Genesis 23:4 – Burying the Dead

“I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.  “
Genesis 23:4

After decades of closeness and companionship, Abraham finds personal tragedy overtaking him when his wife Sarah dies. She who was loved and loving. She who was his close companion through his pilgrimage. She who was so near and dear to him was now a corpse. It is in this moment of grief, that Abraham goes into action: he wishes to purchase land – the only land he will ever actually own in the land that God promised to him. The purpose of this land is to bury that which is dead out of his sight.

Though that which was dead was precious to him, the time has come to put it out of sight. It is now become the past. It is history. If Abraham was to continually carry the corpse before him in his grief, it would have brought nothing but more grief and suffering. Abraham recognizes this, even in his mourning. The time was come to bury the dead. Put the past to rest. Bury the dead out of sight.

Herein is an important lesson for us. There is a time and a purpose for everything. There is a time to mourn the dead. That is, the passing of something which was once alive to us. While there is life, there is hope. There is purpose. There is work. The night comes, however, in which that which was alive dies as comes to us all. This is not just to do with people passing, it has also to do with projects, with dreams, with aspects of ourselves that need to die, with our past, our history, our trauma. There is a time when perhaps these things were alive. Perhaps beneficial. Then came the day when they died or came the time when tragedy struck, when the past became something that you lived in the present.

It is when the passing of all these things happen, that there is a need for us to have the wisdom and courage to take the dead and bury them out of sight. To take those things that we don’t want to let go of for whatever reason, and let them go. Put them away in the past where they belong.

It’s not to say that we forget about it all. Abraham was not forgetting Sarah, but he was not carrying a rotting corpse around with him. Like so, there are memories, lessons, and things that we should treasure and hold dear – and there are corpses that we need to bury out of our sight so that we may flourish and thrive.