Category: Social-Political

Reflecting on Genesis 21:8-21

By J. Thomas Johnson

There are times in which contemporary sensibilities and the narratives of Christian Scripture run seamlessly together. Contemporary concerns with respect to environmental stewardship, for instance, and the biblical insistence in Genesis that humanity was created to care for creation are deeply compatible. However, at other times contemporary mores and Biblical narratives seem to diverge fundamentally. I suspect that the narrative we find in Genesis 21:8-21 is as good an example as any of this apparent divergence.

Genesis 15 recounts a covenant that God made with Abraham. At the heart of God’s promise was a miracle. God promised Abraham and his wife, Sarah, that after decades of infertility they would have a son. So, perhaps as a way of helping God along, Sarah suggested that Abraham take her maidservant, Hagar, as a concubine and produce a child through her. Abraham agreed, and the result of their union was Ishmael. And almost immediately conflict between Sarah and Hagar began to develop.

However, God’s promise to Abraham was not fulfilled in Ishmael. God had intended to provide a child to Sarah and Abraham together. So, in time, Sarah did become pregnant, and gave birth to a boy in her old age. They named him Isaac. And the conflict between Hagar and Sarah escalated.

This conflict is at the heart of Genesis 21:8-21. As Sarah observed the interaction between Ishmael and her baby, she uttered one of the crasser statements to be found in Genesis: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (NRSV, Gen. 21:10).

So much is bound up in Sarah’s charge to Abraham. A distinction of classes is, of course, explicit. But buried within these harsh words are pain and regret and envy and, perhaps fundamentally, fear.  These are not surprising qualities to be found in Sarah given the narratives of Genesis which have preceded hers. What is surprising, at least to me, is that God instructed Abraham to follow her counsel. “But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring'” (21:12-13).

In the text, we are told that Abraham loved both of his children, and it seems implicit that Abraham could only exile Ishmael and Hagar because of God’s promise to care for them personally. And God was true to His word. Genesis tells us that not only did God send His angel to communicate with Hagar and to rescue them both from thirst, but also, “God was with the boy, and he grew up;…” (21:20).

I’ve often reflected on why it was that God did not require these two rivals, Hagar and Sarah, to find a way forward together, and why it was that Ishmael and Isaac could not have been raised as brothers. And then, again, the risk to both in the culture was certainly great. When Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, married two women and took two additional concubines later in Genesis, the rivalry between the women and the children was painful and, in the case of the children, violent. It resulted in one of the sons being sold into slavery by the others. Was God’s decision to support Sarah’s desires rooted in this sort of cultural complexity?

Even more, when God became flesh in the Person of Jesus several thousand years after these events, Jesus taught us that God’s desire was for His followers to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. He instructed His disciples to accept insults without retaliation and to respond to governmental oppression by going beyond what was being forcibly required. In the teachings of Jesus, certainly Sarah’s concerns would have received a rebuke, wouldn’t they? And yet, at the time, God consented to allow her callousness to persist.

As I reflect on this passage again, I am reminded that God begins with us where we are. The rivalry between heirs was pervasive in the culture of Abraham’s day, and Sarah’s concern for the safety and future of her son was certainly reasonable.  And God, rather than asking Sarah to undergo a miraculous and radical transformation of character and worldview all at once, instead allowed her to remain uncharitable, while He Himself served as a personal example of watchcare and devotion to a child that was born outside of His expressed will. God became Himself the caregiver that Sarah could not find room in her heart to become. And by His example, the descendants of Abraham have learned that those who wish to be like God must follow Him into the wilderness and care for a child born out of an act of faithlessness.

I am convinced that Jesus could instruct His followers to embrace their enemies in part because God Himself had set the example for such practices in instances like that of Hagar and Ishmael’s abandonment. Sarah had never seen or experienced this kind of generosity of spirit, and so, she had no context out of which to obey such a command. It is only after God demonstrated His love to those He had not chosen that He asked humanity to respond in kind. God goes first where He asks humanity to follow, and no example of this reality is more fundamental in the church than that of Jesus journey to the cross.

Much later, the Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, would recall this episode in the life of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael, and Paul would suggest that God’s love for Israel herself had more in common with His love for Ishmael than with His devotion to Isaac. The canon of Scripture taken together suggests that we all are children born in a world of rebellion against God’s intentions for humanity. We all have come, in one way or another, into a world that has lost faith in its God, a world that has tried to fulfill God’s intentions by its own wisdom and with its own strength. Each of us has more in common with Ishmael than with Isaac. And yet, God cares for children who would not be had He been trusted, and God has been with us. Perhaps this story, too, is echoed in Paul’s summation of the Gospel of Jesus: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (NRSV, Rom. 5:8). When we are faithless, God is faithful. Ishmael became a great nation. May the Name of the Lord be praised by our willingness to follow in His footsteps.

King of the Hill

By: J. Thomas Johnson

Do kids still play king of the hill? Some may remember standing atop a hill while other kids tried to wrestle, toss, or somehow eject you off and claim the throne momentarily. I know my children don’t play it. In fact, I can easily imagine myself stepping in to stop them if they tried.

I’m not sure from whence that instinct has come. When I was a child, my friends and I rarely saw a hill that one of us didn’t try to claim. But, for whatever reason, that game and many others of my childhood are disappearing from the public life of children. Sam Greenspan wrote an article a few months back that listed king of the hill as one of eleven childhood games that are too violent for contemporary American culture. http://11points.com/11-playground-games-played-kid-violent-today/

King of the hill was both a powerful and a terrifying game. While climbing the hill, I would be filled with aggression and violence. The only goal was to topple the king. The only morality was achieving that goal. The thrill of having achieved that goal was intoxicating.

And yet, once atop the hill, with the power of victory came isolation and paranoia. Whereas all of us climbing the hill had been allied in an attempt to depose the king, upon becoming the king, now I was surrounded only by enemies. In many ways for me, it was more fun to topple the king than to be the king. I can remember on many occasions allowing myself to be defeated so as to recapture the simplicity and safety of the attack. It was a game that, if I had been truly observant, had many life lessons wrapped up in it.

It seems to me that in the public life of our culture, the vast majority of people have come to appreciate the safety of standing on the slopes trying to topple the king. Whether we’re talking about celebrities, comedians, politicians, principals, pastors, institutionalized religion, or even God there is safety and comradery in joining the masses attempting to topple those who have the audacity to stand atop the hill. Today it would seem that the moral high ground is on the slopes. From news media to social media to community life, the safest place to stand is on the slopes and the safest stance to take is opposition to whoever or whatever stands upon the summit.

A few years ago several prominent comedians—Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock among them—made headlines when they publicly declared that they were done playing college campuses because of the hyper-sensitivity of students to their humor. Here is a link to an Inside Edition story from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kVdHr7sR0o.

This is a strange rebirth of king of the hill.  In this version the players cooperate to topple the king, but very few if any wish to assume the summit. And those who do assume the summit spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince the masses that they are, in fact, on the slopes with them, disowning the summit on which they stand and trying to distance themselves from power and associate it with an adversary.

It seems to me that Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is the prophet of a newly emerging kind of leadership:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just… do things.

There are some interesting social dynamics tied up in this historically atypical social competition. Edwin Friedman in his book A Failure of Nerve has diagnosed our culture as chronically anxious. There seems to be a growing consensus about this cultural anxiety, but causes and correlations are difficult to discern. Some believe that the rise of social media is to blame or smart phone technology or unprecedented wealth and affluence or the ease of access to mood-altering and pain-reducing pharmaceuticals, while others, like me, suspect it is the loss of faith in God as Creator and Sustainer of life that has allowed these other things to contribute to such systemic anxiety and despair.

Like kids on a playground, outrage may be safe, mocking may be community-affirming, and protesting might be morally soothing. And all these things have their place in an ethical society. But, if these transitional phases become habitations, both personal character and social ethics will eventually be undermined. As the Jewish and Christian Scriptures have long warned us:

1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, 2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.

Psalm 1:1-2, NIV

Being outraged by evil is certainly an ethical stance. The capacity to see the hypocrisy or foolhardiness or grotesqueness of evil is a moral type of discernment. Publicly protesting evil can be a valid form of resisting it. But, for those of us who follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus, our personal morality and our cultural ethics are not rooted in our reaction to evil, but in our submission to the teachings God has given to us and our practical embodiment of those teachings in our lives.  There is great peril in allowing the Joker to be our sage.  Jesus’ voice will lead us to the health for which our moral outrage longs:

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:43-45, NIV

Law, Freedom, and Tyranny

J. Thomas Johnson

It would seem that our culture has been under ever increasing pressure to legislate not only behavior, but to legislate opinions and their expression. In other words, there are those who would make illegal the expression of opinions that they themselves find repugnant. I suspect that some would even seek to criminalize the opinions themselves.

Now, this is nothing new, of course. There have been many instances in world history in which our own religious communities have attempted to criminalize the expression of contrary opinions, as well. Whether we use the term inquisition or fascism or totalitarian dictatorship or censorship or thought police, the scenes that arise in our imaginations are those of monolithic regimes attempting to control by force of law and violence the thoughts and mouths of their constituents. By including freedom of speech in the United States Bill of Rights, the framers of our own national polity sought to protect this very freedom that has rarely ever been afforded a populace in the recorded history of humanity on earth.

There have always been words and sentiments that societies have wished to excise from public discourse. However, the attempt to do so brings with it a myriad of often unforeseen consequences for all who live under its wings. To silence even the most odious of opinions is to diminish severely the capacity of a society to encourage the character development of its citizenry.

1920s author and educator R. M. MacIver in his book The Modern State warned long ago as follows:

Why must we deny the state this right to regulate opinion, a right which it has owned almost up to our own time?. . . .Force allies itself as easily with falsehood as with truth, so that its mere invocation in support of an opinion is a blasphemy against truth. Opinion can be fought only by opinion. Only thus is it possible for truth to be revealed. Force would snatch from truth its only means of victory. Force can suppress opinion, but only by suppressing the mind which is the judge of truth. . . .When the law of the state is exercised over opinion, then it becomes sheer coercion. . . .Law therefore becomes false to itself when it would enforce belief.

. . . .

What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions, and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfilment [sic], from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. . . .But it shows us clearly that law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. . . .To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters. Here we find the condemnation of ‘puritanic’ legislation, which claims that its own morals should be those of all, even to the point of destroying all moral spontaneity that is not their own. There are groups which, with good but narrow intentions, are always urging the state in this retrograde direction. . . .They cannot see that certain actions which they are perfectly entitled to regard as moral offences are not necessarily a proper object of political legislation. They demand censorship of the stage, of literature, and of art, assigning thereby to some executive official the power of deciding in advance what a whole people shall be permitted to read and think and witness and enjoy.

MacIver, The Modern State, loc. 1941-54, 2001

If we, as a society, are to have any chance at finding unity within our diversity, our government must ensure that opinions are permitted to be voiced and confronted with contrary or alternative opinions. If we continue to bend to the pressure to outlaw words and opinions which offend or even disgust, I fear we will sow the seeds of our own undoing. The following words from MacIver might do more to explain the social unrest of our times than the words of any prophet at any time:

The inner sanction of morality should never be confused with that of political law. We obey the law not necessarily because we think that the law is right, but because we think it right to obey the law. Otherwise the obedience of every minority would rest on compulsion, and there would be so much friction in the state that its working would be fatally embarrassed.

MacIver, loc. 1965

Perhaps the following excerpt from a speech written for Jean Luc Picard from the Star Trek series The Next Generation might drive home our peril.

When the first link of the chain is forged, the first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied chains us all irrevocably. . . .The first time any man’s freedom is trodden upon, we’re all damaged. . . .Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot.  Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.  But she, or someone like her, will always be with us waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness.  Vigilance…that is the price we must continually pay.

Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Drumhead.

For Christians, we must love our enemies by allowing them to speak against us. For those who are not Christians, you will enslave yourselves if you insist on not allowing us to speak against you. The tyranny of the state is sown when its people wish to outlaw opinions with which they do not agree. The thought police we enlist will inevitably come after us once our enemies are vanquished. Let’s learn to protect the right to think and to speak of those whose opinions we find repugnant. Let’s confront opinion with opinion. Once the sword is drawn, we will not be able to control how it is wielded.