It’s Lunchtime. I have been to Kirk, done a walk, fed the kids, and listened to the surf. And I am still stuck with how to introduce this passage. Within it is one unexpected birth — that of Isaac — and the idea that we look forward to a kingdom to come. The kingdom of God, the city of God. It is not here, and yet it is: it is not a nation one can point to and yet it is that which our loyalty must reside.

This challenges us: particularly if we love our nation, and history, and understand the history and genealogy of our families: if we know what we have inherited. For most of us live in established lands, in nations where you can say that your grandfather worked here, and your great-grandmother was educated there: indeed the Maori can recite their ancestry back to the founders who arrived by boat seven hundred to a thousand years ago. For the exemplar of our promise in faith is Abraham, how lived in tents: not David, who established a city.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

(Hebrews 11:8-16 ESV)

The question here is where do our loyalties lie. It is not about the love of our neighbour, or our nation, or our spouse, or our children. Nor is the love of a good walk, a good coffee (or beer) and a good meal. All these things are licit and proper. All these things are obvious to even the most materialistic and militant atheist (both Communist and Libertarian breeds).

It is not that these things are not proper, but that there is more. It is not that these things are not good, but there is something greater. And to say that there is nothing greater is a lie, and that soils the goodness of the natural pleasures, for we end up worshipping that which bears witness to God, not God himself.

For if we were beasts, we should love the fleshly and sensual life, and this would be our sufficient good; and when it was well with us in respect of it, we should seek nothing beyond. In like manner, if we were trees, we could not, indeed, in the strict sense of the word, love anything; nevertheless we should seem, as it were, to long for that by which we might become more abundantly and luxuriantly fruitful. If we were stones, or waves, or wind, or flame, or anything of that kind, we should want, indeed, both sensation and life, yet should possess a kind of attraction towards our own proper position and natural order. For the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether they are carried downwards by their weight, or upwards by their levity. For the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by love, wherever it is borne. But we are men, created in the image of our Creator, whose eternity is true, and whose truth is eternal, whose love is eternal and true, and who Himself is the eternal, true, and adorable Trinity, without confusion, without separation; and, therefore, while, as we run over all the works which He has established, we may detect, as it were, His footprints, now more and now less distinct even in those things that are beneath us, since they could not so much as exist, or be bodied forth in any shape, or follow and observe any law, had they not been made by Him who supremely is, and is supremely good and supremely wise; yet in ourselves beholding His image, let us, like that younger son of the gospel, come to ourselves, and arise and return to Him from whom by our sin we had departed.

Abraham sought this sense of being with God, who had removed himself from this world: David pled that the spirit of God not be taken from him. And many, from the days of the prophets to this present, fallen, age, have died with prayers to God Almighty on their lips: be it Shema Y’Israel, the creed, the Psalms or Ave Maria.

And it is for this reason that it is worthwhile for a Christian Scholar to understand Rabbinical teaching and the liturgical practice of our Jewish Brothers. It is not because they are correct: on many things they are in error, as Christ himself demonstrated to the people who the Talmudic scholars traced their discipleship to. It is because the Jews have shown us what it means to be a pilgrim people in a hostile world.

We may have had a Christian consensus at some time, but that time is not now.