Talking with God: Part One

Genesis 18: Part One
This has been one of my favorite stories since I was about eleven or twelve years old, and I hardly know where to begin to talk about it. It’s fascinating and complicated and mysterious from the very first lines. “The LORD appeared to Abraham” and when he looked up he “saw three men standing near him.” The grammar of the text won’t line up properly. Perhaps because the experience won’t be pinned down. To the three men Abraham said, “My lord. . . .” He uses the singular to address the three, but then offers the plural “yourselves” water with which to wash and bread to eat. We are clearly to understand that Abraham is encountering God here. What’s hard to fathom is exactly what that experience was like. Of course, I understand that. It truly is hard to convey to someone else what an experience of God is like. Just as when God wrestles with Jacob several chapters from now, God does not seem willing to be pinned down. And our language, even our minds, can’t contain the immensity of the Holy One.
Franz Rosenzweig wrote this: “The story opens by saying that God appeared to Abraham, but when Abraham applies the vision to his own world he suddenly sees three men standing before him. Abraham is the religious man par excellence for he sees God in the human situation.” Is this how we are to understand the story, that in a particular human interaction, Abraham perceives God? Later, in chapter 19, two of the three men are referred to as angels. Angels means “messengers,” and tradition has understood them as beings of special powers who worship God, do God’s bidding and bear God’s messages. So, are two of them angels and one of them God? God appeared in human form? Wouldn’t that be rather amazing? How did Abraham recognize Yahweh? Did he know immediately? If Jesus walked into my office now, would I know it? My mind is spinning with ideas of the incarnation and all that is implied in the very notion that the Spirit of God can dwell in human beings.
The mere fact that humans can communicate with the Holy One, that the Holy One wishes, chooses, to communicate with humankind – that’s astonishing. In verse 16 Abraham walks with the two men as they begin the rest of their journey, and Yahweh seems to stay behind and think. Will God decide to reveal something of the mind of God to Abraham? Yes. And it also seems, from verse 20, that God will be both with Abraham by the oaks of Mamre and in Sodom and Gomorrah judging the outcry there.
As we read verse 22 it does seems like we are more in a vision than in every day reality. (Which is not to imply that it is not “real.”) Abraham draws near to God and seems already to know what is on God’s mind, even though we never see him being told. “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” It’s a question we are still asking, isn’t it?