“I will bless those who bless you…”
-Genesis 12:3
Here is the other thing that I was thinking about in
relation to this reading –to this verse in particular— what if it isn’t simply
descriptive of how Abram became a blessing to the world –by leaving the
security and safety of his homeland and his father’s house and going to a
foreign land—but what if it was also instructive of how someone we turn someone
from a curse to a blessing in our own life? Of course, it could certainly be
both and most probably even more than that (i.e. the four-fold reading method),
but with my own prejudices (or predilections) I tend to look for the paradox or
the strangeness in a passage; that is the element that tends to call out to me
and so I stumbled over the blessing of vulnerability in my first approach to
Abram’s call. But, ruminating over the
passage I kept hearing this little piece echoing over and over again in my
soul. And so, after a day or so, I began to contemplate whether the talk of
blessing might also apply to how we look at others, how we treat them, how we
transform we feel toward them.
And this
all came into my heart as I was falling into a moment of personal failing and
–if not sin, then a very near occasion of; I was doing something very much like
gossip. I was talking about someone who
had been hurtful toward me. A person who frightened me even. It all started
with me telling a friend why I wouldn’t be part of an event, and by way of
explanation I brought up the event that caused me such pain and my need to
avoid a particular person. And if I had
stopped there, my words might have simply been informative. But, I began to elaborate on what happened
and my own hurt feelings, and I began to speculate about this person and to
shape my story to make myself the innocent victim and this other person a
mean-spirited bully.
And then
suddenly I stopped. Cut myself off. Sitting there, in that classroom, talking
with a friend, I heard God’s words echo in my head: “I will bless those who bless you…” and I thought –What am I doing?
I’m not blessing her; I’m cursing this person; therefore, I am cursing myself.
It was
probably that precise moment when I realized that this was not simply a
description of Abram’s call to go become vulnerable, but also an instruction
for how we are called to treat others.
I will bless those who bless you.
I began to suspect that this wasn’t JUST directed to Abram
of Ur in 2000 BC. I began to suspect that, like most of the rest of the Bible,
it contained a truth that was meant for me as well. And I began to suspect that it had something
to do with turning my heart around; with how to turn what seems like a curse
into a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you.
If this wasn’t just directed Abram of Ur, then it probably
wasn’t just directed to me either. Maybe I needed to look at it from a
different point of view. Step out of the middle of the “you-ness” of the
statement and consider it from the other side. From this other vantage point I’m
not simply the one being blessed or cursed, but I’m also the one doing the
blessing and the cursing. And reading it
thus, I realized: God blesses me –when I bless others. I don’t mean as a reward, I mean that the supernatural
consequence of blessing another is to be blessed. The supernatural result of
cursing someone is to be cursed.
For me the
message was clear: Having a difficult
time with someone? Stop talking about
it and start blessing them.
