By John Stallings
Once in a while a popular song will get my attention.
Such was recently the case with Taylor Swift’s song, “Why you gotta be so mean?” Here are a few words from the song’s chorus…
Someday I'll be living in a big ole city
And all you're ever gonna be is mean
Someday I'll be big enough so you can't hit me
And all you're ever gonna be is mean
Why you gotta be so mean?
Obviously these were words written by someone being mistreated in a relationship.
Several meanness stories have led the news lately; the four teenage boys in upstate New York
BIBLE CHARACTERS
Each person we meet on the sacred pages of scripture is a complex mix of occasional holy brilliance with liberal doses of frail humanity. Some folk tend to try to soften Biblical character’s personal flaws but in all candidness, everybody's a mixed bag, and only Christ can make us righteous. It’s easy to focus only on the good Bible characters did and neglect to learn from their failures.
Be advised that in the story we’re now considering, the only hero is God. Moreover this is true of every story, even yours and mine.
SARAH AND HAGAR
The story of Sarah and Hagar and their sons, Isaac and Ishmael is an emotionally charged story of human frailty which still speaks to our lives today.
In scripture Sarah is commended for her godliness and trust in the Lord (I Pet.3:5:6; Heb.11:11). Peter tells Christian women to follow her example in being obedient to their own husbands, and in doing good and living a courageous
life. Through such conduct which becomes godly women they can demonstrate that they’re daughters of Sarah in imitating her example of faith in God.
Certainly that’s true, however, we learn in the Old Testament that Sarah made some terrible mistakes which hurt others; mistakes no godly woman should ever imitate.
One might well ask: why does Sarah, the great matriarch of the Bible behave so badly and why does the text make no attempt to cover up or explain her outrageous behavior?
Thank God for the honesty and candidness of the book which truly “keeps it real.”
SARAH WAS WEALTHY AND VERY CLASS CONSCIOUS
When we look at Genesis eighteen, we readily see that Sarah and Abraham knew how to treat some people with kindness when three angels visited their tent.
When Abraham seeks a bride for his son, Isaac must have a bride from far-off Mesopotamia . Abraham doesn’t e-mail Rebecca and tell her to hitchhike to Hebron
Sarah and her husband Abraham were slave owners. So long as Hagar, Sarah’s slave stayed in her place as a useful appliance instead of a real human being with feelings, she did her job fetching water, sewing, washing, grinding grain, possibly even minding little Isaac while Sarah rested her aging body things were O.K. But once Hagar and her own son showed any human feelings and flaws, - “they cast out the bondwomen and her son! “
“Cast out” means THROW OUT! Throw ‘em out like rubbish, and if they get waylaid by bandits, bit
by a cobra, or die of thirst, well…tough! Hagar and Ishmael were the Bible’s first throwaway humans, devalued by men but CARED for by God. They got shipped out on a nature hike through the burning desert, probably barefoot since slaves didn’t usually wear shoes.
Happily Genesis chapter 21 indicates that Abraham did feel uneasy about sending his former concubine and firstborn son to die in the desert.
What a convenient way out for Sarah. Sarah didn’t kill Hagar. And if the desert did, she need never know about it and her conscience would be clear. Ignorance is bliss.
Twice Hagar would be driven into the hot desert by Sarah’s cruelty. The first time during her pregnancy, after Sarah had afflicted (probably beaten) her, and the second time when Ishmael was a teenager and Sarah threw the mother and child out of the only home they’d ever known. Abraham and Sarah made Hagar and Ishmael homeless and turned them into vulnerable vagabonds!
As far as we know the only time Sarah regarded Hagar as human was when Sarah needed a surrogate child-bearer, and it would be in her interest to allow Hagar to “sleep” with her own husband. Otherwise, Hagar was viewed strictly as a nonentity, there to serve others, without any right to acknowledge needs of her own.
Once Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, nothing more was needed from her exploited body, there was no incentive to show her the least respect as a fellow human being.
To be frank, Ishmael’s mother was treated little better than livestock. Forcing Hagar to sleep with Abraham was disrespect for her humanity on a very basic level. Love between a man and a woman, like friendship or forgiveness, is a gift of the human soul which can never be forced out of anyone.
Unless there was genuine love between Abraham and Hagar, it was basically just cold, clinical sex, just like a rancher breeding a heifer.
No wonder no love was lost between Hagar and Sarah. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Sarah ever even once said, “Thank you, Hagar, for all you’ve done for us. Thank you for risking your life to help me provide a son for my lord Abraham. Of course in so doing I’m running ahead of God but why bother with trifles? Things will be just fine.”
Actually not one act of physical violence is ever attributed to Hagar, just verbal sarcasm which most everybody is guilty of at one time or another in their life. A chaotic no-win situation was forced on her which shaped her character development and left her emotions in tatters.
Despite Sarah’s childlessness she had much to be thankful for. Unlike Hagar, Sarah was above and not beneath, the head and not the tail in society (Deut.28:13). In a world of brutal hardship and gross spiritual darkness Sarah enjoyed a privileged position as the wife of a man with whom God communicated personally, as a friend (2 Chron.20:7; James 2:23). Few men in Old Testament history besides Abraham ever attained to that degree of intimacy with God.
Sarah herself would later be blessed with a miracle unheard of in history, an elderly woman past childbearing years giving birth to a healthy son.
Sarah lost sight of all God had done for her, and saw her cup as partially empty instead of mostly full.
Instead of passing on God’s love and compassion to a lonely Egyptian girl trapped in a foreign culture, Sarah went to Abraham to gripe about how it was his fault
“That slave girl” (Sarah never spoke Hagar’s name) had been disrespectful and forgotten her place. After the way she’d nagged Abraham to “sleep” with Hagar, bewildered Abraham wonders why Sarah is angry now that she’s gotten the desired product: a surrogate son.
ANYTHING SOUNDING FAMILIAR?
It’s very unfair when a slave or work subordinate takes the rap for mistakes their boss made. It seems like the higher up the ladder you are, the less accountable you’re held for your actions.
These days in the news we hear of corporate execs getting multi-million-dollar bonuses while their companies go bankrupt and shareholders get wiped out. Is any of this sounding familiar?
When things go south, the “little people” who do the actual
work get shackled with pay cuts and “tighten their belts” while their rich bosses go on cruises to the Bahamas
IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO
Hagar’s story is intertwined with the story of Abraham. She had been in Abraham’s clan for awhile and remained fairly anonymous, because she was a foreign slave. She worked for Sarah rather than Abraham, so it’s likely that Abraham didn’t know her that well. The problem for Hagar began when Sarah gave her to Abraham as a wife because Sarah was unable to have children. Bad idea!
If Abraham had stayed out of Hagar’s tent, no pregnancy would have happened to make her gloat. To often Abraham is exonerated of any blame in all this, while the lion’s share of blame is hung around Hagar’s neck, as if she held the authority and Abraham wasn’t responsible for ruling over his own house and deciding what went on in his camp. The widget welder on the assembly line always takes the rap for decisions made in the corporate boardroom.
In Sarah’s defense, the Scripture says she submitted to Abraham, and she did, in a very dangerous, scary situation. Abraham asked Sarah to lie to the Egyptian monarch and claim she was his sister instead of his wife, for fear the Egyptians would kill him and then take her into Pharaoh’s harem. Abraham saved his own skin, but Sarah risked being raped by the King of Egypt in order to obey her own husband.
God intervened to supernaturally protect Sarah. This sad incident repeated itself when once again Abraham had Sarah lie to King Abimelech about being Abraham’s sister in order to protect him.
Over and over we see God protecting both Sarah and Hagar while Abraham was taking care of “more important “things. Hagar would have almost certainly been raped or killed during one of her forced trips to the desert if God hadn’t watched out for her.
Abraham knows how to submit. Abraham, lord of all the eye can see relinquishes his authority to a strong-willed woman. Instead of firmly insisting that God must be consulted about how to obtain a baby, he gives his meek, weak consent when Sarah demands that he sleep with Hagar.
Abraham may have been the father of the faithful, but His family life was a shambles! His living arrangements did nothing but cause trouble for him.
Nevertheless, Hagar gave Sarah and Abraham a strapping son. Sarah was jealous of Hagar and her baby; Hagar was jealous of Sarah and her relationship with Abraham; poor Abraham is caught in the middle trying to please two women.
Things eventually came to a head. There is all out civil war in Abraham’s tent. As a result, Hagar finds herself in a desperate situation. What she can’t know is that she’s getting ready to have a dynamic personal encounter with the living God. Out of Hagar’s pain comes a ray of hope for all those who find themselves in the hard, harsh places of life.
In chapter 16 of Genesis, Hagar is portrayed as a haughty slave woman. But then her fortunes quickly changed due to her ability to bear a child for Abraham. Sadly her birthing this son also caused her behavior to change. She become prideful and mean. She teases Sarah for being barren, which only stirred up trouble for her. Eventually, she’ll be forced to leave the house but will soon return to the tribe.
SARAH BECOMES PREGNANT
One day out of the blue Sarah becomes pregnant with the child God had promised in spite of her advanced age, and now the plot that is almost unbearably thick gets thicker.
Chapter 21 puts another layer on the story depicting Sarah as an unreasonable person. One day as Sarah watches her son playing with Ishmael, her love for Isaac makes her fall prey to shameful emotions. She becomes fearful that Isaac will have to share his inheritance with another woman’s child.
After all, despite the class differences between them, Ishmael has entitlements as Abraham’s oldest son. So Sarah goes to her husband and asks him to banish Hagar and her son. Abraham gives her to job and she does it with post haste.
As the mother of Abraham’s heir, Hagar is an important character; too important in Sarah’s opinion. So Hagar and Ishmael are banished into the desert.
WE CAN RELATE TO HAGAR
We have all been there at some point in our lives and some of us may well be there now. Many of us can find our own story in Hagar.
She is the faithful worker who is exploited.
She is the under-class abused by the ruling class.
She is the woman with no rights.
She is the foreigner, the refugee with no legal recourse.
She is the other woman; the expelled husband or wife;
The homeless;
The unmarried mother;
The divorced partner;
The one who has been betrayed;
The one the family has rejected -and the list goes on.
She is you and me when we find ourselves in that place where fear and paranoia overtake us and God seems distant or absent.
That dry place where we believe we’ve run out of water;
That wandering place where we believe we’re lost and all we can do is weep from deep down in our souls.
GOD IN THE DESERT
This isn’t merely a tragic story of fearfulness and despair. This, in a very real sense, is a victorious story of hope. For in that dry, dark, inhospitable desert, where water has run out, and all seems lost, Hagar finds God.
Hagar’s heart is broken. She is sure Ishmael is going to die. Can there be a more heartbreaking scene as Hagar watches her son die of dehydration? She doesn’t want to witness the death of her son, so she leaves him under a bush and goes off to weep. She found herself in a situation she could not fix and from which she could not escape.
The water ran out, the sun beat down and Hagar gave up! But when all seemed lost, she encountered the divine when the angel of God appeared to her. She learns that God has heard her cry and the cry of her son Ishmael.
PRAYER CHANGES THINGS
Hagar prayed: Ishmael certainly did. God heard them and moved to help. Prayer is an ever-present resource for the believer. We can run to God anytime, anywhere, for any purpose and He has promised to hear us and help us! Prayer should be our first priority, not the final straw
God called to Hagar and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid.”
Imagine the angel of God standing there with arms wide open and a reassuring smile, inviting her to turn to God for help. As she turns her eyes towards God, the angel offers her a seemingly impossible proposition:
The angel tells her to go to Ishmael for this boy is not about to die. God has a plan for him that defies human logic. God has ordained that he will some day be the patriarch of a nation which tradition says is the Arabic people.
Even though Hagar was a foreigner and a slave, the God of Israel nonetheless appeared and offered protection to her. The narrative tells us….
“Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.”
God opened her eyes and showed her what had been right in front of her all along!
We are blinded to His provisions by our problems. God can open our eyes and show us that He has everything we could ever need. He has more and can do more than we can imagine – Eph. 3:20!
To me Hagar’s response is the most remarkable part in this whole episode. We are told that Hagar named the Lord who spoke to her. It’s not that she only called on God’s name. Hagar actually named God. The slave girl names the deity! It almost seems audacious of her! So powerful is her encounter with God who up to this point had been largely if not totally unknown to her that she needs a name for the One she has now met so personally.
In fact this is the only occasion in the Bible where a human being uses the formal naming formula in ascribing a name to God.
Hagar was the only person who actually NAMED God. She not only had the audacity to do something not even Moses, a great Jewish leader was able to do, but she was unharmed. God accepted her name and blessed her offspring. Thus, despite her lowly status and her foreign heritage, Hagar was still given a special position in God’s eyes.
Hagar gave God a name that describes who God is for her at this moment, El-Roi - God who sees or a God of seeing.
Granted, being a man I see things through male lenses but what is striking to me about this story is the way Sarah and Hagar related to each other. This was a bad scene. I also notice that the way many women interact with each other hasn’t changed much even after thousands of years.
In those days there was intense competition between women. Even though their daily interaction was probably minimal, as soon as Hagar was able to give Abraham what Sarah was not able to, intense emotions pitted one woman against the other.
Neither of these women needed to bother the other. They could have peacefully coexisted. They could have even been friends. However, once a man and potential inheritance entered the picture, these women became bitter enemies rather than sisters.
Even in the 21st century, women can’t help comparing themselves to other women, competing against other women, fighting their way up to the top rather than giving each other a helping hand.
Unfortunately there are too many like Sarah, so insecure of their own abilities and position that they must make others feel smaller in order to feel that they’ll be taken care of. There are too many like Hagar, who are so smug that they’ve achieved something that others have not, that they must mock the competition trying to secure their own sense of superiority.
In this case, Sarah was trying to secure a future not only for her son, but for herself as well. It is only if she had an heir that she would have someone to take care of her and provide for her needs if Abraham should die before she did. She wanted to make sure that her son Isaac would be well off and didn’t want to share Abraham’s fortunes with Ishmael. It looks like Sarah felt that she had no other option but to “take her enemy out.”
If we are to be authentic followers of Christ, we must refuse to discard those who are suffering. As Christians, we are called to identify with those who suffer, because Christ not only identified with human suffering, he bore our grief and sorrow on the cross.
As her story unfolded, we see that despite her trials, Hagar was never alone. The fact that God sent an angel to console her demonstrates the openness and greatness of God’s mercy. There are no borders to God’s love. It’s not restricted by location, by ethnicity, or by status. God loves all people and is just to all. God maintains his promises to Abraham and at the same time, takes care of Hagar and Ishmael.
ABRAHAM
Again we stop and ask ourselves, why was Abraham not more of a presence in all of this? Why did he, as the patriarch and head of this family steer clear of the conflict that was brewing? Abraham told Sarah, his wife, to do whatever she saw fit. He didn’t bother to defend Hagar, his child Ishmael, or even try to resolve the conflict. He just chose Sarah over his slave. If he had wanted, he could have set things right, but he chose not to.
There are far too many men like Abraham, who washed his hands of the situation instead of getting involved even though this issue involved his family, because it was easier to give in to his wife than do the right thing
God understands the human condition. That’s why He sent an angel to Hagar in the desert. God knew already that Isaac was going to be the patriarch of the great nation of Israel
But Sarah and Hagar didn’t have to be rivals. They could have been working together, supporting each other, comforting each other, and providing friendship to each other. Yet they chose to duke it out, all because they were insecure about their promises.
Women have long been considered to be the peacemakers in the world. Perhaps if these women were not too busy fighting each other and supported each other instead, they could have influenced others to do the same.
As humans, we have an inherent understanding that we are not perfect; that we by ourselves can never be what God wants us to be. This inability stirs up tragic insecurities about our worth. It’s easy to see, then, why Sarah had become so insecure. Bearing a son that could inherit her husband’s wealth was her only guarantee of a comfortable life in old age, so she wanted to be absolutely sure that her son is the one that will get the inheritance.
And Hagar… well, she was a slave. She had no rights. In fact, she was not even technically a person. By having a son, she had found a way to be seen as more than a slave: she was the mother of her master’s heir. Of course this would make her gloat. For a while she had something that Sarah didn’t have. She was a slave no longer. It seems rather silly in retrospect, because our God is a just God. God never forgot about Hagar- nor could He ever even consider such a thing.
Despite their bitter rivalry, each of these sons received the blessing of God. In God, there is no zero sum gain. God doesn’t make empty promises. God’s power is so great, that even when we think something is impossible to accomplish, He’s there to make it happen.
THE FAMILY FIGHT CONTINUES
Even today, the descendants of Hagar and Sarah are fighting each other to gain the Holy Land which ironically has become violent, and cruel. Only God knows how close we are to a nuclear war in that part of the world. Only Christ’s return will change that.
Another question that we ask is: why do men wash their hands of responsibility and act as though the affairs of women don’t matter or affect them? Abraham basically washed his hands of the whole thing, even though both of these women were technically his wives and the mother of his children. Perhaps some of we men are thinking, “These are women’s issues. It has nothing to do with me.” Possibly this is what Abraham thought as well.
We must remember that simply because God picked up the pieces doesn’t mean that Abraham took the best course of action in all this. The situation would have been better had Abraham tried to create peace in his household.
The reality is that this lesson is for everybody. We all have mothers and grandmothers, possibly sisters, aunts, and cousins, not to mention friends. The wellness of one contributes to the wellness of all, because we belong in and with our families, regardless of what the family may look like.
Once Hagar bore Abraham a son, she became, in essence, his family. Certainly to turn his back on her was not the best he could have done.
The family structure is the foundational block of our social structure and our lives. It’s given to us solely through God’s grace. To allow it to fall apart because of petty disagreements and envy is shameful.
Moreover, as Christians, we have been accepted into a new family. This is a family that extends beyond blood ties, beyond marriage, and beyond earthly relationships. Christ calls us all into community with each other, as His faithful servants to live together as brothers and sisters and most importantly, to love each other- even our enemies. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught…
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God.”
Many times we’re too much like Sarah: greedy, jealous, mean spirited, overly ambitious and unfeeling, and this story serves as a warning for us when we are so.
But there are times also, when we like Hagar are crying in the desert not aware that the angel of the Lord is coming to quench our thirst and relieve our distress.
God, who has redeemed us, loves us more than we can even imagine.
God is always on the way even if our back is turned in hopeless grief.
Blessings,
John
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