HARD LESSONS

By Eric Von Salzen

My father resigned as a Sunday School teacher over Genesis 34:13-29.

In case you’ve forgotten , that’s the story of how the sons of Jacob took revenge on Prince Shechem for raping their sister Dinah. (Although the scriptures tell us that Shechem took Dinah “by force”, afterwards his “soul was drawn to Dinah”, “he loved the girl, and spoke tenderly to her” and asked his father to arrange a marriage.) When Shechem’s father asked Jacob and his sons to agree to marriage between the two (and generally between their two tribes), Dinah’s brothers tricked the Shechemites into agreeing to allow all their menfolk to be circumcised, and then, while the Shechemite men were still incapacitated from the operation – performed in those days with flint knives and no anesthetic – the sons of Jacob murdered them and plundered the city.

In our Sunday School text book, there was no condemnation of the sons of Jacob; after all the Shechemites were pagans, whereas the sons of Jacob were the chosen people of God. My father protested to the Sunday School director, We can’t teach 12-year olds that you can do anything you want so long as you’re a member of the right religion. We have to say that what the sons of Jacob did was wrong. But the Sunday School director refused to allow my father to teach that God’s chosen people could be wrong. My father never taught Sunday School again.

That was in the dark ages of the mid 1950’s, in a Presbyterian Church, and surely wouldn’t happen in an Episcopal church today. I mention it, though, because it was my first experience with one of the “hard” lessons of the Bible. I don’t mean “hard” in the sense that some of Paul’s theology is hard to understand, or that the imagery in parts of Revelation or Daniel is hard to visualize. I mean hard to accept.

There are a lot of these hard lessons, particularly in the Old Testament, such as God banning Moses from entering the Promised Land because he didn’t do the water-from-the-rock trick the right way; King Saul losing God’s favor because he failed to kill all the Amalekites after defeating them in battle; and Psalm 137, which begins with that poignant lament, “By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps”, and ends in a hateful fantasy of revenge against the Babylonians: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

But the quintessential hard lesson for me is Abraham’s (almost) sacrifice of Isaac. Every year in Education for Ministry, I look forward, with interest and a little trepidation, to the week the Year 1 members read and discuss that story. What are we to say about a God who tells a father to murder his own son, and about a father who is ready to do so? Every discussion is different, but it’s always challenging.

Most of us prefer easy lessons to hard ones. Easy lessons are the ones that tell us that what we already believe is correct, that what we want to do is what we ought to do. The nice thing about easy lessons is that there’s so much to choose from. Given a little imagination and a good concordance, you can find scriptural support for just about any position that appeals to you. That’s why my baloney detector goes off whenever I hear someone try to end a discussion by saying “The Bible says . . . .”

You don’t learn anything from a scripture that says (or that you believe says) that you were right all along. It’s hard lessons that you learn from.

Kierkegaard used the hard lesson of Abraham and Isaac as the point of departure for his discourse in Fear and Trembling. He characterized Abraham as a “Knight of Faith”, who was willing to sacrifice his son at God’s direction, but at the same time believed “absurdly” that he would get Isaac back. That’s an interesting take on this hard lesson, and worth further thought and discussion. In EFM, the same week that the Year 1 members are reading the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis, the Year 4 folks are reading about Kierkegaard. There’s an opportunity there for some productive cross-discussion.

Jesus made it a practice to take easy lessons and make them hard. When a rich man asked him what to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus could have advised tithing, but instead he told him to sell everything he owned and give it to the poor. A hard lesson for a man who “had many possessions” (and mighty hard for all of us, too). When a lawyer asked Jesus a similar question, Jesus could have been satisfied with the standard scriptural answer, to love God and one’s neighbor, but that was too easy. Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, which says that the most despicable person a good Jew could imagine – a Samaritan! – was his neighbor for these purposes. And as if that weren’t hard enough, Jesus added, “Go and do likewise”.

We can try to dodge the hard lessons, of course. We can dismiss the Abraham and Isaac story as a cultural vestige of a dark and primitive age that has nothing to teach us. That’s pretty easy to do. But you don’t learn anything that way. Our Catechism tells us that God inspired the human authors of the holy scriptures and still speaks to us through them; it also tells us that the Holy Spirit guides the Church and us in interpreting the scriptures. I think that means we’re supposed to work on it; we’re supposed to take the scriptures seriously, even when they’re hard. Especially when they’re hard.

In turns out, by the way, that condemning the murder of the Shechemites doesn’t challenge the scriptures after all. Genesis never presents the sons of Jacob as moral role models, quite the contrary. These are the same lovable characters who, a few chapters later, kidnap their kid brother Joseph and sell him into slavery. The Sunday School director just didn’t know his Bible very well.

The hard part of this lesson comes when we remember that the sons of Jacob are us. We, the people of God, do awful things all the time, just as the Israelites did over and over again in the Old Testament. Just as in the New Testament we crucify Jesus. The hard question is: Why does God tolerate the human race? There’s a good topic for discussion.