New from Rantrage!

 New from Rantrage! 

 

So, after this, God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 And he said, “Take now your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains, which I will show you. 3 And Abraham rose early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, also Isaac his son. He cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and he got up, and he went to the place God had told him about. 

     4 On the third day Abraham looked up, and he saw the place a way off. 5 And Abraham said to his young men, “Wait here with the ass. The lad and I are going up there. There we will worship; then we’ll come back to you. 6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and loaded it on Isaac’s shoulders; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife; and they went up together. 7 And Isaac spoke to Abraham his father, and said, “Father.” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Look. Here is the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” 8 And Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt-offering, my so.” So, they went on together.

     9 And they came to the place which God had told him about; and Abraham built the altar there, and he laid the wood in order, and he bound Isaac his son, and he laid him on the wood. 10 And Abraham reached out, and took the knife to slay his son. 11 And the angel of the Lord called to him out of heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham.” And he said, “Here I am.” 12 And he said, “Don’t lay a hand on the lad; don’t do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, there, behind him was a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. And Abraham took the ram, and he offered it up for a burnt-offering in place of his son. 14 And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh: as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.” 

     15 And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven, 16 and said, “‘By myself have I sworn,’ says the Lord, ‘because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will truly bless you. I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand on the sea-shore; and they shall possess the gate of their enemies; 18 and in your descendants shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice.’” 

     19 So Abraham returned to his young men, and they left and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beer-sheba.

God decides to test Abraham even if, if he really is God, he must know how it’s all going to turn out.

            “Abraham!”

            “Yes?”

            “Isaac, Isaac whom you love – take him to Moriah. There’s a hilltop there – I’ll show you when you get closer. There you’re going to offer him as a sacrifice to me.”

            Abraham is struck dumb, the same Abraham that negotiated for the deliverance of strangers in Sodom and Gomorrah, when it comes to the life of his son – struck dumb.

     Without a word then, he goes to bed, he gets up, he cuts wood for the fire, and he loads his donkey. He gets Isaac out of bed, and he calls two servants to go with them. They set out. It’s three days journey – in complete silence. The third day Abraham sees where he’s going. Voice rusty, he squeaks to the servants he’s brought apparently only for this one task: “Watch the donkey,” he says. “Watch the donkey, while Isaac and I go over there. Up there.

            “We’ll be back,” Abraham says, which can’t be true if he’s going to go through with this thing God has commanded. He’ll be back, but Isaac will not.

            He loads the wood for the sacrifice on Isaac’s back. He has the knife and what he needs to start a fire. They’re climbing the hill.

            Isaac says, “Dad.”

            “Yes?”

            “We have the wood and the starter and the knife to slit its throat, but we don’t have the lamb to kill.”

            “Well,” “Dad” thinks a minute. “God will provide.”  And they keep climbing.

            Until they come to the right place, the place where Abraham will build his altar, stack his wood on it, and sacrifice his son.

Sorry. There’s no help for it: This is genuinely fornifreckulated. God wants to test Abraham, whom he must know is faithful; and the test is . . . human fornifreckulating sacrifice. “Put your son – you know, the one I promised you – on a pile of wood, slit his throat so the blood runs out, and burn what’s left. Oyez, oyez.”  What’s he thinking?  What’s God thinking?  What’s Abraham thinking?  What’s Isaac thinking, as his father ties him up and puts him on the wood?  I mean, “Jesus!” who incidentally said more than once, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”

            Sorry. This is like a footnote. And you know the footnotes in your Bible aren’t part of the Bible itself. Some donkey like your author decided to add in his two-cents’ worth at the bottom of the page.

            But back to the story –

Abraham builds the altar, rocks and mounded earth, and he arranges the wood on it so it will burn. Then he grabs the wood-bearer, Isaac, his son, and he ties him up and puts him on top of the pile of wood on top of the altar to God. And he picks up his knife to slit his son’s throat. And he does, and that’s going to prove that he’ll do whatever God says.

            No, right?  Instead, an angel calls out from heaven, “Abraham!”

            “Yes?”

            “Wait.”

            And Abraham drops the knife.

            “Wait,” the angel reads from his script. “The test is over. We know now that you love God, because you’d kill your son if he said so.”

            “Yes?” Abraham agrees.

Again, sorry. It can’t be helped. Surely he knows, the angel, and if he doesn’t, the God that knows everything must: It is one thing to pick up a knife. It is quite another thing to slit a throat with it. And if “they” or we and Abraham don’t see it through to the bloody, fiery end . . . it’s not a real test, is it?  Not like Jephthah and his daughter. Jeph proves he’ll really do what he says he’s going to do. Why, incidentally, doesn’t someone – capital S – stop that one?  Sorry. Another footnote. You can ignore it. Not like Jephthah and his daughter; not like Pilate and Jesus either. Why doesn’t Someone (capital-S) . . . ?  Sorry. Back to this story –

Abraham looks around and where he couldn’t see one before there’s a ram, caught in a bush. He untangles it, he ties it up, he gets Isaac down atop the altar, and he makes the swap. He slits the ram’s throat, he lets the ram pee his pants, he lets ram’s blood run out, and he burns it all as a pleasing smell to God.

            He and Isaac go back down the hill, as he told the servants they would: “We’ll be back.”  And they all go home.

Questions and Conclusions

Sorry.

     Whatever your Sunday School teacher told you, Abraham is not a type of God the father, nor is Isaac or the lamb/ram a type of Christ. Note that Jesus never called himself a lamb - that was John the Baptist. About sacrifice he only said that he desired mercy instead. It was the Apopsicle Paul that called him “our paschal lamb [that] has been sacrificed,” and it was whoever-the-hell wrote Hebrews that figured out he was somehow both sacrifice and priest. Sorry: with all due respect, talk about mixed metaphors.

02.10.20

_______________

 * The cover of Church’s paperback is The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by the 19th-century British painter, John Martin. For other Rantrage titles with “read-inside” links, click here.

Next?

 Next? 

Three questions of Ted Riich:

This has been going on for quite a while. How long?

You mean The Ambiguities. The first post was New Year’s Eve, 2013 with a detail from George Grosz’s Blood Is the Best Sauce.

And this is how many posts later?

This is the 709th.

And the last? Now, it’s over?

It looks like it if I still hope it may not be. Hope against hope, as The Apostle says.

     I don’t know the cause, but my concentration has become practically non-existent since we got the cat. I can’t think in a straight line for more than a centimeter or two; then it turns and I find myself, oddly, meters away from where I’d begun, in another room on another floor, even outside on the street - in my pajamas. Shivering. Still, I do hope it’s not. Hope against hope.

That’s where?

Romans 4, but don’t ask me what it means, part of that odd, prooftextual argument about the justification of Abraham who believed before there was Law. He didn’t distrust God’s promise that he would have a son even if he were a hundred years old and Sara ninety-nine. Rather - I’ll have to look this up . . . Verse 18: “In hope he believed against hope, that he should be the father of many nations.”

     Not that it matters what Romans says. What we mean when we say we hope against hope that we’ll find the twenty we lost is that unless the God we don’t entirely believe in - certainly not like Abraham did - unless God finds the twenty, we have no hope at all.

Thank you.

Yes. Thanks for stopping by.

02.06.20

_______________

 * I might have ended it already, but fond hope says, “Keep on! Tomorrow will be better.” 
                                                                                                               - ALTS (the Another Loose Translation Society)

I fell.

 I fell. 

the front door from the inside,
drawn on my phone with my finger
and colored with electronic crayon

Roz called from work: If I went outside - granted that was unlikely - and I saw the car was missing . . . Did I remember she was taking it to take a friend to a doctor’s appointment? I said, Yes, I remembered, because I did when she reminded me.

     “granted that was unlikely” - because I haven’t been out for days. I fell. Not so much down as apart. I closed my eyes because I was weeping and when I opened them the world was shimmery. Objects wouldn’t stay in their shapes. They looked like pictures I colored when I was little and couldn’t stay inside the lines.

     This was I don’t know when but days ago.

This is the kind of thing she is always doing, Roz, taking friends to appointments, involving herself in others’ lives as if she didn’t have enough to worry about. Or as if she didn’t worry.

     I think sometimes she doesn’t. She sympathizes, but she doesn’t worry. It’s one of those things that “doesn’t do any good.”  And I can’t say, “Well, it doesn’t do any harm either.” But I can stay inside.

Our feet reach the ground in different ways.

01.27.20

_______________

 * More on Roz with links, see here.

Strait is the gate...

 Strait is the gate... 

You don’t hear from someone for a while, then the letters come in bunches.

Dear Ted,

The girl you knew from college that died about the same time I did, I met her finally, Lisa. Well, you asked me to look her up, right? “Ask her about Jesus and Aristippos,” you said. Could she figure out a way to reconcile them, since you’re interested in both. Though why reconcile them? That’s what I thought, and that’s what she said, too.

     “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way,” you said. “But that’s the name of a novel by André Gide, isn’t it?” she said. I said I didn’t know, but she thought she’d read it in college if she couldn’t remember why. “Not for fun,” she didn’t think. “I

didn’t read much - maybe not at all - for fun,” she said. She found reading very difficult, the letters kept moving inside the words, and the words kept moving around on the page, “sometimes even jumping from one page to another.”

     I can see why you liked her. It was a car wreck, right? Did you say? That’s what I half-remembered, but I didn’t want to ask. “I may be completely off on that,” she said about the novel. “Maybe not Gide at all.”

     We met in a diner for coffee. Well, not really - it doesn’t work that way, but imagine that it did. A diner with a Bible - of course! And we found the passage. It’s in the Sermon on the Mount, right? - Matthew 7:13-14. “Go in by the narrow gate, for the wide gate and the easy way take you toward destruction. But strait is the gate and narrow” - or hard? - “is the way that leads to life.” “Destruction” vs. “life” - “life” not “salvation”? We decided we’d let you figure that out. Because we didn’t know Greek.

     And the context - you can figure that out, too. It’s toward the end of the Sermon, it looks like - after the blessings, and after the “love your enemies” and the “do not be anxious” or “judge.” We couldn’t see how Jesus got from those to this.

     But there’s a lot not to know we decided, “like whether Gide wrote a book named Strait is the Gate,” Lisa said. “Or anybody else did,” I said. “Well,” she said, “probably somebody.” “Right,” I said.

                                    Love, Moira

P.S. Can you find out? Also, what it’s about if it is?

01.16.20

_______________

 * Links to the Moira “story,” click here. Link to “André Gide” by m ball, here.

Two

 Two 

from Uncle Albert* —

with Sigrid Undset

What astounds me above all else is not that I continue to believe in a benevolent God but how long it takes me to get up and dressed in the morning.

Not to mention how much longer it takes me to discover that I have forgotten to zip my fly. 

01.09.20

_______________

 * 96 years young. (Not the way he describes himself, 
thank you very much.)

Things

 Things 

A letter from my (dead) sister, Moira.

Dear Ted,

In your alternate universe, I ran away to Spain and Morocco and one of them saved my life. [See here and here.*] I wish I had and it were so. Why I didn’t - that’s for another time. Maybe.

     This time I’m thinking about “things.” (And Hannah. [See here.] Though I may be worrying about you, too.) Why I’m thinking about things, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about the “topic,” at least not personally. But when has not knowing stopped anyone from venturing an opinion, thinking she is a philosopher.

     We acquire, I believe, out of attachment to place. We want a place. Eventually, we buy a nice house, and we want to stay there. In that place. Then we weight the house down so it won’t fly away from us. Beds for the bedrooms; chairs and couches for the living area; a huge dining room table that will extend to seat a dozen; plates, cups, glasses; pots and pans, especially good for ballast. Marble countertops.

    This attachment to place has to do with security. For reasons - not very good reasons, but we’re convinced I don’t know why - we begin to see the world “outside” as a dangerous place. So we want to have everything we might need inside. Then, if we decide we don’t want to, we don’t need to go out at all.

    Do you agree? You don’t have to, but think about how disconcerting it is to you, how worried you get about going anywhere new - you might get lost.

     So, could you have run away to Spain or Morocco if you didn’t know how to get there - turn by turn how to get there?

                                    Love, Moira

01.08.20

_______________

 * And for more, all the Moira links, see here.

Yet another bad idea:

Joel Osteen by m. ball

 The gospel of Jesus of Nazareth 

 Dateline. The First Tuesday after Epiphany —

                       And they came bearing gifts, gold . . . .

Why the gospel of success succeeds while the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth that preaches poverty and powerlessness cannot but fail. (I mean by succeeds gains followers, by fails loses them.) Who with any sense (any hope, any ambition) would choose that itinerant, murmuring, nonsensical rabbi over Joel Osteen with his big house, his expensive clothes; his blonde wife and straight teeth - with his amplified voice preaching surely, sensibly, and incontrovertibly that more is more? How can it not be? — It is the nature of tautologies that they must be true. So it is the nature of oxymorons, equations that cannot balance: they must be false. “Less is more” can not be so.

When I find myself wandering, hoping by odd chance that I will stumble into a store that is giving away what must make me feel better, I have to remind myself, “Wait. Stores don’t give away, do they?”

01.17.20