are no longer distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus, and this is what it means to be the seed of Abraham and heirs according to the promise."

-- Galatians 3: 26-29

We have been reading the Abraham stories and trying to make sense out of them. Time and again references to Christ Jesus slipped into our reflections because we could not make sense out of them without him. For example, the binding of Isaac suggested the crucifixion, where God did not spare his son as he spared Isaac, but gave him up for us all; and the three mysterious visitors at Mamre suggested the Holy Trinity; and the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael suggested the rejection of the Son of God by his own people. All through our reflections I have been hinting that the deepest level of these stories is reached only by the reality of the Cross, which alone touches the depths of violence and betrayal in them. Especially in the Akedah we encounter an interpretation of faith that takes us beyond human ethics into the realm of the divine love, the realm where God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

Today I want us to read the stories as a NT Christian read them; not any NT Christian, but the most prominent one, whose writings make up the bulk of the NT, the Apostle Paul. I shall set out the interpretation Paul gives to the Abraham story and then apply it to present condition of our world. I believe, however, that when you hear it, it will apply itself readily and self-evidently.

Imagine Paul the Jewish religious scholar studying his Bible, trying to make sense out of what happened to him on the Damascus road. Like any religious person he tries to integrate his spiritual experience with his religious tradition and so turns to its classic sources. Abraham is the dominant figure in those sources, followed closely by Moses.  Paul’s problem is to integrate Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, alive and active in the lives of those who believe in him, with the Jewish religion for whom Jesus is a renegade and heretic messiah.

He solves his problem by concluding that the faith in Jesus Christ is not the same as the Jewish faith in Abraham and Moses, and therefore that the faith of the Christians is something different from the faith of the Jews.  I know that this is confusing because up to now you might have thought that Abraham’s willingness to obey God riskingly is the essence of faith as such, and thus makes the three Western religions which are based on such faith essentially the same. While the dynamics of faith in Judaism and Christianity are the same, the object and outcome are quite different. Let me explain.

We are fortunate to have a foil against which to interpret Paul, in the Jewish Christian teachers who visited his Galatian congregations after he had left, and persuaded many of their members that Paul had not preached the true gospel, because he had not demanded that they be circumcised. The rival teachers pointed out that Abraham had been circumcised immediately after he had entered into a covenant with God, that the covenant had two parts, the promise and the requirement, and that the requirement, circumcision, was therefore the sign in the flesh of the covenant’s promise (Gen 17). (Today, Jews call circumcision “briss”, as in berith=covenant). The larger argument of the teachers was that the promise of God is for Jews only and that faith in Christ is a way to inherit the promise by becoming a Jew with all the ritual and moral duties and privileges pertaining. Christian faith is a way to become a Jew. The only way to receive the full divine blessing is to join the Jewish people, who are the descendants of Abraham to whom God made all the promises. Outside of this people there is no blessing, so Paul had deprived the Galatians of the benefits of their faith by not telling them the whole story.

It is striking to see how differently Paul read the Abraham story, same text, different interpretation, different practice. There are three things that God offers Abraham, the land, a great posterity, and the blessing of all nations through that posterity. Circumcision indicates that one is included in that posterity and so is an heir of the blessing. Paul ignores the promise of the land, and he ignores the demand for circumcision, and focuses everything on the promise of a posterity and the blessing of the nations (i.e. the Gentiles). This is how he interprets the text: God’s word to Abraham concerns primarily his posterity and the nations of the world. The term “posterity” or “descendants” is translated “seed” and Paul notices that every time it is used in the Abraham stories, both in the original Hebrew and in the Greek translation, which most Christians would have read, “seed” is in the singular and not in the plural. So Paul, using accepted methods of rabbinic exegesis, says God promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations through his one, singular seed, and that seed is Jesus Christ. The promise to Abraham of a great seed and a blessing of the nations is therefore a prophecy of the coming of Christ. So the Jewish nation is not the seed of Abraham and membership in it is of no consequence one way or the other. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female in the only thing that matters, our standing before God. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Christian, and within the church Jews do not have a special status, despite the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and Paul, and Peter and James etc.

Paul is not, however, advocating a general humanism that makes a right relationship with God a simple natural endowment. It might not matter whether we have been circumcised into Israel but it is vitally important that we have been baptized into Christ.  Just as circumcision is a fleshly mark of membership in Israel so baptism is a spiritual mark of membership in Christ, and the latter is the important membership because it mediates to us the blessing that God promised to Abraham, while the former is just a worldly differentiation that in the hands of the “principalities and powers” leads to ethnic exclusionism, religious pride, and a sense of heedless entitlement.” (When I read in Gen 15:18, “To your descendants will I give this land, from the wadi of Egypt to the great river Euphrates,” I hear the agenda of the fanatic Jewish settlers, and I wince. Then I am doubly grateful that Paul pointedly ignores this cruel nonsense, and I rejoice in the grace of the Gospel, a Gospel that values Woodside as much as Jerusalem, or the wadi of Egypt).

Clearly, Paul is reading Abraham through the lens of the death and resurrection of Christ for the salvation of all the world, and one might ask whether his reading does violence to the text. I do not think so. Let me point out some reasons why. It is the case that what the English translations render as “descendants” or “seed” of Abraham as if it were a plural noun, is in every case singular. There are two cases where the surrounding words indicate that the plural or collective is intended, but the majority of occurrences is singular. So Paul has a legitimate basis in the text for his Christian interpretation.  Secondly there are two accounts of the covenant with Abraham, one in Gen 15 and one in 17. They are from two different prior sources, the J and the P respectively. The first account does not mention circumcision but does include the promise of the land, whereas the second one mentions both land and circumcision. However, in both accounts the first thing to be mentioned, and lovingly emphasized is the blessing of the nations through the seed of Abraham. Listen, “Then taking him outside he said, ‘Look up to heaven and count the stars if you can. Such will be your seed. And Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness (15:5-6).” This is the text Paul dwells on in Romans 4, as we noticed last week.   Listen, “God said this to him, ‘ Here now is my covenant with you: you shall become the father of a multitude of nations. You shall no longer be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, for I make you father of a multitude of nations…( 17:3-6).” (Here is another significant name: Abraham means “one of noble birth, “ and also “father of a multitude”). Later, after the Akedah in Ch.22, we read, “I swear by my own self – it is the Lord who speaks – because you have done this, because you have not refused me your son, your only son, I will shower blessings on you, I will make your seed as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore…All the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by your seed, as a reward for your obedience (22: 15-18).

Let me bring this to a close. The seed through which God will fulfill this promise to Abraham is Christ; he is the one by whom the nations will bless themselves; he is the one who shall become, has become, as numberless as the stars, and as countless as the grains of sand. We who have been baptized into him are stars and sand grains in that blessed universal community that is the mystical body of Christ. We are members not of Israel but of Christ, and we are Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, male and female, and none of those differences in the end makes any difference at all! I find it marvelously inspiring when I read, “…your seed shall be as the stars and as the grains of sand…” because I read Jesus Christ for seed, and I experience imaginatively the universal community of love, respect, and spiritual equality, beyond the differences of nations, customs, and religious practices, a common humanity in the Son of Man.

The Apostle sums it up when he says, “If you belong to Christ then you are the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to promise (Gal 3:29)”. You see how close the identification with Christ must be. We put him on like a garment in baptism, and that garment obscures all our differences, renders them unimportant, and we become a universal community of love, which is Christ in his collective self, the single seed of Abraham who potentially encompasses the whole of humanity and in whom Gods’ promised blessing to Abraham becomes real for all the world.  As Paul ends the letter to the Galatians, let me end this sermon, “ So circumcision is nothing, and so is uncircumcision, all that matters is new creation (Gal 6:15)!” There are many ways to live as a Christian; all that matters is faith that touches the new creation. We have new creation when we put all our faith, faith that holds nothing back, not even a beloved son, in Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection creates the world anew and blesses all the nations, Jews and Gentiles alike.