A Homily for Refreshment Sunday
“These things are an allegory.”
Today is called “Refreshment Sunday,” referring, of course,
to Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, and also to the fact that we have
reached the mid-point of our Lenten exercises. The fourth Sunday in
Lent is also called “Mothering Sunday.”
In today’s Epistle lesson, Saint Paul talks about two
mothers, Sarah and Hagar, the mothers respectively of Isaac and Ishmael, and,
therefore, of the Jews and the Arabs. But Paul also says that “these
things are an allegory”—the motherhood of Sarah and Hagar is symbolic of
the mystical motherhood of the Church and the world.
We should consider, briefly, the context of the Epistle.
Saint Paul was writing to the Church in Galatia, in central Asia Minor—or
what is now Turkey (although there were no Turks living there in Paul’s day).
After Paul founded the Church there, and after he had moved on to continue
his work elsewhere, someone came from Jerusalem and convinced the Galatians
that they needed not only to become Christians, but Jews as well. That
is, they needed to submit to the ritual of circumcision and to obey the precepts
of the Jewish law, the Torah.
Now the Torah is the five books of Moses, what we call
the Pentateuch (or the first five books of the Old Testament). The whole
of the five books is the Torah, the law, including the parts that are commandments
(halakah) and the parts that are narratives (haggadah). And so, Paul
says to the Judaizers in Galatia: “You who want to be under Torah,
why don’t you read what Torah has to say.” The Judaizers were trying
to enforce the commandments of Torah, but Paul quotes to them part of the
narrative of Torah.
The passage he cites is key to the whole understanding
of what it meant to be Jew, because it refers to the blood lineage of the
Jewish people from the patriarch Abraham. You will recall that Abraham
and Sarah had grown quite old, but that God had promised that they would have
a child. Sarah laughed at the promise, because it was so ridiculous
that she might become a mother at her age.
So Sarah agreed that Abraham could have a child with
Sarah’s Egyptian slave-girl. And that child was Ishmael. Fourteen
years later, as God had promised, Sarah also bore a son, Isaac.
And Ishmael, who was then a teenager, teased and harassed the baby, so that
Sarah demanded that Abraham throw Hagar and Ishmael out of the house, saying
that “the child of the slave-girl shall not be heir with my son.” The
child born according to the natural law is not to share with the child born
according to God’s promise.
Saint Paul emphasizes the contrast between the natural
law and the promises of God by quoting a passage from the prophet Isaiah.
“Rejoice, barren woman who has not borne a child . . . for the children of
the barren woman are more numerous than those of the wedded wife, says the
LORD.” The passage from Isaiah goes on to say: “Your Creator
is your husband, the LORD is your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God
of the whole world. . . . My faithful love will never leave you,
my covenant of peace will never cease, says the Lord who has compassion for
you.”
There are some remarkable points about Paul’s interpretation of the Torah
passage. First, he says that the story of Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and
Ishmael is an “allegory.” An allegory is a story in which the characters
have symbolic meanings—they stand for something beyond themselves. It
must have been quite shocking to people accustomed to reading the Bible in
a strictly literal sense to be told that one of the principal stories in
the Bible is allegorical.
Second, the observant Jews are represented not by Isaac, their genetic ancestor,
but by Ishmael, who was cast out of Abraham’s family for taunting the baby
Isaac. This is not how we expect the Bible to be read. And it
is certainly not what we would expect from Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee, the
rabbinical student who learned to interpret Scripture from the great rabbi
Gamaliel.
In Saint Paul’s exposition of the allegory, Sarah and
Isaac represent Christianity, while Hagar and Ishmael represent Judaism.
The Jews—“are they children of Abraham?” Paul asks in another place,
“So am I”—are Abraham’s physical descendents according to the natural process
of genetic inheritance, but Christians are Abraham’s spiritual descendents
according to God’s promise.
In another place in the epistle to the Galatians, Saint
Paul says that God’s promise to Abraham was made not to Abraham and his descendents
(plural), but to Abraham and his descendent (singular). And the one
descendent of Abraham, to whom the promise was made, was Christ. (As
Saint John the Baptist told the people of Jerusalem, when they went out to
hear him preach in the desert: God could have made descendents of Abraham
from the rocks underfoot.) God’s promise was made to Abraham and to
Christ, and, therefore, to those who are Christ’s, who are in Christ.
God made his promise to Abraham because Abraham had faith
in God, and because of his faith he was righteous in God’s sight. The
heirs of the promise of God to Abraham are those who people of faith.
The rules of the Old Covenant were given to the Israelites
though Moses at Mount Sinai. Those who choose to remain under the commandments
of the Old Covenant are in bondage, like the slave-girl Hagar. The rules
of the Old Covenant were a counsel of perfection, but perfection was impossible
to human beings, and so the rules of the Old Covenant imposed a death sentence.
But we are under the New Covenant, the covenant God made
with mankind on Mount Calvary. Those who accept God’s New Covenant are
free, because they are citizens not of the earthly Jerusalem, the capital
city of the Old Covenant, but of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is the City
of God.
The citizens of the earthly Jerusalem are still subject
to sin and death, which are the real slave-masters. The citizens of
the heavenly Jerusalem have been set free from the slavery of sin and death
by the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And so, as Sarah was
to Hagar, as Isaac was to Ishmael, as the Jews were to the Arabs, so are
the Christians to the Jews. “These things are an allegory.”
It has been rather a long time since the question of
Judaization troubled the Church. Hardly anyone these days would suggest
that Christians must keep Kosher kitchens, or go up to Jerusalem for the
Feast of Unleavened Bread, or bind the words of the Sh’mah as a frontlet
before their eyes, or wear yarmulkes and fringed garments, or refuse to work
on Saturdays. There is rather too little respect for Jewish traditions
among us than too much.
But there are those among us, whether within the Christian
Church itself or in the world around us, who tell us that we can find our
own way to salvation within the context of the world. There are precious
few today who would argue that salvation can be earned by rigorously following
the precepts of Torah. But there are many who believe that we (or they,
at any rate) can earn salvation by doing good deeds, or by political action,
or by scientific progress, or by material prosperity, or by getting in touch
with one’s feelings.
In fact, everyone who tries to tell you that you can
earn salvation by following some set of rules in this world is selling you
the same kind of snake oil that the Judaizers were selling to the Christians
of first century Galatia.
Anyone who thinks he can achieve redemption by some plan
other than by God’s plan has Hagar, the slave-girl, for his mother.
But anyone who has faith in God has already been redeemed by the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and he has Sarah, the free woman, for his
mother.
For that let us give thanks to God on this Mothering
Sunday.
Church of Saint Mary Magdalene
Orange California
10 March 2002
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