Genesis 12:1-9 Commentary

Go!

Have you ever been struck by the fact that this is God’s very first word to Abram?  Go.  Leave.  Hit the road.  Have you ever been struck by how unattractive this must have sounded to Abram at his advanced age?  Why would he want to go anywhere?  He had his home.  He had established a successful estate.  His life was likely highly comfortable there in Ur.  He and his wife Sarai had, as we like to say, settled down.  They had put down roots.

It reminds me of a lovely scene in the movie Field of Dreams in which Bert Lancaster plays Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham.  He had hoped to be a professional baseball player once but only played half-an-inning back in the day before giving it up to become a doctor.  He had settled in Chisolm, Minnesota, and was a highly respected member of the community.  But at one point Kevin Costner’s Ray Kinsella shows up and asks Dr. Graham to come with him to a magical baseball field in Iowa where his old dreams might come true.  Dr. Graham refuses.  “This is my most special place in all the world.  Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again.  You hold it like it’s your child.  I can’t leave Chisolm.  I was born here, I lived here, I’ll die here.  And no regrets.”

Abram could surely have said the same about Ur.  At his age he had no desire to leave.  What’s more, he certainly had no desire to leave all that he knew to set out for a place that initially at least was a mystery destination.  “Go . . . to a land I will show you.”  Kind of vague.  More than a little scary.

If Abram wrestled with all this, the text does not tell us.  If he had a hard time selling the crazy plan to his wife Sarai, the text does not tell us.  We are told only that God said “Go” and Abram went.  No questions asked.  Or none recorded for us.  But if Abram had concerns or doubts, they were well founded.  Truth is, he would never again be as settled as he had been for all his long years in Ur.  Not even close, in fact.  Oh, God will show him the land of Canaan eventually and assure him his descendants will inhabit the land but that would not being to happen for a long time.  Fast forward a dozen chapters from Genesis 12 and you read the story of the only piece of property in Canaan Abram ever officially owned before he died: it was the 6×6 plot of ground he purchased as the burial site for his beloved wife.

And that’s it.  “A wandering Aramean was our father” the saying would go eventually to describe Abram/Abraham.  Why did God decide to found his chosen people by displacing the father of the faith?  Why turn Abram into an immigrant, a wanderer, a man without a home or country?  Hard to say.

But maybe it was in part to show what was necessary to save this fallen world.  All the nations of the earth will be blessed through Abram’s descendants we read here in Genesis 12.  But if so, it would be because God established his people in a way that was supposed to ensure that radical hospitality toward outsiders would be a hallmark of Israel.  God made room in his family for the fallen lot of us and God’s people were supposed to be in the business of making room too.

Even the eventual set of events that land Abram’s descendants in Egypt for 400+ years got rolled into this identity.  Israel knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of an inhospitable people and so when God establishes laws eventually to tell Israel to make extra provisions for aliens and strangers and immigrants, God always grounded those commands by saying “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt!”  Remember that, in other words, and then be sure you never turn around and do the same thing to somebody else.

Israel would struggle to remember that, of course.  They too became ethnically insular and took on superior airs toward outsiders.  The prophet Jonah was emblematic of this when he refused to reach out to the Ninevites on the off chance they would actually repent and get admitted to his Members Only salvation club.

Fast forward to the New Israel that is the Church of Jesus Christ and you find the same struggles.  We still want to define the boundary markers pretty tightly to keep the church a gathering of the like-minded, of people who look and live and act and vote like . . . well, like me.  But that is because we forget how we got Jesus in the first place.  We got Jesus and the salvation he brings because like Abram in Genesis 12, the day finally came when the Son of God left home and became a stranger on this earth.  The Father told the Son “Go” and he went.

In the beginning the Word was with God, John tells us in John 1.  He was home.  And then he wasn’t.  And although the whole world had been made by him, when he arrived, the world did not recognize him.  He came to his own people and, John again tells us, they received him not.  The Word became homeless, a stranger on this earth.  That is how we got our salvation and it is supposed to be also our model in reaching out to the whole world via the Church to this day.

But in these weeks after Pentecost, we can recall that we struggle to be hospitable.  As Neal Plantinga has pointed out, the virtue of hospitality has a surprisingly high profile in the New Testament.  You bump into it all over the place.  But there is a good reason for that: we have Abraham as the founder of our faith and Jesus of Nazareth as the perfecter of our faith.  Abraham and Jesus bookend the Christian story as two immigrants who relied on the hospitality of others.

So much of all that we know theologically is packed into one tiny word.  Go!

Illustration Idea

In his memoir, Open Secrets, Richard Lischer employs a most lovely image at one point.  In the church he first served following his graduation from seminary, the wine chalice used for the Lord’s Supper was a fairly large goblet made of a shiny silver.  Each time when he presented the wine, he would lift the cup up high over his head.  A few people in his staunchly Lutheran congregation didn’t like that move–they thought it looked too Roman Catholic.  But Lischer says that the reason he did this was because when he lifted the cup up, he could see on the curved underside of the chalice the entire congregation reflected.  The bottom of the cup was like a convex mirror in which he saw everyone’s reflections all at once.  It reminded him of the fundamental truth of the sacrament: when we eat the bread and drink the cup of our Lord, we thicken our union with Jesus but also with one another.  We are all one in the cup we share.  And we are called to live like we know this is true of all our fellow believers and of every potential brother or sister we meet and to whom we are called to extend the radical hospitality of the Gospel.