Genesis 17 Circumcision. . .

Genesis 17
Again, the covenant, the promises made by God. You wonder if all this repetition is perhaps the result of the way Genesis was woven and edited together over the years, taking oral histories and stories and shaping them into a book about people and God for the people of God. But then, it also seems right to me that God would repeat God’s self and that Abram (know Abraham) would hear it a little differently each time. God has to tell me the same thing again and again, and my understanding transforms over time.
You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. (v. 11) . . . Any uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. (v. 14)
It is hard for us to comprehend how meaningful this outward sign of an inner commitment became to the Hebrew people. Contemporary American Protestant Christians are not so big on outward signs. We wonder how something like this could matter so much. We hypothesize that perhaps the real reason God commanded this to them was for hygiene, not so much faith.
But I wonder if maybe we aren’t missing the point, and I also wonder if we haven’t lost something by so adamantly shunning outward signs. When God calls these people “holy,” that doesn’t mean that they are self-righteous or better than other people. (God is always ranting about how “stiff-necked”, stubborn they are.) God means that they are separate, marked as God’s, for God: “an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” (v. 7b) They circumcised themselves; they ate differently; they kept the Sabbath. Over time, many practices developed which marked them as distinctly different. All those people traveling between the kingdoms of Egypt and those of Mesopotamia could see that there was something different about these people. And getting dressed, making a meal, living out their week, they lived differently, with a different focus and purpose. Sure, outward signs can be just that, but this outward sign was always intended to be more. We read in Deuteronomy 10:16: “Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer. For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome. . . .” This is supposed to be about remembering God, that they are bound to God in covenant, in permanent relationship.
What do we do to remember, again and again and continuously, our connection to the Holy One?
By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already suffered persecution because of being marked as Yahweh’s people. During the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV Jews who kept the Sabbath, for example, were put to death. It was no easy path to keep the ways of the LORD.
Deciding that circumcision was no longer required, as Paul insists, could not have been an easy manner. We need to keep this in mind when we’re reading Acts and Galatians about the battle within the Jewish community. Yes, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, all are equal and free. But it is not easy to give up practices that have defined who we are.