Abraham: Not Even A Foot’s Length

As the father of faith, Abraham serves as an admonishment to us as we seek to understand how we should live as people of faith in relation to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It's a message of trusting God, of transcending civilisation's status quo of violent power, and it is a story of patience and faith in God's power to ultimately redeem.

It begins with the patriarch's first great act of obedience: leaving his homeland and all its securities and political guarantees for an unknown land and unsecured life of faith.

Here, Abraham's background is important, for when we meet him, we understand that his family is wealthy and entrenched in the power structures of Babylon.

Specifically, his father is an international trader in the Mesopotamian hierarchy, and part of the fraternity of the Moon God Sîn. We know this because the writers of Genesis specify not only his culture as Babylonian, but they also take care to note the cities associated with his clan. This is critical to understanding his story and what it means to us, as it reveals his culture, his worldview, his ethos and his source of livelihood and security.

The cities mentioned in connection with Abraham lie on an important trade route—this was big business in the ancient world and explains his family's wealth. Ur is the southeastern endpoint, the clan's original home in lower Mesopotamia. Harran (the midpoint in upper Mesopotamia) is where the family was living when we first meet them. And to the southwest is Hazor, the Canaanite capital and logically Abraham's next port of call.

This trade route is well-documented in history, and it was devotion to Sîn that linked the cities, an association that gives us even more insight into what Abraham's family represents, namely, the wealth and power and belief system of the Babylonian Empire and its predecessors. It represents the power and ethos of the world, what the Apostle Paul called "this present darkness."

A CALL TO FAITH NOT SECURITY

During his layover in Harran, Abraham hears a voice: "Now the LORD said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.... '"

That was not an easy ask. Abraham was to set out in the name of an unseen Divinity who had no association with anything in the world system that had enriched and protected him. "Go-you-forth from your land," said the voice, "from your kindred, from your father's house to the land that I will let you see."

It's about letting go of certainty to enter something unknown and the text is emphatic on three points:

Abraham was to leave his "land" or eretz (ארץ)—the term familiar to us today in Éretz Yisra'él (Land of Israel). This was his political identity; Abraham would thus be leaving his country, his citizenship.

He would also have to leave his kindred, or môledeth—his people, his culture.

Moreover, he was to leave the bayt or "house" of his father.

But bayt is the same word as "temple" and carries with it all the weighty spiritual importance associated with ancestral beliefs. Thus, he would leave behind his ethos, his framework of reality, including this all-important ancestrally tied lineage of the holy house, which in his family, meant the tangibility and security (financial and physical) of the idol-based religious coterie connected to the Moon God. Thus, the voice called Abraham to become an apostate and to no longer rely on his religious assumptions.

THE PROMISED LAND

The New Testament's Book of Hebrews reflects on this by contrasting the security of property, politics, and power that characterised his city life in Babylon with Abraham's new goal: "the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God."

Where and what is this city? After arriving in "the land that I will show you" Abraham is first given a promise that the land will be for his descendants—it is the Promised Land. He later encounters the extraordinary and unearthly figure of Melchizedek, the King of Salem—Jerusalem. The meeting with Melchizedek is sacramental, "Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine; and he was priest of God the Most High. And he blessed him, and said: 'Blessed be Abram of God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth; and blessed be God the Most High.'"

Melchizedek's Jerusalem is not a city of Babylon, not built from the brick and mortar of Babel's tower, not part of the system of human-made civilisation. It represents the transcendent and apolitical.

JERUSALEM

Abraham's children agree on this, having always understood that Jerusalem is a place that links the eternal and transcendent with the temporal and mundane.

Even now, our faith's aspiration is to see beyond Jerusalem's stone walls and footings to that city whose foundations and structures are divinely built.

Our present-day consideration of the Promised Land and Jerusalem—Zion—al Quds—Har HaBayith—Temple Mount—Bayt al-Maqdis—Al-Ard Al-Mubarakah, should be guided by Abraham's vision. It is not real estate to possess or to conquer and rule. It is not a political philosophy or religion to convert others to. To the contrary, Jerusalem and the Holy Land is meant to be the prophetic antithesis of the world order, the critique of the system Abraham left behind, and it is to be a message of hope and healing.

Integral to the promise of Abaham are the people who will populate the land: "I will make a great nation of you, and I will give-you-blessing and will make your name great. Be a blessing! All the clans of the soil will find blessing through you!"

This emphasis on a transcendent place and people of blessing stands throughout the biblical narrative, most beautifully expressed by Isaiah who envisions a day of peace when the nations will stream to Jerusalem to learn the ways of God and "beat their swords into ploughshares."

The Promised Land and Jerusalem were to be open to all nations who would come for blessing and learn the ways of peace. It existed to call humanity away from the patterns of power and violence that have infected the world's systems since the dawn of civilisation. The very nature of the promised people and land was to be unlike that system.

It is this legacy that Jews, Christians and Muslims claim to inherit. And yet, today, the Promised Land stands as one of the worst examples of a broken world, and Jerusalem as a point of mimetic rivalry marked by the most vicious sibling violence.

A PROCESS OF HOPE

That fact should not leave us hopeless. The promise to Abraham is not a quick and easy fix. It was not easy in his lifetime—his journey was one of constant testing—and it has not been easy since.

It doesn't mean the promise is void. It's a long process fraught with relapses and failures. It's a promise that trains us and shapes us, part of a larger picture that we in our temporal state cannot see but which is clear to God.

Typical of our struggle with the vision is the biblical Israelites' demand of God "for a king like the other nations."

This is an early episode that will be repeated by Jews later in history, and just as often by Christians and Muslims.

It occurred very soon after entering the Promised Land, after exile in Egypt. Acutely aware that they were nothing like other nations—they had no cohesive identity or structure, no tax system, no army, no royal rulers—the Israelites lost faith.

Let's remember, the heart of Abraham's legacy—the whole point of his calling—was to separate from the archetype of state and power that was Babylon. Abraham's descendants were meant to create a new paradigm. It was to rest on the authority of transcendent heaven, its security guaranteed only by the undefinable Creator's purpose in human life itself. The new residents of the Promised Land couldn't bear with the insecurity of it, and they demanded a king, an army, and all that went with it. (1 Samuel 8)

It's a familiar theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Another example is Jerusalem's refusal to rely on their promise when under attack from Abraham's old homeland. "Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult YHWH!... If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all."

The Hebrew record of this struggle leads directly to Jesus, who called his people to the "Kingdom of Heaven," his way of calling attention to the new un-Babylonian paradigm in which we are to trust.

 OUR PRESENT TEST OF FAITH

We can take heart from this narrative. Despite early and continued failures of faith, God remained faithful. Anything good in our present world—concern for human rights, the poor, care for the sick—all come from the constancy of the call to transcend the world's status quo. In that, we see evidence of the promise at work.

Indeed, the message of change and hope (words politicians have always fecklessly exploited) has continued to transform humanity over millennia, to the benefit of hundreds of millions. No credit is due to the world system. Any good is entirely due to the Divine criticism of that system.

Moreover, our failures do not deter the Divine process as it works to redeem and heal us. The hope remains. Christians bear witness to its efficacy in the patience of a God who remained faithful to Israel, ensuring that the line of David would bring the miracle of Jesus and his affirmation of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Muslims can agree with this and further see that work in their own path of revelation and faith.

And Jews understand very well that it is the Creator's faithfulness alone that will repair the broken world.

AS STRANGERS

Abraham's faith remains as standard for us. So again, we look to his example: How did he live in the Promised Land?

After leaving his home country, Abraham "the land I will show you." And it is exactly where he was headed in the first place—Canaan, the capital of which was Hazor, the southern stop on his ancestral trade route.  

What made it a different land for him now? It was simply how he lived in it, his attitude towards the place. As a newborn man of faith, he lived there as a stranger to its political ethos, as a foreigner to the Babylonian security that before this defined his life.

He referred to himself as a stranger and wanderer. The New Testament sums up his life: "By faith he abode in the land of promise, as in a strange country, as one that dwelt in tents."

Faith is not about ownership and control of land; it is about humbly deferring to God's ownership of it for the purpose of healing and the blessing all.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, proclaimed this with his dying breath.

Abraham, he said, left Harran understanding that his offspring would not inherit a conventional legacy. Calling his listener's attention to the transcendence of Abraham's faith regarding the Land, he asserted that God "did not give him any of it as a heritage"…"not even a foot's length" of ground.

This did not go down well with his audience for whom the square footage of the Promised Land had become a sign of concrete salvation. This was occupied Palestine; their land was under Roman occupation. They dedicated their lives to getting the Land back under their control. Salvation for them was political and militant. His listeners "became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen" and dragged him away and stoned him to death.

They would fit in very well with many of our misguided brothers and sisters today.

JERUSALEM A TEST OF FAITH

Who today among any of the Abrahamic religions in Jerusalem understands this? Our attitude toward the Holy City and the Holy Land reveals where our faith truly lies.

For Christians and Jews, the Temple Mount is where Abraham bound Isaac in the story of Genesis. It is significant that this is the place where his call to faith faced its ultimate test today. Our relationship to the mount in Jerusalem is a measure of our faith in heavenly things. Is our faith in the sword or in God? Is our inheritance material? Or is it as a people of blessing to all nations?

For Muslims, this test is eschatologically connected with Jerusalem's al-Haram ash-Sharif where the Prophet experienced the Mi'raj, an ascent, or more truly, a transcendence into heaven where he met Moses, Jesus and Abraham and received the commandment for the five daily prayers. There, his approach to the Sidrat al-Muntaha represents the essential point of the division of the created and uncreated, very much the theme of Abraham's vision of city with divine not earthly foundations. The Prophet was not told there to make war but to bow in penitent, submissive prayer.

For all of us Jerusalem challenges what we truly value and where our faith rests—is it in the present darkness of politics and power? This is our test of faith.

In truth, Jerusalem's eschatology is not about fighting for supremacy in the End Time. It is about humility in the recognition of God's final judgment.

LAST THINGS

Today, Jerusalem's place in eschatology drives the agenda of power and violence for many. This has been true in the past also, especially during the first century (the Roman-Jewish Wars) and again during the conflicts between the Persian and Byzantine Empires (which was the historical setting for Islam's emergence) and then again during the First Crusade.

Of course, Jerusalem really is a sign of Last Things according to all three Abrahamic faiths, and the place of final judgment. But in each of these times—including our current one—the faithful have fallen away from faith in the Divine and transcendent and embraced the opposite of Abraham's faith through an obsession with power and possessing the ground.

Since all of our communities warn of eschatological danger (Gog and Magog in Judaism, ad-Dajjal in Islam, and Antichrist for Christians), I wonder if this pattern of faithlessness isn't really about that spiritual battle. Our obsession with and faith in geopolitical power means falling to the deception—succumbing to the false messiah of antichrist and ad-Dajjal. That's what the End Time battle really is.

What then should we do? There can be no better answer than for us to come together to reaffirm Abraham's calling as we consider our relationship to the holy city and the holy land. We can begin to encourage each other in faith. We can choose to put aside politics and power, even if for an hour, to do nothing but think about these things and repent of our failures and pray together in penitence.

 How do you think we should begin?