Aliens and Strangers

(http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2023:1-24:66&version=NIV)

            The story of Abraham buying a tomb isn’t as straightforward as it appears.  I won’t pretend to have sorted through all the issues but let it be enough to say that the story is a careful negotiation in which not everything is as it seems and in which Abraham seems to be especially protective of his own independence.

            Note these several details:  Abraham describes himself as an ‘alien and stranger.’  The first word indicates that he had no inheritance rights among them; he wasn’t a ‘legal’ member of the dominant society; the second word indicates his nomadic existence.  Taken together, the two explain his existence.  As long as he was a nomad, just passing through (even though he’d been in the land for like 60 years), and as long as he made no demands on the dominant Hittite society, he was tolerated.  Now, though, he is making a request for permanence.  He was buying property.

            Second, the offering of the land as a gift is prefaced by the recognition of Abraham’s wealth and power.  They don’t want him as an enemy, yet they don’t particularly want to cede any territory to a potentially dangerous rival.  The offer to give him the land is designed to put him under obligation to them.  Some scholars suggest that granting him the land free of charge would be the same thing as bringing him under their feudal system, in which Abraham essentially would have pledged allegiance to the local warlord.

            Third, when Ephron is pushed for a purchase price, he names an exorbitant price and minimizes it by saying, “What is that between me and you?”  It’s like he’s saying, “We’re such rich and powerful men that 10 pounds of silver is like penny-ante poker.”  Perhaps Ephron assumed Abraham would haggle; perhaps he was trying to keep Abraham from buying the land.  Either way, the price is out of line.

            Fourth, Abraham insists on outright ownership, with absolutely no ground on which to challenge the purchase, and he refuses to be beholden to Hittite interests.

            This refusal to be beholden is also a prominent feature of the next story:  finding a bride for Isaac.  Abraham insists:  no Canaanite bride!  “Go to my country and my relatives,” he says.

            Throughout these two chapters, there seems to be this underlying theme:  God has plans and purposes for Abraham and his descendants and those plans and purposes will not be fulfilled in compromise with the dominant society of Canaan.  The day will come when the land will fully belong to Abraham’s family; until then, they live as strangers and aliens.

            1 Peter grabs on to this idea of God’s people as strangers and aliens (1 Peter 1:1, 2:1).  Peter argues that we latter day Christians are like Abraham—extended residents of a world in which we don’t belong.  Now, this needs some careful comment.  Just like Abraham had been promised that the land of Canaan would eventually belong to him and his offspring, so the world in its entirety has been promised to us latter-day people of God (cf. Matthew 5:5, for example).  So, please—none of this talk about ‘leaving earth and going to heaven.’  Our inheritance is the earth—the earth purified, restored, and made new, to be sure, but the earth nonetheless.  The earth is ours because the Lord promised it to us.  But, again like Abraham, that promise hasn’t been fully realized.  That means that we need to walk carefully in the world, dealing with them with integrity and yet refusing to be beholden to them.  We dare not compromise with the world, though we strive to live in the world as honest neighbors.

            I worry that, too often, we latter-day people of God miss this.  We seem to think that we can convert some aspect of this fallen world into the reign of God, and we end up getting co-opted into the world’s ways of doing things.  Sometimes we just don’t have the wisdom of Abraham.  The world offers us a free pass if we’ll just pledge a little allegiance to them, and we fall for it.  Or they make us an offer and we negotiate with them and give away a little of our integrity in the process.  Oh, that the Lord would grant us the wisdom to walk as aliens and strangers among the powers of a fallen world!