Why are the descendants of Abraham today embroiled in bitter rivalry rather than enjoying the blessings of living as God’s family?Introduction to Abraham: Father of All Believers
Over half of all the people on earth today look to one man as the pioneer of their relationship with God. Twelve million Jews, two billion Christians, and one billion Muslims trace the foundation of their belief to the encounter of Abraham with God almost four millennia ago. Though the world more often thinks of these three peoples in terms of a clash of civilizations, divided by hatred and a history of violence and war, the root of each of these global religions is the faith of Abraham. From him and his descendants God wishes to bring only blessings to all the families of the earth.
Abraham is truly the father of the world’s monotheists. For most Jews and many Arab Christians and Muslims, that fatherhood is rooted in their DNA. But for most of the world’s believers, Abraham’s fatherhood has nothing at all to do with blood. All of these religions define “father” more expansively: as the one who gives his children a spiritual outlook, the one who hands on to his children what he has discovered about God. The one who teaches the essential truths of life, the one who transmits tradition and identity to the next generation, is father to his spiritual descendants. For the same reason that male spiritual directors, priests, and rabbis are called father by those they teach and guide, Abraham is father to us all.
Questions to Consider
Why are the descendants of Abraham today embroiled in bitter rivalry rather than enjoying the blessings of living as God’s family?
Who are the people I would define as my fathers—biologically, ethnically, and spiritually?
The Uncontrollable God of Abraham
Only a small percentage of all the stories told about Abraham in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are found in the Bible. A scholar of the twelfth century, Maimonides, compiled a great summary of Jewish belief in the Mishneh Torah. In that work, he offered a narrative of Abraham’s youthful career, collected from the stories handed down by the rabbis through the ages. He described the Mesopotamian culture into which Abraham was born as a society utterly lacking awareness of truth and worshiping an array of gods. Terah, the father of Abram (the name of Abraham before his covenant with God), made and sold idols of these gods in his shop. When he put his son in charge of his shop, Abram ridiculed the buyers for bowing down to these objects fresh out of the kiln.
One day a pious woman came to the shop to present a grain offering to the idols. Feeling mischievous, young Abram took a hammer and smashed his father’s entire stock, except for the largest statue. He put the hammer into its hand and awaited his father’s return. Terah was stunned by the destruction and demanded to know who had rampaged his store. Abram explained that the woman had set the grain before the idols and each one had demanded to eat first, resulting in a bitter fight in which the largest idol took the hammer and smashed all the others. Terah was, of course, incredulous, shouting that he couldn’t be fooled. “These idols don’t know anything,” he said. Abram replied, “Do your ears not hear what your mouth has just said?” Terah was apparently left speechless.
The tradition describes the young Abram as a thoughtful man whose speculative mind gradually came to a preliminary understanding of God. Inspired by the transcendent unity of creation, Abram reasoned that the world was not the work of a committee of gods but of one magnificent Artist. This one God, who later revealed himself to Abram and whom Abraham came to know as El Shaddai and El Olam, is also the YHWH of Israel, the Abba of Jesus, and the Allah of Muhammad. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the creating and redeeming God of us all.
The God who revealed himself first to Abraham, and gradually through Abraham’s descendants, can never be fully known. What we know of God from the Bible is only a glimpse of his awesome majesty and profound depths. The One who called Abraham to leave his homeland and wander about the land of Canaan in tents is a God who refuses to be stationary or restrained. The three religious traditions that stem from Abraham all teach that it is utterly impossible to define God fully or to confine God completely in any image, temple, or institution made with human hands.
Questions to Consider
Why are there so many names for the one God in the Bible? Why has God only gradually revealed his identity and true nature to the peoples of the earth?
What are the ways in which people through the ages have attempted to define or confine God? Why is this ultimately impossible?
Founding Father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
The people of Israel trace their lineage back to Abraham. If their exodus from Egypt was the birth canal through which they passed to their freedom, and their encounter with God on Mount Sinai the moment of their birth, their conception was the covenant God made with Abraham. When God passed through the separated parts of Abraham’s sacrifice with his fiery torch (Gen. 15), he conceived a new people who would develop through the stages of gestation for four hundred years, through Isaac, Jacob, and their children, down to the call of Moses. All Jews look to Abraham as both the biological and the spiritual beginning of their life as a people. They trace their lineage through Abraham’s son Isaac, his son Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, who were the founders of Israel’s twelve tribes.
The Gospels of the New Testament underscore that Jesus is a son of Abraham. Tracing his lineage through King David and back to Abraham, the evangelists accentuate the Judaism of Jesus and his messianic roots. As Israel’s Messiah, Jesus brought the history of Abraham’s descendants to a peak. Yet his saving mission was not limited in scope to only the children of Israel. The universal dimension of God’s plan begun in Abraham, a plan to bring blessings to all the nations, began to be realized in Jesus and was spread through the evangelizing mission of his disciples. For the world’s Christians, Abraham is their spiritual father, the one in whom God’s history of salvation began. By belonging to Christ, Christians see themselves as Abraham’s offspring, a multitude as uncountable as the stars of the sky. For Christians, a family tree is less important than faith; blood is less important than belief.
In the Qur’an of Islam, Abraham (Ibrahim, in Arabic) is the primary example of what it means to be a Muslim, “one who submits to God.” He is viewed as the true founder of Islam, and Muslims invoke him daily in prayer. The accounts of Abraham’s offspring begin with a conflict between two women, one from Mesopotamia, his beloved wife Sarah, the other from Egypt, Sarah’s servant Hagar. Abraham’s first child, Ishmael, is born from Hagar; later Isaac is born from Sarah. The biblical stories of the two sons are strikingly balanced. Though Ishmael is expelled from Abraham’s house at the insistence of Sarah, he is not excluded from Abraham’s affection and paternity. Though Isaac receives the inheritance of Abraham, Ishmael is also abundantly blessed by God. There is no victor and loser here. Ishmael later marries an Egyptian and fathers twelve tribes and becomes the leader of a great nation. According to both Jewish and Islamic tradition, this great nation descended from Ishmael is the Arab people.
The Bible and the most essential traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam demonstrate that the God of Abraham is not the possession of any single race or people. Abraham lived before the historical expressions of each of these religions and is looked upon by all as their founding ancestor. Today the truth that Abraham discovered about God is dispersed to every corner of the world. When the descendants of Abraham look back to their origin, they discover that they are all offspring of the same father, members of the same family. The carefully balanced message of the stories of Abraham is that God cares for all of his children.
Could not, then, the father of all believers be a source of healing and reconciliation for the divided children of God? What if religion began to be seen as a source of unity and a bearer of peace rather than a force for division and strife among people? What if Abraham could save the world from the cultural clash between the East and the West that defines the violent world of the twenty-first century? What if we could truly realize what the ancient Scriptures proclaim about Abraham: “Through him, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”
Questions to Consider
In what way is Abraham the founding father of each of the three major monotheistic religions?
In what way is the crisis in the Middle East a sibling rivalry? What could end the fighting and begin the reconciliation?
The Holy Places of Abraham
The monotheistic religions most often associate three sacred places with Abraham: the Kaaba is Islam’s most sanctified shrine in the center of the great mosque at Mecca; the Foundation Stone is the top of the bedrock in Jerusalem around which is built the Dome of the Rock; and the Machpelah is the burial cave of Abraham in Hebron. Unfortunately, these three sites are some of the most tense and well-guarded places on earth.
Every year, during the annual hajj (pilgrimage), millions of Muslims from around the world travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The Kaaba (cube, in Arabic), the sacred building in the center of the great mosque, is their primary goal. Every day, followers of Muhammad throughout the world turn in prayer to face this sacred site. The Kaaba, which is about thirty-five feet by forty feet wide and fifty feet tall, is called the house of Allah. The Qur’an says that Abraham found the primordial temple on one of his visits to Arabia to visit his son Ishmael and Ishmael’s mother, Hagar. Muslims believe that Abraham reconstructed the Kaaba at its present site with the assistance of Ishmael, building it precisely, stone by stone, in perfect submission to God’s commands.
After Abraham completed the restoration of the Kaaba, God commanded him to go to the top of a nearby hill and summon all of humanity to make a pilgrimage to the site. God amplified Abraham’s voice so that it could be heard around the world. The pilgrimage became one of the five pillars of Islam, and every Muslim who is physically and financially able is required to go to Mecca on pilgrimage at least once in a lifetime. When pilgrims enter the Grand Mosque, after purifying themselves and donning white garments, they circle the Kaaba seven times, praying in unity with Abraham. In other events during the weeklong festivities, pilgrims run between the hills of the nearby Safa and Marwa, remembering Hagar’s frantic search for water for Ishmael as her son was dying in the wilderness. Pilgrims also throw seven pebbles at a stone pillar that represents the devil, who tried to tempt Abraham to ignore God’s command to sacrifice his son (in Muslim tradition, the son is Ishmael, not Isaac). The pilgrims then sacrifice a sheep, reenacting the story of Abraham sacrificing the ram that God provided as a substitute.
The most prominent structure in the city of Jerusalem is the golden Dome of the Rock. This beautiful Islamic shrine from the seventh century was built over the large outcropping of bedrock on the site where Solomon’s temple once stood. Biographers of Muhammad describe the mystical night journey in which the prophet came to this spot to join Jesus and earlier prophets for prayer. Here, at this holy place, which people had believed for centuries to be a connecting point between heaven and earth, Muhammad briefly ascended into heaven to meet God, then returned to earth.
Jewish tradition has always considered this place as the site of Mount Moriah, where Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice. On the feast of New Year, Rosh Hashanah, Jews blow the ram’s horn (shofar) during synagogue services to commemorate the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. The blowing of the horn, while calling to mind the faith of Abraham, which led him to offer his son to God, is meant to arouse God’s compassion. Through the merits of Abraham, God forgives the sins of men and women as he judges them on Rosh Hashanah.
Mount Moriah and Mount Zion are one and the same. After King David conquered Jerusalem, he purchased this site for the future temple. For centuries, the smoke of animal sacrifice ascended from the temple to God, as God’s people continued to offer daily the substitute offering that God provided in lieu of Abraham’s son. In Christian tradition, the sacrifices at the temple are a foreshadowing of the climactic work of Christ, offered in sacrifice by the Father for the sins of the whole world. The binding of Isaac, the crucifixion, and the dhabih (the Qur’an’s version of Abraham’s offering) are events at the heart of the self-understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The fact that all three religions recount the excruciating suffering of a father preparing for the death of his son, the most unimaginable kind of anguish, points to the shared origins and the core of obedient divine love at the foundation of these three Abrahamic faiths.
From the temple mount of Jerusalem, the sounds of the three great religions can be heard in the distance: the blowing of the shofar, the ringing of church bells, and the Muslim prayers amplified from the minarets. People today take for granted this dissonance of sounds. For many people of the world, these are the sounds that represent a bitter history of antagonism and conflicting worldviews. But if we look to Abraham, and if we look to the truest teachings of the founders who followed him—Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—these three sounds could become a harmonious triad of peace for all the world to hear.
Finally, the cave of Machpelah in Hebron is the burial place of Abraham. In Arabic it is called Haram el-Khalil, “the sacred precinct of the friend of God.” Originally the patriarch purchased this cave for the final resting place of his wife Sarah. After the death of Abraham, he was buried here also, as were his descendants Isaac and Jacob, along with their wives, Rebekah and Leah. Today this site is heavily guarded and hotly disputed by Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, the scene of much bloodshed throughout the centuries and into most recent times. Serving as a synagogue, a church, and a mosque at different times in history, this resting place of Abraham is the second most uneasy site in the Holy Land, next to the temple mount.
Yet, when Abraham died (as Genesis records in one of the most hopeful passages of the Hebrew Scriptures), his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, who had been rivals since their births, stood side by side to bury their father in the cave of Machpelah. Ishmael, the patriarch of the Muslim people, and Isaac, the patriarch of Jews and the spiritual ancestor of Christians, shared their pain that day and recognized that they were brothers, children of the same father. Could not this scene of painful reconciliation be a symbol for new understanding and sympathetic dialogue among the world’s three great monotheistic religions? Could not the shared grief that gives birth to forgiveness be the spark that sets the world alight with new hope for peace in the twenty-first century?
Questions to Consider
What is the spiritual value in pilgrimage to sacred places?
How could the cave of Machpelah in Hebron be a symbol of reconciliation for the clashing descendants of Abraham?
Ancestor of Us All
Lectio
Read this inspired text, listening for its fuller meaning in light of the whole plan of God.
ROMANS 4:11–12
11[Abraham] received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised and who thus have righteousness reckoned to them, 12and likewise the ancestor of the circumcised who are not only circumcised but who also follow the example of the faith that our ancestor Abraham had before he was circumcised.
Continue exploring the meaning of Paul’s words through the tradition of the church.
In writing to the Christians in Rome, Paul demonstrates that Abraham is “the ancestor of all who believe” (v. 11). For the early church, this meant that both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, could enter a saving relationship with God and thus claim Abraham as their father. Neither is pitted against the other. All people can become descendants of Abraham by sharing his faith.
In the life of Abraham, as Paul demonstrates, faith was the priority. Abraham was made righteous before God through his faithful trust. His circumcision was a subsequent seal of his righteousness, not the producer of his saving relationship with God. Thus Abraham is the bearer of God’s promised blessings to all people, not just the Jewish people. All who believe in the God of Abraham are Abraham’s children.
Meditatio
Consider the meaning of this Scripture passage in the context of your own life in Christ today.
In what ways do people sometimes erect unnecessary barriers that divide people rather than unify them?
How can faith in the God of Abraham be a means of dialogue and understanding among Jews, Christians, and Muslims?
Oratio
Respond in prayer with the hope that arises within you.
God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, you have promised blessings to all the peoples of the earth. Open my heart to a spirit of forgiveness toward those who share my life, and help me be a minister of reconciliation to struggling and broken people. May the peace you desire for the world begin through an understanding of the inspired texts of our ancestors in faith. Enlighten and encourage me as I read and contemplate your inspired Word in these sacred Scriptures. Show me how to make my life a testimony to God’s love.
Continue to pray to God from your heart . . .
Contemplatio
Remain in quiet and place yourself under God’s loving gaze. Ask God to give you an experience of shalom (Hebrew), salaam (Arabic), peace.
Operatio
How can I best dedicate myself to the reflective study of these sacred texts of Abraham over the coming weeks? What regular place and time could I choose for the quiet practice of lectio divina?