I don’t think there are any. There certainly weren’t for Abraham and Sarah.
‘Sarah bore a son, and his name was Isaac, and he was, not surprisingly, the apple of his parents’ eye.
But before we get into the story of Isaac, we come to Sodom and Gomorrah. Since I was born in, and live for a good part of the year in the modern Sodom, I have a certain feeling for the destruction of great cities.
It was immediately after the laughter of Sarah, and while the three heavenly visitors were getting ready to leave Abraham and Sarah, that
the Lord said, “Because the noise of Sodom and Gomorrah is very great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now”
and see if they are truly as wicked as they seem to be.
So the three heavenly visitors turned away from Abraham and Sarah on the plain of Mamre, and looked toward Sodom.
But Abraham stood in front of the Lord and said, “Will you also destroy the righteous along with the wicked? Possibly there are fifty righteous people within the city. Will you go ahead and destroy? Or will you spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous….Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?”
Powerful language for Abraham to use before the Lord of the universe, but the prophets, for all their faults and flaws, had the courage of their convictions, and Abraham’s conviction was that the Lord had to do what is right, that what el did must be right. Perhaps this encounter with divine judgment over Sodom and Gomorrah stood him in good stead later on.
And the Lord said, “If I find in Sodom fifty innocent people, I will spare the city for their sake.”
Abraham continued to push. “Forgive me—but what if there are only forty-five innocent people?” and then forty, and then thirty, and then twenty, and then ten—and each time the Lord said that el would save the city for the sake of the innocent people.
A wonderful conversation, a freeing conversation. There is nothing we need be afraid to say before the Lord.
—
So I continued to read, to think, to pray. And by the time our freighter holiday was over, I was so deep in Genesis that wherever I went I reached for whatever Bible, in whatever translation was available, and continued to read, to think, and to hope that what I read and thought would move me on into prayer.
—
After this remarkable conversation about the wicked inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, God went along, and Abraham, having had his say about the innocent people, went home, and Jehovah left the two angels to complete the mission he’d given them. They left Mamre and went to Sodom, where Lot, Abraham’s nephew, was sitting at the city gate. He greeted the two angels, who were in the form of two beautiful young men, and after some persuasion on Lot’s part they went to his house where he had a fine meal prepared for them, which they ate. Angels may be pure energy, but these angels made a point of eating so that people would understand that they were real (energy and matter are, we now understand, interchangeable; nevertheless this proof of reality for our sakes is amazing). And as the resurrected Christ made a point of eating fish and bread and drinking wine, so that his friends would know that he was real, even if they failed to recognize him by sight.
So the angels ate the meal Lot offered them. At bedtime all the men in the city, young and old, surrounded Lot’s house and asked him to bring the two young men to them. According to the King James translation, the men of Sodom wanted to “know” the two young men, in the same sense that Adam “knew” Eve. The Good News Bible, which was the translation in my room when I came to this part of the story, puts it very bluntly. They wanted
to have sex with them.
Lot, of course, was horrified. It was his ingrained habit of hospitality which had caused him to ask the two young men home for a meal, nothing else.
He went outside and closed the door behind him. He said to them, “Friends, I beg you, don’t do such a wicked thing!”
The sacredness of hospitality, and of one’s responsibility toward one’s guests was far greater then than it is now. It is difficult for us to understand Lot’s feeling of obligation toward these two strangers whom he felt he must protect at all costs. Of course, he didn’t know that they were angels and well able to protect themselves; therefore he could not betray his sacred obligation. Even so, his response seems extreme. Lot offered the men of Sodom his two daughters, which may have been wily, rather than naive, under the circumstances, adding,
“But don’t do anything with these men; they are guests in my house and I must protect them.” But the men of Sodom said, “Get out of the way, you foreigner!”
Distrust of foreigners seems to be as old as the fear of great darkness, and probably came about because foreigners, if they were stronger than you, were apt to take your land and your wives and make you into slaves. However, Lot surely posed no threat to Sodom.
When the men of that city would have forced their way into Lot’s house by breaking down the door, the two angels
pulled Lot back into the house and shut the door. Then they struck all the men outside with blindness.
The two men said to Lot, “If you have anyone else here, sons, daughters, sons-in-law or any other relatives living in the city, get them out of here, because we are going to destroy this place.”…
So Lot went to the men his daughters were engaged to and said, “Hurry up and get out of here! The Lord is going to destroy this place.”
For by now he understood that the two men were angels.
Where were the ten just men for whom Abraham had begged the Lord to save the city? It seems that there were not even ten just men in that great city.
According to Hassidic tradition, there are always ten just men in the world (and once again I am using the word men in the generic, biblical sense of male and female). These ten just people do not know who they are. Only God knows. When one dies, the place is filled by another. So long as there are ten just men…
But there were not ten just men in Sodom, and in the morning the angels took Lot,
his wife, and his two daughters, by the hand and led them out of the city. Then one of the angels said, “Run for your lives! Don’t look back and don’t stop in the valley. Run to the hills so that you won’t be killed!”
God’s people are ever argumentative. Lot thanked the angels for saving their lives, but argued that the hills were too far away.
“Do you see that little town? It is near enough. Let me go over there. You can see that it is just a small place. And I will be safe.”
The angel answered, “All right, I agree. I won’t destroy that town. Hurry! Run!”
And at last Lot ran. The sun was already beginning to rise when Lot reached the little town which was named
Zoar. Suddenly the Lord rained burning sulphur on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed them and the whole valley along with all the people there and everything that grew on the land. But Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.
Sodom had been their home. It was a natural enough thing for her to want to take one last look. And if Lot hadn’t argued with the angel, and so delayed their departure, she might have been all right.
In Pompeii one can see the petrified forms of people who had been caught in the grey ash of the volcano, perhaps also looking back for one last glimpse of home, and who were turned, not into salt, but into statues of volcanic rock.
Early the next morning Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood in the presence of the Lord. He looked down on Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole valley and saw smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a huge furnace.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, whatever caused it, sounds terrifyingly like the destruction which would be caused by atomic warfare.
At a dinner party I sat next to someone who works for the Army Corps of Engineers, and whose present job is planning the evacuation of New York City, and the feeding and housing of survivors, after the city has been hit by an atomic bomb. This person is receiving a go
vernment pay check for this effort in futility, and I could not help exploding, “The thing to do is to stop an atom bomb from falling on New York in the first place, not figure out how to feed and house people after they’re dead, or dying of radiation sickness.”
I still believe that atomic warfare can be prevented, as long as there are ten just men left in the world. As I continue to type out for my children some of the loveliness of their childhoods, trying to cull from my journals the delicate flowers from the overgrowth of rank weeds, and reliving the years of raising a family and struggling to write, I also live through the continuing series of past international crises. One spring back in the fifties when the serious news commentators did not think it likely that we would make it through the summer without hostilities breaking out between the Soviet Union and the United States, I walked down our dirt road picking pussy willows and wondering if this was the last time I would see the loveliness of spring trembling across the land. In school the children were taught how to hide under their desks, with their hands over their heads, and I was shocked at the folly of it, for how could the wood of a desk protect these little ones from even an ordinary bomb?
So I shudder when people link atomic destruction with the Parousia, the Second Coming. It seems to me that it trivializes Christ’s Second Coming to assume that it involves this planet only, or could be caused by the folly of power-greedy man. If we take seriously that Christ was the Word who spoke creation into being, if we take seriously that
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….All things were made that was made—
all things, all of the galaxies with their countless trillions of solar systems—if we truly believe this, then the Second Coming is not for this planet alone. It is for all of creation.
When we concentrate on ourselves, on planet earth, we stumble into the old Greek flaw—a fatal one—of hubris. We play into the hands of Satan, and also of the various extreme sects which assume that they, and they alone, of all of God’s creation, are to be saved. It is a presumptuous thing, and very seductive one, to decide that you and your group are the sheep destined for heaven, and all the rest, including Anglicans like me, are destined for hell fire.
My children and grandchildren have never known a world which was not under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. It is hard for them to realize that when I was a child there was no Pentagon. It is hard for me to realize that, too, as I look through those old journals, and decide that when I finish culling things for children and grandchildren they had better be burned.
If we continue our arrogant ways until we incinerate this planet, it will be we foolish creatures who are doing it, not God. We need to rid ourselves of the megalomania which focuses God’s prime concern on this one minuscule part of creation. Not that we aren’t important; we are. All of creation is important. If we blow ourselves up it will likely have negative effects on planets in distant galaxies.
Are we grown up enough to use the power we have discovered in the atom creatively instead of destructively? Are we capable of holding back on this use until we have learned how to dispose of atomic waste? And what about those containers of atomic waste which are already lying on the bottom of the ocean and which are beginning to rust, so that radiation is seeping out and spreading its contamination?
We have discovered this incredible power at the heart of the atom, and we can’t make it go away. And we, like Adam and Eve, are still out of synchronization. We know, with our intellects, much more than we can comprehend with our spirits. We are woefully, terrifyingly, out of balance.
I do believe in the Second Coming, the fulfillment of all things, but not that it is tied in with man’s ability to turn the earth into a dead, dark satellite. I do not think that God collaborates with us creatures in destruction. That’s Satan’s realm. God calls us to be co-creators with el. If we refuse this high calling, then we—in one way or another—destroy ourselves. Like the people of Sodom.
And what about those people of Sodom? Do I want even the most depraved sodomite to be destroyed forever?
There are crimes so vile that they are totally beyond my ability either to assess or to forgive. In ancient Hebrew times when someone was put outside the city walls it was because he had done something so terrible that the tribe could not punish it, and so the sinner was handed over to God. “This is beyond us, Lord. We’re delivering him to you.”
There is a club in New York, membership in which depends on the ability to find and produce a white man’s testicles, and little boys are the easiest victims. I know about this only because it happened to someone we knew of. After my first murderous reaction, I realized that it is beyond anything I can understand or respond to. And the very perpetrators of this crime have had, or their ancestors have had, equally vile horrors done them by white men. Evil spawns evil.
A plague on both your houses! Mercutio cried. Outside the city walls! Only God can deal with this.
What can we human beings do with an Eichmann? Or the doctors in the concentration camps who made lamp-shades out of human skin, who turned children into soap? There is nothing we could do which would be adequate punishment.
But what is punishment?
There is only one purpose for punishment, and that is to teach a lesson, and there is only one lesson to be taught, and that is love. Perfect love banishes fear and when we are not afraid we know that love which includes forgiveness. When the lesson to be learned is not love, that is not punishment; it is revenge, or retribution. Probably the lesson of love is the most terrible punishment of all—an almost intolerable anguish—for it means that the sinner has to realize what has been done, has to be truly sorry, to repent, to turn to God. And most of us are too filled with outrage at rape and murder to want the sinner to repent. We want the sinner to feel terrible, but not to turn to God, and be made whole and be forgiven. And so we show that we do not know the meaning of forgiveness, any more than Jonah did in his vindictive outrage at the people of Nineveh.
We are so familiar with the Parable of the Prodigal Son that we forget part of the message, and that is the response of the elder brother. As I read and reread Scripture it seems evident that God is far more loving than we are, and far more forgiving. We do not want God to forgive our enemies, but Scripture teaches us that all God wants is for us to repent, to say, “I’m sorry, Father. Forgive me,” as the Prodigal Son does when he comes to himself and recognizes the extent of his folly and wrongdoing. And the father rejoices in his return.
Then there’s the elder brother. We don’t like to recognize ourselves in the elder brother who goes off and sulks because the father, so delighted at the return of the younger brother, prepares a great feast. Punishment? A party! Because the younger brother has learned the lesson he has, in a sense, already punished himself. But, like the elder brother, we’re apt to think the father much too lenient.
When our children were little they used to do what I called “working up to a spanking.” It usually took about two weeks, and quite a few warnings. One time our eldest child had worked herself up to a spanking and been given one, and that night she sat in her father’s lap, twined her arms about his neck, and said, “Daddy, why is it I’m so much nicer after I’ve been spanked?”
Because it was a lesson of love, that’s why. I did not spank my children when I was angry; when I was angry I was incapable of teaching that lesson of love. If I was really angry, I would say, “Go sit in your room until I have calmed down enough to talk with you. I don’t want to talk while I’m angry.”
And our younger daughter once asked me, “Mother, are you mad at me, or mad with me?”
“I’m mad with you,” I replied. She was right; there is a big difference.
So whatever punishment God gives us when we do wrong, it is to teach us a lesson of love. And, just as we do not enjoy punishing our children, God does not enjoy punishing us. But that hard lesson of love must be learned.
The Book of Common Prayer includes Mana
sseh’s Song of Repentance:
O Lord and Ruler of the hosts of heaven,
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
and of all their righteous offspring:
You made the heavens and the earth
with all their vast array.
All things quake with fear at your presence;
they tremble because of your power.
But your merciful promise is beyond all measure;
it surpasses all that our minds can fathom.
O Lord, you are full of compassion,
long-suffering, and abounding in mercy.
You hold back your hand;
you do not punish as we deserve.
In your great goodness, Lord,
you have promised forgiveness to sinners,
that they may repent for their sin and be saved.
And now, O Lord, I bend the knee of my heart,
and make my appeal, sure of your gracious goodness.
I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned,
and I know my wickedness only too well.
Therefore I make this prayer to you:
Forgive me, Lord, forgive me.
Do not let me perish in my sin,
nor condemn me to the depths of the earth.
For you, O Lord, are the God of those who repent,
and in me you will show forth your goodness.
Unworthy as I am, you will save me,
in accordance with your great mercy,
And It Was Good Page 13
