Freedom on both sides

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of my master Abraham, who has not withheld his steadfast faith from my master. For I have been guided on my errand by the Lord, to the house of my master’s kinsmen.” Gen 24, 27.


Some years ago I used to be a fairly regular attender at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kensington, at the time of Archbishop Anthony Bloom. He would preach at the Sunday morning liturgy, advancing to the top of the altar steps, fumbling with the microphone, and delivering, with great intensity, an impromptu sermon around the gospel of the day. He had a constant theme: that the incarnation should lead us to the full glory of our humanity, a humanity that God had taken on himself. In the congregation there was an old Russian lady scarred by a tragic life, who would denounce other worshippers, if they stood too close, for casting an evil influence on her. One morning, as Archbishop Antony began once again to preach on the grandeur of humanity, she turned and said, loudly enough for him to hear, “The same old thing. We’ve heard it all before.”

I tell the story because what I have to say this evening may seem rather close to what I said in a sermon a few weeks ago. I was arguing that faith is not just an event in our heads, but an objective structure in which something is given us. ‘Our society tells us repeatedly that faith is a private affair, a matter of personal opinion, and no more to be taken into public account than our taste in music or in painting. Religion, it is suggested, should have nothing to do with the objective, public world, where generally it will only cause harm.’

This evening we have heard part of the story of Abraham; and there is no space in that story for a privatised, internalised view of faith. Abraham’s faith was about action: leaving Haran, travelling to Canaan, founding a lineage, offering up his son Isaac. We are never given Abraham’s private opinions on God. Instead we read his belief from what he does. His faith is the drama that is enacted between himself and God, and that drama has the objective quality of real happenings in a public world.

But Abraham’s actions raise broad questions about how we act toward God and how God acts toward us. One familiar view says that if we act toward God in faith, then God will satisfy us: he will give us material blessings, the life of a loved one, spiritual gifts of love and grace. When that doesn’t quite happen, the focus shifts to God’s action toward us: notwithstanding appearances, we are told, God is actually giving us his gifts in everything that happens, even if those gifts don’t accord with our desires and we can’t see them as gifts at all.

I have caricatured those positions slightly and there is no doubt that they do contain spiritual insight. But there are also dangers. Each, in a different way, removes freedom from our relationship with God. The idea that acting in faith ensures God’s gifts, binds God to our purposes. We set the agenda; if we apply sufficient faith, God is bound to deliver. The second position binds us to God’s agenda. God is, invisibly and often incomprehensibly, writing the script of your life, a script which you may not understand and which makes your purposes a secondary consideration.

It’s easy to read the Abraham stories in these terms. Abraham has faith in God and God gives him what he wants: lands, descendants, the life of his son, Isaac. All that is the reward of faith. Looked at the other way, God has from all eternity written the script of Abraham’s life, and He prompts and nudges him along the way to a determined conclusion. You thought that sacrificing Isaac would rather destroy the play? Just wait for the next scene to see how my script will be played out.

Crudely put: either Abraham manipulates God or God manipulates Abraham. But to read the story in those ways is to leave out of account a crucial word, a word that governs all of this: the dull old word ‘covenant.’ Abraham’s actions, and God’s actions, are not just one-offs: they are held within, and given meaning by, the overarching frame of the covenantal relationship.

A covenant, as anyone who has bought a house will know, binds parties into a relationship of freedoms and obligations. I may grow cabbages in my front garden, if I wish, but I may not erect a public funfair. The point of a covenant is that it gives each party a position. The covenants of Genesis—between God and Noah, and between God and Abraham—recognise the standing of both parties and the freedom of each in respect of the other. Humanity is given its freedom, its dignity, which is different from the dignity of God. Men and women are no longer the vassals of the gods.

Look again at this evening’s story. Abraham has decided that Isaac must marry a woman from his native land, and not just from his native land, but from his kinsfolk. That is Abraham’s decision; God has issued no instructions on the point. For whatever reasons, good or bad—maintenance of a pure line, dislike of the Canaanites—this is what Abraham wants.

Abraham has his purposes, and no doubt he thinks they accord with God purposes. Can he be sure that they will come about, that God will see to their fulfilment? No, he can’t. His steward asks him: what if the girl from your kin won’t come back with me? Abraham sees that it is a possibility. If that happens, we think again. But even then, he says, don’t take Isaac back home.

So Abraham doesn’t think he can determine God’s actions simply by applying sufficient faith. God is free; he may do something quite different, faith or no faith. But Abraham is also free: the purposes that he sets out here are his own. These are human choices in a human situation.

This freedom is crucial to understanding covenant. God has promised his favour to Abraham. He will be close to Abraham and his descendants; as the steward says, he will show steadfast faithfulness. But this doesn’t mean that God relinquishes his freedom as far as Abraham is concerned. Things may still not happen the way Abraham wants them. Nor is Abraham bound to give up his freedom. He will continue to make his own choices, for his own reasons; but they will be made within the covenant, toward a faithful God.

As human beings, we act in freedom toward a God who, in his faithfulness, acts in freedom toward us. Neither binds the other. This is Abraham’s covenant, and it is the covenant that Christ renewed when he said to his disciples, ‘this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many’ (Mark 14, 24). Again, there was freedom on both sides. Christ’s wishes could not control the Father: ‘if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.’ Nor could God’s purpose override Christ’s freedom: he was free to refuse the crucifixion, to hide or disguise himself, to escape back to provincial obscurity. Christ was free; God was free. But at that moment in the upper room, the two freedoms came together; in that perfect conjunction of human freedom with the freedom of God the covenant was fulfilled, and human nature, as Archbishop Antony used to say, displayed its full glory.