Genesis 16, Matthew 4.1-11
Many passages in the Bible, and especially in the Old Testament, are a challenge for anyone who believes that the whole of Scripture is the inspired revelation of God. The stories they relate can be very upsetting, especially when measured by modern standards of behaviour.
Hagar finds herself in an abusive relationship. She’s a slave and probably a young teenager. Slavery was an accepted institution in ancient Israel. Slave girls were often captured in raids carried out by warring neighbours. But in Hagar's case she was probably sold into slavery to settle a family debt.
Sarai's decision to make Hagar sleep with her husband takes Hagar's slavery to new depths. No doubt Abram wasn't the only man in ancient Israel who slept with his wife's slave girl. Jeffrey Epstein was still procuring sex slaves for himself and his entitled friends in the Twenty-first Century. The unusual thing about Hagar's story is that it appears in a sacred text. It doesn't show him and Sarai in a good light.
The narrator tries to gain some sympathy for Sarai by telling us that Hagar gave herself airs and graces once she found herself pregnant by Abram. It was all the agency she had, and in fact it was very daring of her. It caused her no end of trouble because Sarai was quite vindictive about it, and if Hagar thought Abram might stick up for her she was mistaken.
Abram and Sarai seem to have experienced ‘buyers’ remorse’. The whole sordid scheme had been Sarai's idea and Abram had bought into it, but Sarai now felt that her status as Abram's wife had been undermined and Abram, to appease her, gave her his permission to put Hagar back in her place. Was this his way of dealing with his own guilt for taking part in Sarai's plan? To take his own remorse out on an innocent girl was contemptible of him.
Fortunately for Hagar, Abram and Sarai were not the only people in the story who had an encounter with God. When she did finally summon the courage to run away, though not before, God reached out to Hagar and gave her the inner strength and assurance to go back and endure more harsh treatment, until a more auspicious time for her to make good her escape once and for all.
Hagar too was called, like Abram and Sarai, to be the ancestor of a nation. Despite her isolation and powerlessness she discovered that God had seen her plight. In fact her new name for God is ‘The One Who Sees’. And the name God told her to give Ishmael is similar; it means ‘God has heard’. In this context it's profoundly ambiguous. Abram was persuaded to adopt the name for his son because he thought God had heard his desire for a child, whereas Hagar believed that God had heard her unconscious cry for protection.
The most disturbing aspect of the story for modern readers is that there were no repercussions for Sarai and Abram. God had already promised them a child of their own in the previous chapter, and the promise is renewed in the next. There was no rebuke from God for the way they have treated Hagar, no punishment, no retribution, no demand for repentance.
And this shameful story had no subsequent impact on their reputation. Jesus talked about ‘Father Abraham’ in his parable about the rich man and the poor man and presents Abraham as a kindly friend of beggars.
The narrator of the Genesis story assumes that Abraham and Sarai's conduct, though calling for comment, is not atypical and takes for granted that this is how people sometimes behave in a slave owning society.
However, the narrator does make clear that Abram and Sarai had made a mistake. The birth of Ishmael was not really part of the plan. It was a wrong turn which did nobody any good. If anything, the story serves to explain how the Ishmaelites, a rival nation, came into being. The name means ‘nomads’ and God tells Hagar that Ishmael will lead a nomadic life in the desert to the south and east of Israel.
So what lesson are we supposed to take from the story? The Anglican theologian Isabelle Hamley points out that everything went wrong for Sarai and Abram because they jumped the gun.
She says that they had been ‘hanging onto [God's] promise in the face of disappointment’. He had promised them that they would be the ancestors of a great nation as innumerable as the stars, but Sarai's biological clock was ticking. We don't have to believe the exaggerated claims about their respective ages to appreciate that they were getting on in years - perhaps in their late thirties or early forties. At the time life expectancy for well-to-do adults would be between sixty and seventy years at most, and often much less.
Faced with time apparently running out, they made two wrong decisions which we might easily make too. First, faced with no obvious answer to their prayers, they decided to make the answer happen.
There’s a subtle distinction between staying alert - for God-given opportunities to make things happen, where if we fail to seize the opportunity it will be gone for good - and alternatively forcing the pace by relying entirely on our own initiative. It's not always easy to tell the difference. Is that new idea, or project, or opening inspired by God or is it a desperate attempt to come up with something we think will be good? Is God working quietly behind the scenes, so that - whatever happens - we can tell ourselves that God was at work in it? Or are we to wait for a clear revelation of what God wants us to do? And whichever way we choose, how will we know for sure that we're not deluding ourselves?
Which brings us to Abram and Sarai's second wrong decision. They made the assumption that the end can justify the means. In other words, it would be all right to treat Hagar like a pawn, an expendable part of their bigger game plan, collateral damage along the way.
A lot of people make plans like that, where hurt will be done and damage will be caused on the way to some greater purpose. Chopping down ancient woodland to make way for a bypass or a new railway line would be a relatively trivial example, and sometimes we do have to make hard choices like this. But in doing so we have to ask ourselves whether the end really does justify the means, and when we feel that God is calling us to do something, build some project or start some new initiative, we can be sure that we must be making a mistake if serious harm or emotional damage is likely to be caused to someone else, or if our plan involves manipulating people or oppressing them in any way.
Like Abram and Sarai, Jesus faced the same challenges. The Tempter tested him by inviting him to make his mission happen in his own way, not God’s way, and without any pain or hardship. Why not work spectacular miracles to impress the crowds, or use money, or power, or political influence, to bring in God’s Kingdom instead of doing it by dying on a cross?
The Church of England sponsored a number of high profile, celebrated initiatives involving charismatic worship projects or aimed at building new types of Christian community. Some of these were very good, and all of them drew huge crowds of adherents, but some ended up in the news for the wrong reasons, because vulnerable or impressionable people were then subject to abuse of various kinds. The last Archbishop of Canterbury lost his job for failing to stop or investigate some of these abuses.
Peter Mandeson is another modern day example of someone who was tempted and gave in to the temptation. Although he was a Socialist MP he always had a taste for the high life. He was irresistibly drawn into the orbit of people with power, influence and money. He took holidays on the yachts of billionaire businessmen and, of course, on the island that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein. Like the devil in Matthew’s account Jesus’ Temptation, Epstein drew people into his circle with promises of a good time at no cost to themselves. But Mandelson found himself trapped in a web of deceit, abuse and dishonesty. There were those seemingly playful photographs which, at best made him look silly and at worst put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In no time at all he was passing state secrets to Epstein. Others behaved even more abominably.
These high profile failures remind us that it can be very difficult to discern what is really the right thing to do. We can get drawn into doing the wrong thing almost by accident, or through a series of unwise or thoughtless decisions.
For Christians, one test is to see if we can find reasons in scripture to confirm what we think we should do. Another test is to see if we can find good examples of something similar happening in Christian tradition. And finally, we can see whether other Christians and people of good reputation are supportive. They won't always get it right and then we have to see if over time we can persuade them and win them round with sound arguments.
Sarai and Abram allowed their personal desires and ambition to cloud their vision of God's will and warp their moral judgement. We must be careful not to fall into the same trap, so that we don't stand in the way of good developments, or encourage bad ones, from a mistaken conviction that we are doing God's will.
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