Tuesday 09 October 2012

Background

Have you ever heard (or preached!) a sermon in which a passageof Scripture is mangled beyond all recognition so it ends upmeaning what the preacher wants it to mean, which is quite theopposite to what it plainly means to any sensible person? Well,here's one famous example! The original story of Hagar and Sarah isa tragic one (you can read it in Genesis chapters 16-17, 21). Sarah, Abraham'swife, could not conceive so she used her Egyptian slave, Hagar, asa surrogate. Hagar produced a son, Ishmael, as Abraham's heir.Unsurprisingly, Sarah was very jealous of Hagar and when,miraculously, Sarah herself conceived in late old age she wantedher own son, Isaac, to be the sole heir, so she got Abraham to sendHagar and Ishmael away. Ishmael became the father of the Arabtribes, who were despised and rejected by the descendants of Isaac,who ignored God's promise that he would bless Ishmael and hisdescendants. (Muslim Arabs still trace their ancestry back toAbraham.)

Paul well and truly mangles this story in order to make hispoint: it is, he says, as though the two lines of descent fromAbraham have been swapped. The Jewish law ("from Mount Sinai" (v.24), where Moses received it from God) has become a kind of slaveryand so the Jews (or maybe, more specifically, Jewish Christians whoinsist on imposing Jewish law on gentile Christians) have becomethe children of Hagar ("the present Jerusalem" (v. 25)). The truedescendants of Sarah, then, are those who are free from the slaveryof the law. And so the Gentiles who have believed in Jesus as Lordand Christ are the true "children of the promise" (v. 28) and of"the free woman" (v. 30). Confused? Very probably! Paul's argumentwas not exactly coherent, but then he was extremely angry. And hisargument would have been extremely, and intentionally, offensive tothe Jewish Christians he was attacking because it challenged theirfundamental identity as Jews. But for Paul the crucial point wasthat gentile Christ-followers should be free, and not have visibleaspects of 'Jewishness' imposed on them by the representatives ofthe Jerusalem church - Paul's enemies.

To Ponder

• How might the story of Sarah and Hagar inform our understandingof the relationships today between Jews, Christians and Muslims?Does it help, or hinder, those relationships? Why?

• "Now this is an allegory" (v. 24). What do you think aboutPaul's use of the Hebrew Scriptures in this passage? Is it helpful?Under what circumstances do you think it is OK to claim that theBible means something opposite to what it actually says?

• Paul (and Jesus) used Scripture to attack their opponents.Should we do that too? Why?