Expecting the worst

Those who expect the worst out of life are rarely disappointed. They are not, it has to be said, usually very happy, so there clearly is a cost to being right all the time, but it would seem that, the lower you set your sights, the clearer your vision will be.

You would have thought that when builders working on the multi-million pound Streatham Hub discovered an time capsule from 1926 buried under the old ice rink, those of a naturally Eeyore disposition, would be, well, almost ecstatic with the opportunity this would afford to wallow in gloom and doom. After all, what better way to bemoan the free-falling standards of the present day than to chance upon a window into an earlier more innocent, more… moral age? Hold up 100 years ago for comparison with right now and there will be proof positive that things only ever get worse.

Well, let’s distract our pessimists for a moment- toss them a copy of the Daily Mail to keep them occupied- and zoom in on the moment of the opening of the time capsule. The atmosphere is tense. The excitement palpable. The great and the good of 21st century Lambeth life are gathered with the borough historians to open this artefact that has lain undisturbed for almost a century. The archaeologistgentlylifts the jar in his white-gloved hands, and twists the cap. A little sand, trapped in the cap for eighty-six years, is caught in the light as it falls into a new century. The technician lifts out the first thing from the capsule, unrolls it. Everyone in the room is unconsciously holding their breath… It’s… a month’s-worth of minutes of Streatham Council Meetings. Oh. Ah but evidence of times when Council meetings were things worthwhile, when noble aldermen the country over bestrode their domains serving the public good and upholding civilisation, times when Reform politicians would have been locked away rather than allowed to run councils. It’s not like that these da… Shh!

Back to the time capsule and next to emerge are two local newspapers. Here at last is evidence of a different, gentler age. The headline on one, the Council’s Window Dressing competition which will run till Christmas; the other, Charlie Chaplin’s latest blockbuster The Gold Rush. You see, things were different then, people didn’t… oh. Hang on. Down the bottom of the front page is an alarmingly contemporary-sounding story of… metal theft in Balham.

And for the golden-age nostalgics things are about to get a lot worse. The last thing to emerge from the Streatham time capsule is an envelope marked ‘Coins of the Realm’. This should contain pristine examples of 1926 money- half a crown, a florin, a shilling, a tanner, ha’penny, farthing, and so on. Except, the envelope is empty. It’s sealed, but there’s absolutely nothing in it, and sitting alone under the foundations all this years, it always has been. Apparently, knowing full well that they would not be around to take the rap when the capsule was opened, someone back in 1926 has quietly pocketed the coins of the realm and bequeathed an empty envelope’s worth of disappointment to a future generation. 

So you see, it’s not true that things are always getting worse. They’ve always been bad.  Those who expect the worst out of life are rarely disappointed.

Would you expect the worst from God? I hope not. You are in church,  you are committed Christians. You firmly believe and truly that God is good. God is kind. God is benevolent and above all God is Love. So what if God asked you to kill your child? Your only child. Your only son, in an age where sons were everything and daughters didn’t matter. Would you expect that from God? If your answer is ‘no’, as I sincerely hope it would be, then we have a major problem with our Old Testament reading this morning. Because in this infamous part of Genesis, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac his son and Abraham obeys. Do we really realise how shocking this story is? I don’t think so. Nobody cried out in disgust when we just heard it read. It may be in our scriptures, but this is repulsive, horrific; if we take the story at face value it is all the nightmares of the social worker’s feverish imagination come true, except this is not satanic child abuse but the Lord’s.

Christians have had a long time to ponder this story and to try to make sense of this terrible tale, to find excuses for both God’s atrocious demand and Abraham’s equally atrocious acquiescence in it.

The first thing we might want to say, is that, Isaac wasn’t sacrificed: God was merely testing Abraham and stepped in to stop the grizzly charade at the eleventh hour. Even if we lay aside such objections as ‘why would a God who knows everything need to test Abraham’s faith’, and ‘what a sick way of testing it’, this excuse really doesn’t carry much weight. Isaac was spared, yep, but what about Jephthah in the book of Judges? This scripture is not wheeled out very often, for reasons that will become obvious. Jephthah, Judge of Israel, vows that if he is victorious against the Ammonites then he will sacrifice to God the first thing he sees when he returns from the battle. He is victorious, and the first thing he sets eyes on is his daughter. For her, there is no last minute reprieve. God does not step in to prevent this religious murder. Jephthah’s daughter dies, a sacrifice to God. Run forward to the book of Samuel, and there is no middle-man sacrifice: God himself takes the life of David and Bathsheba’s infant son. If God did not stop these deaths, we cannot feel better that God stayed Abraham’s knife hand.

We might say, it’s obvious that Abraham had a heavy heart: but he still did it. We might  excuse Abraham’s behaviour because God stopped: but Abraham didn’t know that was going to happen. We might, like St Paul & St James,  marvel at the strength of Abraham’s faith in God that he would sacrifice his son: but is that faith of any value at all if it leads you to set out to kill your child? 

If often the Old Testament seems to us crude and cruel, violent and vengeful, that’s because it is. Let us never, however, think that God is. If we want to know what God is like, then we should be very cautious about looking there. The scriptures tell us about God: they also tell us about the humans who wrote them, in this case, religious maniacs of the type that think nothing of blowing themselves up, flying planes into skyscrapers or murdering children to demonstrate the complete commitment required from those who have faith in God.

Revelation is partial, it is progressive and it is ongoing- if only we knew then what we know now. That growing in knowledge and insight of God, His ways and His demands, is reflected in our Scriptures.  Our understanding grows, we see in a glass darkly, but that glass is clearer now than it was. We have a major problem if we believe that each part of scripture equally and fully describes God, because in a very important sense, it doesn’t. From Genesis to Calvary, our scriptures describe the journey of God’s people in time, yes;  but far more importantly, they describe the journey of God’s people in understanding. That understanding reaches its apotheosis in scripture not on Moriah, in the burning bush or the 10 commandments; not in the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple or the Levitical Law, but on the Cross.

What most clearly and reliably tells us about God is not scripture, but Jesus. Our scriptures have value to us precisely to the extent that they tell us of him.

Through the centuries some Christians have looked at this shocking, revolting story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac and seen Jesus, not in the God that demands child sacrifice, but in the ram caught in the thicket, sacrificed instead of Isaac. This interpretation cannot be pushed too far without opening a whole new can of worms, but it does at least say something to us about Christ and his dying, for us.

As Christians, we should be shocked by the Old Testament, appalled by some of what is described there. But if we understand that all scripture is a groping towards that truth of God revealed most fully in Christ Jesus, we need never deny that they are our scriptures. If we can accept that even the most brilliant of Biblical insights are pitifully partial, then nothing can ever make us expect the worst from God.