God says to Abram, “Emigrate! Pack up and take off. I’ll tell you where…en route.” Genesis 12:1 Word on the Street
He may not have had the driving curiosity of a Gilgamesh, nor the physical prowess of an Achilles, two of the other great heroes from this time period, but he had something neither of these legendary men possessed, the ability to suspend his incredulity and believe the impossible. This tremendous feat of the imagination was heroic in its own light…God commands and Abram packs his bags. Divine purposes and human ones are, for once, in harmony. Charlotte Gordon
Having spent the past two days, as it were, walking around with Abram, several things strike me. First is the suddenness with which he appears on the scene. Outside of the genealogical introduction in the latter part of Genesis 11, we simply have no background, no personal backstory, no tales from his youth or enchanted birth stories. He appears on the biblical page full grown…and 75 years old (or so). Rabbis and church fathers alike can’t resist filling in those blanks, and so stories were told of a significant child, a signature birth holding great promise; of a baby Abram who believes in God from his mother’s womb.
Surely, he couldn’t have just been an ordinary man.
But the fact that he and the others we frequently call the “patriarchs” were in fact quite ordinary men – even greatly flawed men – seems to me crucial to the story. These were not giants like the mysterious “Nephilim” of Genesis 6, sired by angels, men of reknown. They were, well, ordinary.
And yet this ordinary man, Abram, was called upon to do something extraordinary. He was called upon to make the most radical, personal culture shift we can imagine: from the patterns of comfortable, safe, and advanced urban life, to the life of a homeless man constantly on the move. Life’s circumstances and economic downturns often force us to such radical lifestyle shifts. But from all indications, Abram was called to just simply walk away from it all. And he was called to do it not in his adventuresome youth, but at 75.
Charlotte Gordon (as I meditate on Genesis 12-24 this week, I’m reading alongside it her interesting take on Abram’s story in The Woman Who Named God) theorizes that with Terah being 70 years old when he had his three sons Abram, Nahor and Haran, and Abram entering Canaan when he was 75 (Terah would then be 145), that this means Abram quite literally left his father (the pater familia!) behind in Haran. She surmises that Abram’s father Terah would have lived his remaining 60 years (dying at the age of 205) well through most of the Genesis story of Abram. However, Stephen in his defense in Acts 7 insists that Abram left only after his father died, so I have to side with him in the chronology of things. But Charlotte’s take showed me Abram as I hadn’t really seen him before.
Abram the prodigal son.
Abram breaking with his father, his birthplace, his family, and with a few brave souls in tow (along with a whole lot of servants and slaves and domesticated animals – perhaps his claimed share of his father’s estate?) he breaks away and finds his own path. Through the eyes that stayed behind what to us is an act of great faith was no doubt clothed rather differently. Disrespect. Recklessness. Audacity. Folly. Heretical. Sin.
Oddly, it makes me like Abram more.
Real faith does not consist in the refining and affirming of propositions, but in the courageous act of the imagination that is able to “suspend incredulity and believe the impossible” – even though to all outward appearances it seems pure folly.
There’s no hint in Genesis of a divine propositional revelation to Abram. No divine signs and confirming wonders. No bushes aflame. No guiding stars. Just the bare, fresh creative Word, “Go, and I will bless you.” God’s voice, beckoning, summoning. And Abram walks with God. He leaves the temples of his youth. Then, surrounded by temples in the new (to him) and alien culture of Canaan, Abraham builds simple altars of dirt and stones. Bare rocks gathered together becoming sacramental intersections between heaven and earth for him. And then he moves on, always he moves on, the landscape marked by what to others would be meaningless gatherings of stone. He merely walks as God’s friend. He needed no religion, no priesthood (and yet he honors Melchizedek – another figure coming out of nowhere), no canaanite institutional support. He had “food to eat they knew not of.”
Early on, Abram and his clan came to be called “Ivri” (English translation: Hebrew) – the crossers. Probably from the fact that he had crossed over the all but uncrossable Great River Euphrates. And that’s exactly what we are doing as we cross over into Genesis 12. We are crossing over from the massive, unending river of curses from the Fall to the mark of Cain to the great flood to Noah’s cursing Canaan to the scattering of humanity at Babel…to blessing. Abram’s story marks the great reversal, the great shift in the Story.
He challenges me. His story invites me to become the prodigal, to enter into the absolute “waste” of faith’s imagination, leaving the ruts of my own heritage of far too much religious “cursing” and into a place of blessing. Of earth and stone and simple altars – and to learn what Peterson calls the “unforced rhythms of grace” – the rhythms of being a friend of God.
(from Mike Freeman’s blog, Project1189.org)