Seen and Heard
It’s a story with all the elements of a good movie. A complicated relationship, a crisis pregnancy, abandonment and rejection, jealousy and conflict. All ends pretty well, considering.
What do we know about Hagar? She was Egyptian, some say, possibly the daughter of Pharaoh, so potentially a princess. Either way, she was a slave, sold or given as currency to get Abraham and his crew out of Egypt before the Hebrew God was further upset.
Sarah orders Hagar to sleep with her husband to bear a child she will have to hand over for Sarah to raise. There’s an echo of an earlier story here. Just as Eve takes something that isn’t hers and gives it to her husband to consume, so does Sarah with Hagar. We should know this is going to spell trouble and it does. Sarah can’t bear to see Hagar with her husband’s child, and Hagar is rather revelling in her new role – Concubine is a step up from slave…just. Sarah treats her badly and Hagar runs away.
We don’t hear her name or her voice until she is face to face with God (in some form of angel). I think that’s because, as with all of us, our dignity and sense of worth are always restored from that encounter.
God sends her back into her given role as a servant. I’ve struggled with this, but I can only think it was for the fulfilment of his plans and the protection of the child in her womb. Ishmael, too, was the son of Abraham. And we know Abraham loved him, Ishmael takes his own role in providing the thousands of promised descendants. Hagar’s reward is that she sees her descendants don’t live their lives echoing her bondage.
When Hagar returns to the tribe, we hear of no more conflict for another 12 or 13 years, I think Hagar returns different, with a sense of her worth known in her core despite all the external factors telling her otherwise. I think when we know it at our core, we don’t have such need to prove it to those around us.
Sarah has given birth to the promised child Isaac, yet her fragility again comes to the fore after his weaning, and Hagar is cast out of the camp with her son. We watch her with bread and water on her back set out into the heat of the desert. She seats her son in the only part of slight shade she can find and waits for them both to die. But of course, the God who saw her before sees her still.
I’m struck that it’s only now that she can see the spring of water saving them both from death. I wonder how often we are screaming so loudly for help that we drown out the response we desperately cry out for. The Lord reaffirms His promise, and Hagar and her son settle just outside the promised land. She finds her son a wife from her homeland, and we can assume she lives out her days in comfort and freedom. Ishmael has 12 sons and one daughter. The Arab nations started here.
I think about how Abraham’s rejection must have felt, not only to her personally but also to see her son so disregarded. No one appears to have stood up for her despite the maybe 15 years of living with these people. That must have been 15 years of never feeling you belonged. She was a hybrid Egyptian slave but also mother to the patriarch’s son – a little like Moses, I think; she didn’t fit neatly into any camp.
We experience rejection as physical pain. It piggybacks the same pathways in our brains. Our IQ drops significantly for a time after rejection, we have poorer short-term memory, and our decision-making is adversely affected. When we later recall rejection, we remember the pain far more clearly than any physical trauma we might have experienced. Researchers suggest that social acceptance and inclusion are so vital to human survival that we are given physical pain-like signals to orient us to work against any threats to that acceptance. Compliance, obedience, and fitting in with social norms are examples.
We have an instinctive need for community; we are hard-wired to belong. An instinct that, perhaps yes, ensures our physical and emotional survival but ultimately leads us to the very heart of the one who created that need for our spiritual health and eternal survival.
Download the small group resources for Hagar here
