• Genesis 15:1-12,17-18

God’s relationship with Abram/Abraham is direct, revelatory and revealing.  God makes impossible requests of Abraham and Sarah, and, in return, makes staggering promises.  In this episode Abram has an immediate worry; he has no heir.  Only a slave in his household is a stand-in heir.  “But the word of the Lord came to him.”  The Lord took him outside at night, told him to look up at the star-filled sky and then made a promise that Abram would have a son, an heir, and his descendants would be a numerous as the stars.  After a ritual reading of entails is completed, the Lord makes another specific response: “To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”

• Psalm 27

The psalmist expresses full trust in the Lord during some personal crisis in his life.  He renews his commitment to the Lord, whom he cherishes as his “shelter.”  He has this feeling of security most strongly in “the house of the Lord.”  The psalmist makes a request, “to see God face to face.”  The psalm concludes with further assurances of his trust in the Lord’s goodness and the Lord’s “ways.”

• Philippians 3:17-4:1

To a church that had been generous in the past, Paul now writes to differentiate between immediate and delayed gratification.  He appeals to the “glory” of the Lord Jesus Christ “whom we are expecting to come as a Savior” who will “make all things subject to himself.”  In the meantime, Paul writes, “stand firm.”

• Luke 13:31-35

Throughout Luke’s narrative he drops hints of the coming climax of volume one, which  will occur “on the third day.”  However, before that day of vindication by God’s direct action, Jesus must live out the rest of the story.  Luke writes that there are rumors about Herod’s trying to track down Jesus to kill him.  But that is not how Jesus will meet his fate.  Jesus must go to Jerusalem, the place where God’s action/intervention/revelation always result in either acceptance or rejection.  “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem,”  which has become “the city that kills prophets.”  Jesus then says, Luke writes, that the day will come when he will be greeted in the words of liturgical welcome (Psalm 118:26): “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”

No matter how assertively, or contrariwise, how meekly God reveals God’s-Self, the revelation gets entangled in and co-opted by human politics, nationalism, and social and religious structures.  In the Hebrew scriptures, God’s self-revelation is linked to specific places, including the guarantee of a “promised land,” which is today’s reading from Genesis.  For the devout, the epicenter of the glorious history of God’s revelation is the Temple on the holy mountain in Jerusalem, which the psalmist equates with the Lord’s “shelter.”  Therefore, there is a certain inevitability in the gospel narratives about Jesus that culminates in Jerusalem, “the city that kills prophets.”  God’s Self-revelation undercuts human institutions, traditions and loyalties.  And, as has been shown repeatedly, they are too frequently used to merely re-enforce preexisting human prejudices and assumptions.

Jacques Derrida has meditated on this problem of revelation and human complications in The Gift of Death.  There he writes:

“…the place where the sacrifice of Abraham or of Isaac… is said to have occurred, is the place where Solomon decided to build the House of the Lord in Jerusalem, as well as the place where God appeared to Solomon’s father, David.  However, it is also the place of the grand Mosque of Jerusalem, the place called the Dome of the Rock near the grand mosque of El Aksa where the sacrifice of Ibrahim is supposed to have taken place, and from where Mahomet was transported on horseback toward paradise after his death.  It is just above the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem and the Wailing Wall, not far from the Way of the Cross.  It is therefore a holy place but also a place in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other.”  “Isaac’s sacrifice continues everyday.”  (p.70)

God’s Self-revelation speaks words but says things we barely grasp and too easily distort.  We want to grab them, own them, rather than the other way around.  Even when they come to us meekly and helplessly, as with Jesus’ total submission to the vagaries of human political and religious institutions, we feel threatened.  Why?  There is no such thing as human moral progress.  God’s Self-revelation and human expectations never mesh smoothly.  “…[S]acrifice continues everyday.”  The story Luke tells about Jesus, which culminates in Jerusalem, as it “must,” still occurs in real time, our real time.  Yet, the One who comes willingly walks eyes-wide-open into the place of human confusion and violence.  We cannot extricate ourselves from this coming.  Despite everything that has happened, God takes the risks and comes to us again… and again… and again….  This is a story of depressing human failure and awe-full divine love.  In this mean-time, (Paul writes), “stand firm.”  The story of Abraham begins with a man worried about his legacy, but through encounters with an unknown God who approached him out of nowhere, becomes a story of a human being who is invited to imagine and to live into a future he could not of dreamed of by himself.  Along the way, it will become a story fraught with the range of human failures which are inevitable and inescapable, but also with the steady, reliable promise of more than– more than we are inclined to ask or imagine, more than we could ever expect, more than seems possible right now.  The path leads through Jerusalem, “the city that kills prophets.”  But it leads to an empty tomb that always invites us to imagine a way through tragedy to hope, through human “dispute” to God’s wisdom and peace, through the meagerness of our imagination to the grandeur of God’s vision for each of us and all of us.