Prophet Abraham, hope and sacrifice

Praise be to Him who immortalized the sacrifice by making an experience, a trial, that Abraham lived through an example, and who has let us live one more remembrance of this experience. One way of not reducing the sacrifice to the meat that is slaughtered and distributed, and of making it purely an occasion for our servitude to God, is to be a contemporary of Abraham, to be of one state with him, and of course, for that, above all to try to understand him.

In the effort to understand him, Muslims undoubtedly have very beautiful efforts. Today I would like to leave you alone with an effort at understanding from a different place. For the latest issue of the journal Tezkire I translated a fine text by the famous Catholic radical hermeneuticist John D. Caputo that tries to understand Abraham's general experience by reconciling it with the principle of hope. I am relaying from it, as is, a meaningful passage on the subject as a holiday gift:

HOPE AGAINST HOPE

The experts of the possible have reasonable hopes. Their hopes rest so much on facts that they can have every kind of reasonable expectation that things will go well. The doctor says that the illness has been diagnosed at its earliest stages and expects a full recovery. She has cured many such cases before, and the outcome has almost always been positive. The future carries all the weight of the past behind it; the course of events seems almost inevitable. This hope is, at the very least, hope, and at the most a reasonable expectation. That is, "the future is now," a future I can see and taste on the basis of the present, a future that, because it can be strongly predicted, has practically already been realized. I have done everything possible, everything within my power, so that the future will come about exactly as I have planned. Let us think about what "the future" is for stockbrokers who push down the prices of shares on the basis of the good news they have received, for example the expectation that the Federal Reserve Board will lower interest rates. When the action expected from the Board actually takes place, if nothing happens to the shares, the future action has already been built into the price.

But in the experience of the impossible, all this reasonable calculation is upset and things look hopeless: The illness has spread too far and treatment has not come about in time, and there is no hope for the patient. But is hope not needed precisely in these gloomy and hopeless times? Is hope not hope only when everything looks hopeless and hoping looks like a mad thing? Is it not when we need to encourage the stormy waters of hope that we take on the risk of hope, that is, remember what an experience means?

This is, at least, not the view of stockbrokers or of Aristotle's rational and learned foresight but of Abraham, the father of us all. Abraham is remembered not as the father of the stock exchange or of calculated foresight but as the father of hope. Precisely when he was left without hope, when his body was nearly approaching death, when he was nearly a hundred years old and Sarah's body was barren, Abraham trusted the Lord's promise that he would be the father of generations. Precisely because he was fully convinced that this was impossible, Abraham continued to hope, to the point that Saint Paul calls "hope against hope" (Rom. 4:18).

Hope is hope only when one hopes against hope, only when the situation is hopeless. Hope has its full power only when we are first directed to the point where hoping is impossible, and it is then that we hope against hope, just as faith is faith in the face of the unbelievable. Hope is hope when, there being no hope, the only thing I can do is try to keep hope alive.

There is no hope, I know this and am convinced of it, but still I hope. Only impossibility will enable the realization of the highest potential of faith and hope. The experts of the possible will already have left by the back door.

But why did Abraham continue to hope when the situation was hopeless? Because "God was able to do what he had promised" (Rom. 4:21). Because the name of God is the name of the impossible becoming possible. We call on the name of God "to keep hope alive," as Jesse Jackson said: "God's name is the name of hope for Jackson and Martin Luther King, for Gandhi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for Nelson Mandela and Reverend Tutu," to keep the future open, even when all doors are closed. When we cannot find an exit door, a way to go, when we are stuck in an impasse more complete and comprehensive than Aristotle could imagine, we need hope. God's name is the name of our hope, the power that steps into our weakness and hopelessness. Because "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Rom. 8:31).

Saint Paul says, "Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience" (Rom. 8:24-25). If hope is definitely concerned with the unseen, then in its highest realization it is concerned not with the unseen but with the foreseeable, but with the absolutely unforeseeable, that is, it constitutes a future more radical and "absolute" than the stockbroker's "future-present."

When the future is more or less planned and foreseeable, time becomes a particular process of approach, making routine progress toward the goal, coming to ever nearer and nearer edges, oriented toward the future point, closer to hoping. Then we are filled with growing expectations. But hope pushed toward its highest potential is blinder than this, more open-ended than this, and cannot see its way.

Hope cannot imagine what the future holds or how things will turn out, and when something unexpected happens, we are left to wonder how it could have been possible, though it was impossible. Therefore, insofar as God's name is connected with the experience of the impossible, it also opens onto another experience of time and onto a particular phenomenology of an absolute future.

God's name is the name of a horizon of absolute expectation, of unconditional hope. More precisely, God's name is not the horizon but the hope that remains beyond the horizon when there is apparently no hope, when there is no hope on the horizon. God's name opens closed horizons, interrupts the foreseeability of the future. When, in despair, we are encircled on all sides by an enveloping horizon, when we cannot see where to turn, then it is to God that we turn.

If all probabilities have been overturned, then it is only for God that the way is open, because with God everything is possible, the impossible included.

If we have reached the limits of our capacity to hope, then precisely at that moment God's power steps in to bring us out of despair.