Abstract
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram
There was no handshake. I only noticed it as we walked away, picking our way through the puddles on the rather muddy second-hand car lot where we’d looked around, settled on a vehicle, taken a test drive, and agreed to purchase. My daughter was acquiring her first car—she and I went into the Portacabin, where the paperwork was completed and the deposit paid—and the deal was done. But there was no handshake.
Whether the deal was concluded when documents were signed or when money changed hands I don’t know, and I don’t suppose that it matters. The handshake would have been a courtesy, no more, but a courtesy whose origin, I guess, lay in its use at one time as a symbolic gesture which marked the moment that a bargain was struck and became irrevocable. So the handshake stands as one of a number of ceremonial actions—the sealing of a document, the public signing of a treaty, the handing over of a sword, the commingling of bloods, the cutting of an indenture, the removal of a sandal—by which two parties have said to each other ‘I have reached an agreement with you and I will be bound by it.’
Such actions, of course, have varied from culture to culture and from age to age. In ancient Greece it appears that one practice was to carry a torch whilst reciting an oath. More graphic, perhaps, is the ritual described in an artefact from eighth-century BCE Mesopotamia. The Sefire stelae are stone tablets that contain details of a treaty ceremony in which a lamb was apparently butchered and divided into pieces. One party (the party who was being subjugated in the treaty) then swore to abide by the treaty and indicated that, should he go back on his oath, he should be liable to a fate similar to that of the dismembered animal. As with some of the torch-carrying ceremonies of Greece it was an act of self-execration: he called down curses on himself that would be realized if the agreement were broken.
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram. On that day Abram had been promised a great reward but had protested that he had no child who could inherit whatever blessings the Lord was giving him. On that day God promised that he would make Abram the father of a great people who would inhabit a vast territory. On that day Abram did as he was commanded by the Lord and took a cow, a goat, a sheep, a dove, and a pigeon; he cut the beasts in two and laid the halves over and against the other. On that day Abram waited until in went dark and entered into a deep sleep. On that day a smoking fire pot and flaming torch passed between the dissected carcases.
There are some scholars who believe that the word for covenant, berith, derives from a source word meaning ‘to cut’. The action by which the covenant is sealed is when the fire passes through those things that have been cut into pieces. God and Abram have reached agreement. It is an awe-inspiring, mysterious scene, played out in a terrifying darkness and what is most awe-inspiring and mysterious of all is the role that each party seems to take. Having prepared the animals, Abram can do little but watch and wait (and drive away the carrion eaters); at the moment that the covenant is sealed, Abram is inactive through sleep, dread, or both. It is divine action, even the divine presence, that is symbolized by the fire that passes through the carcases. The responsibility for maintaining the covenant, the subjugation to the terms of the covenant, and whatever self-execration is implied in a breach of the covenant are taken by the Lord to himself.
This strange covenant ceremony marks the beginning of a relationship between God and the descendants of Abram. It also acts as a sign of the nature of the covenant God as one who takes to God’s self the responsibility for and the consequences of the covenant. Abram is not bound here as God is bound. God graciously and without condition makes God’s promise and God opens God’s self to the pain of a broken covenant.
In the season of Lent, we are aware of the pain of the broken covenant. Our Ash Wednesday penitence was an acknowledgement that we have heard the call to live as God’s covenant people and we have ignored it. We have known the gracious love of God and we have abused it. We have been aware of the responsibilities that have been entrusted to us and we have failed to meet them. We recognize our individual responsibility and we recognize the brokenness of our world. The human family has not lived in unity with itself and peace with the created order to which God calls us. But the one who takes to himself the consequences of our breaking the covenant is the one who knows that he will die in Jerusalem. The cross stands as the fulfilment of that mysterious enacted promise to Abram—this is the Lord’s covenant and the Lord experiences the pain of its breach.
In Lent we hear that again and we give thanks for the love that we have been shown. But in Lent also we make a choice to identify ourselves with the one who takes responsibility in the covenant relationship. The small sacrifices that we make in whatever interpretation of the fast we have committed ourselves to undergo may seem insignificant in purely material terms but in the context of the choice that Christ made to go to Jerusalem they carry great symbolic weight. The ash on our foreheads and our additional prayers of confession enable us to repent those times that we have been enemies of the cross and to pray to be strengthened in our resolve to stand firm with Christ. The treats that we deny ourselves and the times that we do not eat help to master the appetites which so often cause us to turn away from our commitment to Christ. Our participation in study groups or attendance at midweek acts of worship gives opportunity to offer ourselves again in the fellowship of the Church which is the body of Christ that we might share in his work of healing the world’s divisions and bringing the whole created order back to himself.
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram. On that day, Abram was invited to look at the stars and was promised an progeny just as innumerable. The scale of the image is astounding, as a single mortal gazing into the vastness of the skies is invited to gauge the immensity of the promise for which God takes responsibility. Lent invites us to do the same. The magnitude of the promise, as Paul wrote to the Philippians, is the renewal of all things in Christ as our Covenant God takes to God’s self the pain of a broken world. The call is simply to live as those who have seen the fire of the covenant.