The passage of Genesis we have heard today, and that is part of the on going story of Abraham, helps us to continue to explore the meaning of faith. Last week, we read from Chapter 18 and we heard about the visit of three men, identified as the Lord, who came to renew the promise made to Abraham that he will be greatly blessed with an offspring. Actually, it was even more specific than that this time. The men didn’t come to promise but rather to inform Abraham that one year later they would be back, and Abraham will be the holding his son, a child not given by Sarah’s servant Hagar, but an heir born to Sarah his wife. The passage ended up with Sarah overhearing the conversation and laughing at the possibility – or rather, laughing at the impossibility. You have to put yourself in her shoes. She wasn’t able to have a child in her young age, and now how could she, after she had gone through menopause? It was like being twice barren. In fact, that’s not even at the possibility of being pregnant that she laughs, she laughs at the mere possibility of having intercourse. She says: “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” (Genesis 18:12). So the story is kind of explicit! But I think it’s important not to overlook that for two reasons:
– First, We see that there is a promise from God for the body, and not just for the soul. The decay of our bodies is due to sin, but from the beginning of the Bible to the end, there is a belief that our bodies will be restored: In my flesh I shall see God says Job (19:26), and of course there is the bodily resurrection of Christ and the witnesses insisted that Jesus was not like a ghost since he could share food with his disciples. It’s very mysterious, but it’s also very real. We have come to spiritualize a lot of our beliefs, they are like a beautiful ideas in our minds, and yet for God it’s very concrete, very incarnate. Jesus was not an idea, but he was a real person and a real child to start with.
– And so, and that’s the second reason we shouldn’t overlook the details of the story, we see that God is going to act concretely, and Abraham and Sarah will be both witnesses and participants in the miracle. It is not going to happen somewhere in heaven, it is going to happen in their very flesh. God first made a promise to Abraham that he will have many descendants, but then it gets clearer, God says it is not going to happen through a surrogate wife, Hagar, as Abraham and Sarah ended up believing, but through Sarah’s very womb.
Now our passage today takes us about three or four years later, after “The child, Isaac, grew and was weaned”, on the day of this great feast people used to have for the occasion. Now, it may surprise us a little bit. We may first be surprised that children would be weaned so late, but it made sense when resources were scarce, and then we may wonder why they would have a party at that specific time of the weaning, rather than at the child’s birth. Well, when most children didn’t survive their first years, it made sense too – it’s a little like now when parents want to wait three months to announce a pregnancy because of the risk of miscarriage. At the time, you wouldn’t rejoice too much with family, friends and neighbors about your baby until he had passed the toddler stage and became able to survive taking food on their own.
At weaning time, people celebrated not only a birth but also a victory over death. The future felt more secure, parents could start breathing, and even celebrating. And so it’s a very joyful occasion. And it should have been more even so for Abraham and Sarah who had defied all the odds. Right before our passage begins, it is said that they actually chose to name their son Isaac, a name that wasn’t chosen by God contrarily to what we might think, and Isaac means: He laughs or Laughter. It acknowledges the miracle, because both Abraham (Ch 17) and Sarah (Ch 8) had laughed in disbelief the first time they heard about God’s plan. Maybe now they assumed God was laughing even louder than they both laughed before, or maybe people were going to laugh at hearing the story: “Sarah said ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me’” (Genesis 21:6)
And yet. Yet now, suddenly, like out of nowhere, on this joyful occasion, when all finally acknowledge that the miracle is here to stay and everything should be all right – now there is trouble in paradise. It’s right there at the end of the first line of our text: “But” it reads “Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham ‘Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this salve woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac’.” So what about that? On this beautiful day where they should celebrate God’s provision, and even more than that, God’s ability to do the impossible, God’s exceeding goodness towards them, Sarah lifts up her eyes and it’s like a dark cloud comes over her heart. The cause of her distress? She sees two children playing. Now it’s hard to overestimate the number of rabbinic commentaries that have been written about the translation of this word “playing”, and it is true that it can have different meanings in Hebrew: From “playing” like children play, to “laugh at”, “mock’, or even “bully” or some form of sexual activity. Yet the real reason there has been so much debate about this word is probably because we want to understand what happened that could have made Sarah so angry, so upset she asked Abraham for such a radical decision to cast away the woman and her child, his child. You would think that it must have been very serious. And yet, there is nothing else in the Scriptures that can make us think anything more was going on than two children innocently playing together. We already know that Sarah has felt threatened by Hagar before, when Hagar got pregnant, and it made sense at the time (Read Chapter 16). But now? Sarah has everything she could wish for. And yet – a dark cloud comes over her. And it’s hard to understand.
Or maybe it isn’t. We talked last week about our “crisis of faith” and we know that Abraham and Sarah went through many of them and it is easily explainable given the difficult life they led. They had to endure famine, captivity, war, and in the meantime they weren’t getting any younger. God kept asking them to trust more and more even when everything seemed against them. And that’s very natural to have doubts in those circumstances. But today I think we are confronted to another kind of crisis of faith, the kind we can bring onto ourselves. The ones that don’t happen when we meet obstacles, the ones that happen when everything should be right, good and well, when God has finally blessed us with what we wanted. And when, strangely rather than being comforted, rather than rejoicing, we start worrying that God, or anybody else for that matter, is going to take it all away from us. Sarah looks at the children, the one of the slave woman, the one she birthed herself, and she’s afraid that because they interact as equal, Ishmael is going to ask for his own inheritance and put Isaac at a disadvantage.
And I think that when we hear this story and we look at her behavior, most of us can only feel indignant. Because she still does not get it, right? After everything God has given them, she still does not trust God. And you know how Jesus was very kind and patient, but that was one of the things that would drive him crazy. In Mark 8, it is said that shortly after the multiplication of the bread, Jesus catches the disciples worrying again they wouldn’t have anything to eat, and Jesus sort of loses it a little. This is what he says to them:
‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ ‘And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?’
I think that’s what Jesus could say to Sarah too: Do you not yet understand?’ And yet, I think we can recognize ourselves in that as well, in the crisis of faith that does not come when it’s a bad time and we doubt God’s presence, but in the crisis of faith that comes after we have received something good and we’re so afraid it’s not going to last. When fear of lacking and anxiety still override our faith and leads not only to still doubt God but also see other people as a threat to us – as if God could not provide for everyone. As if there wasn’t enough room, resources or blessings for all.
I told you last week that I am doing summer Bible study with a little group of students, and this week I had to explain to them that Hagar’s child, Ishmael, is actually the ancestor of the Muslim people and I said that they too received a special blessing (see Gn 16). And one of the students got very upset and she asked me: But why would God care for Muslims since they don’t believe in Jesus? Well, maybe because God is not like Sarah, or anyone of us who think there are not enough blessings for everybody. God cared about the life of Ishmael in the same way that God probably cares that 50,000 children have been killed or injured since the begin of the conflict in Gaza, or what do you think? When we read this passage, it’s pretty obvious for us that Sarah should have cared for Ishmael and his mother and not send them to their death, and the question wasn’t whether they were chosen or not chosen, the reality is that they deserved protection because they were people. And according to Jesus in our Gospel today, even if they had been sparrows, God would still have cared because none of them fall to the ground without his noticing. And then Jesus had to remind his disciples that being the chosen people isn’t about getting to play golf with God, it’s about taking our crosses and not let our fears and insecurities override our faith and lead us to forfeit our responsibilities.
And so today I guess the question for us, as it was for Abraham and Sarah, is the following: Are we here to grab God’s blessings or are we here to pass on the blessings we have received? Out of God’s compassion should come our own compassion, out of God’s generosity should come our own generosity. Faith is not for the keeping but for the giving, we have to live it out to keep it alive.