The Victory Feast of Joy: An Easter Sunday Homily

There came a day when the anointed king of Israel had been surrounded by his foes and abandoned by those who'd claimed they'd follow him. But it wasn't yet the day you might think. For this was King David. We hear tell in the Scriptures of a battle at Pas-dammim, where the Philistines had assembled at a large barley field, and they were so overwhelming that the Israelite army fled, forsaking their anointed king. Only one man stood with David in the middle of the field “and defended it and killed the Philistines. And the LORD saved them by a great victory” (1 Chronicles 11:13-14). No doubt that faithful soldier ate dinner at David's side at David's table that night. And so began a great history of “the kingdom of the LORD over Israel” (1 Chronicles 28:5), “the kingdom of the LORD in the hands of the sons of David” (2 Chronicles 13:8).

A thousand years went by, until there was born “in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11), “and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32). As he ascended toward Jerusalem for that fateful week, even the blind begged, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Luke 18:38), inspiring praises to God. “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 21:9). But when the temple priests sought to censor this Anointed One of God, he warned that “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you” (Matthew 21:43). They did not understand.

Passover was fast approaching, the covenant feast that had preceded God's battle for Israel against the false gods of Egypt, the battle for Israel's freedom. Only on the other side of that preparatory feast and the divine battle could the tribes be forged into “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). And so, too, now. This Passover was a preparatory feast of the King with his captains before the battle. “You are those who have stayed with me in my trials,” said Jesus, “and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Luke 22:28-30). Here the apostles became a kingdom of priests, destined for thrones and a table. But, in fact, it was through service at the table that they would most perfectly govern their people (Luke 22:24-27).

The next day, the tables seemed turned. In the night, when the devil-infested apostate apostle led soldiers to capture the Christ (Luke 22:47-53), his apostolic army fled for fear, one and all (Mark 14:50). As others feasted but fed him naught, his kingship was the very charge laid against him and question put to him: “Are you the King?” (Luke 23:3). What could the people expect “if he is the Christ of God, the Chosen One” (Luke 23:35)? And yet his captors robed him, crowned him, saluted him; thinking to mock, they oversaw his coronation (Mark 15:17-19). On the cross, beneath his title as 'King,' he was enthroned, “lifted up” to gather his subjects to his salvation (John 3:14; 19:19-22). “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God glorified in him” (John 13:31).

No doubt the demons, those sneering Philistines unseen by mortal eye, jeered and cheered as the light of day faltered and failed. They could not see that there, in this darkness, the Son was offering his Father an infinite act of worship: on behalf of humanity, the sacrifice he rendered to God the Father was the entire life and death of God the Son. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” he cried as the temple's seamless veil ripped from heaven's end on down (Luke 23:44-46). How little did the demons know that, by this sacrifice supremely sufficient to solve the sin of the world, he was “canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the principalities and powers and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). In his faithful sacrifice of self, he won the battle.

But in dying, he opened the next phase of his campaign. While grieving men wrapped his crucified corpse and rested it in a tomb for its sabbath sleep (Luke 23:50-56), his human soul was a Trojan horse, smuggling the fullness of God into the belly of death to burst it from the inside. For “he entered into Sheol and brought out its prisoners; he fought with the Evil One and conquered him; he trampled him and broke his foothold and spoiled his possessions.”¹ Like Samson bringing the Philistine temple crashing in on itself, so the soul of Christ “by his own power uprooted Sheol..., shattered the bars of Sheol, and came out of the darkness.”² “Sheol saw me and was shattered,” he could've said, “I have been vinegar and bitterness to it.”³ Death was left “like Goliath, who with his own sword perished” at the hands of David.⁴ “Then the powers of darkness sat in mourning, for Death was humbled from its power..., its hands paralyzed...; it lamented and shouted aloud.”⁵

And the bitter wails of Death ring out this morning, I tell you, through the cavernous echoes of an empty tomb. The very body once crucified was now permanently transfigured by the glory of life, leaving his shroud to testify: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the Seed of David” (2 Timothy 2:8). His heavenly servants rolled the stone away for his triumphal procession. And to those who came in early morning too late to grieve at the grave, his heralds queried, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Why look for the Victor where victims lie, why hunt the Triumphant in the annals of defeat? “He is not here; he has risen!” (Luke 24:5-6). “Weep no more, for behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered” (Revelation 5:5). “It is time... to sing victory songs to Christ, for he has conquered the world for us...”⁶

And what does a king do after a battle but hold a celebratory feast with his troops, “a recognized means of formally concluding a campaign and declaring victory”?⁷ No wonder we read, that very day, that the King of Glory re-recruited two discouraged disciples on the road, finagling his way to their table so that “he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them, and their eyes were opened” (Luke 24:31), overwhelmed by the joy of defeat turned to victory. No wonder we read, that very night, that the King of Glory invaded their midst to prove his physical reality to them by his beautified wounds – “for the trophy of victory over death was the showing of this to all”⁸ – and then, “while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling,” by sharing with them in the leftovers of their Easter supper (Luke 24:36-43). It was a victory feast of joy, at which the King of Glory “presented himself alive to them..., speaking about the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3).

The victory of life hasn't ended: “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57). Neither has the joy been exhausted. St. Augustine, preaching on Easter Sunday over sixteen centuries ago, celebrated “joy in your coming together, joy in the psalms and hymns, joy in the memory of Christ's passion and resurrection … Just look how these days, when alleluia is ringing in our ears, our spirits soar!”⁹ “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). The victory feast of joy goes on, with the Risen Lord himself as our feast! And this meal of celebration in his victory won for us is, at the same time, a preparatory banquet for his ongoing warfare in us and through us: the war of faith against unbelief, of truth against deception, of wisdom against folly, of hope against despair, of joy against mundanity, of heavenly love against the darkness. So let us rejoice, let us exult; the kingdom is coming – keep the victory feast of joy!  Hallelujah!

God of Ears and Eyes

Last Sunday, we heard a tragic story showcasing the weaknesses of Abram and his wife Sarai in their turn to works of the flesh (in this case, assisted reproduction via traditional surrogacy) in a bid to seize the promised gifts of God. Today, though, isn't the day for their story. Flip over what we heard last week, and there's another tale to tell. This forgotten character is “an Egyptianess” (Genesis 16:1). She grew up believing in the ways of the Egyptians, grew up striving to act in accord with ma'at. She worshipped at the shrines of the gods. When her grandparents died, maybe they were able to afford coffins painted with spells to aid them in their voyage through the underworld. She hoped that their kas were judged favorably, and that the same would one day be true of her. By the time she was a young woman, she'd lost her freedom somehow; and then came the day she was taken and given, transferred into the service of an Asiatic foreigner with whom Egypt's king wanted good relations. And when these Asiatics were evicted from the land for their duplicity, she and others carried along with them (Genesis 12:16-20).

From that moment on, for the Asiatic woman Sarai, “for her there was a maidservant” in this Egyptian girl; she became functionally “a personal assistant.”¹ She waited on Sarai as she watched the Asiatic chiefs divide their flocks and scatter across the land (Genesis 13:8-12). She watched the Asiatic chieftain Abram, Sarai's husband, move their camp and build an altar to his God, the LORD (Genesis 13:18). She served Sarai as Abram and the non-Egyptian servants rode off into a battle, and came back successful but empty-handed (Genesis 14:14-24). She was called often to Sarai's tent; sometimes, on her rounds, she saw Abram acting strangely, like standing at night counting stars or like batting vultures away from slabs of raw meat all day (Genesis 15). And so went the Egyptian girl's life, for at least three years, as she heard of the profound relationship Abram was cultivating with his God and of the unrealistic hopes and dreams it stoked in him. The Egyptian girl carried on as his wife's maidservant – “and her name,” we're now told after years have passed, “was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1).

So, at least, says the narrator. To listen to Abram and Sarai talk, you'd never know it. Go ahead, read every last word that comes out of their mouths; they never call Hagar by name, as a person.² “Behold, please,” says mistress to master one day, “the LORD has withheld me from bearing; go, please, into my maidservant – maybe I'll be built up from her” (Genesis 16:2). It isn't Hagar's idea. But when the master and mistress agree, Hagar has no voice and no choice. Sarai “took Hagar the Egyptianess, her maidservant..., and she gave her to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). At least it's a role of greater prestige, lifting Hagar up even as it uses her. “He went in to Hagar” – not a night she greatly relished – but, as a result, “she conceived” (Genesis 16:4).

I wonder how many weeks went by before she knew she had conceived. In time, she saw the telltale signs, saw and felt her body changing. And then, armed with this knowledge, “her mistress was diminished in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). Exactly what behaviors expressed that, it's hard to tell. One ancient reader commented broadly that “she made her pregnancy a ground for boasting and behaved insolently towards her mistress.”³ A Jewish reader expanded here on Hagar's “insolence to abuse Sarai” while “assuming queenly airs,”⁴ while a Christian one agreed that Hagar adopted “an ungrateful attitude” and acted “arrogant and self-important.”⁵

Hagar likely didn't hear either Sarai's dour diatribe about it or Abram's disconcerting dodge ducking the situation. “Behold, your maidservant is in your hand,” – here he disclaims involvement, no longer identifying Hagar as his wife, but instead ceding full authority in the case to Sarai. He continues: “Do to her what is good in your eyes” (Genesis 16:6). Morally, that's not a fine answer on his part; a lot of trouble started when Eve reached for whatever was desirable to her eyes (Genesis 3:6), and things keep spiraling later when each person does what's correct in his eyes (Judges 17:6; 21:25). And with that encouragement to act however she saw fit, Abram “handed the servant girl over for punishment without even waiting for the birth of the child in her womb,” the child Abram both desired and disregarded.⁶

What we read next isn't pleasant. Your Bible might read: “Sarai dealt harshly with her,” or “Sarai mistreated Hagar,” or “Sarai treated her harshly”; I'd translate either that “Sarai afflicted her” or “Sarai humbled her” (Genesis 16:6). What that looked like in practice, we can guess based on where Sarai grew up. In laws from ancient Sumer, we know that if a wife gave her husband a slave-girl to bear children on her behalf, “after which that slave woman aspires to equal status with her mistress,” one ruling said she couldn't be sold, on account of the children, but was to be humbled by being marked physically as slave and reduced in rank to join the slave women of the household.⁷ Sarai does that: whether it's a hairstyle or a brand or tattoo, Sarai visibly lowers Hagar in rank to clearly put her back down in her place. No more could Hagar act the part of Abram's wife; she was demoted lower than where she'd started from. Likely as a result, Sarai “makes Hagar work like a servant,” without special considerations for Hagar's pregnant condition.⁸ An even older law from where Sarai grew up suggested that if any slave-girl cursed her mistress, “they shall scour her mouth with... salt” in large quantities.⁹ Maybe Sarai followed that law, scrubbing Hagar's mouth out with salt. Sarai had free range, too, to let her imagination run wild and mean; no doubt she lectured, yelled, piled on tasks. Modern commentators have spoken of “physical and psychological abuse,”¹⁰ “brutal, humiliating abuse,”¹¹ “aggressive humiliation.”¹²

And all this does is make Hagar mad. She doesn't look any more favorably toward Sarai; she only becomes prouder and more resentful, “unrepentant and insubordinate.”¹³ But finally fear and fury flame out of control, until “she fled from her face” (Genesis 16:6) – “a voluntary flight, not a banishment,” which made Hagar not an exile but a runaway slave.¹⁴ She abandoned the camp of Abram's tents, rejected Sarai's authority, slipped away under the cover of night and started to run over the countryside. Given Hagar's pregnant condition, it was an especially drastic move which underlines her desperation in the face of Sarai's harshness.¹⁵ And the next verses could – we expect that they would – tell us about how Sarai and Abram react, how it affects our usual heroes. Instead, though, the narrator brings us along with Hagar, making her the main character of the story for now.¹⁶

When we succeed in catching up to Hagar, we spy her by “a spring of water in the wilderness..., the spring on the way to Shur” (Genesis 16:7). Shur, meaning 'wall,' meant the fortifications at Egypt's northeast border; it was a customary stop on the desert road between Canaan and Egypt.¹⁷ Instinctively or intentionally, Hagar is retreating from the land of Abram's promise toward the land of her birth: Egypt.¹⁸ (Though, if she could be given away so easily to a temporarily resident foreigner, does she really have any hope of a warm welcome in her native country?)  As for how far along she is on the road, this spring is described as “between Kadesh and Bered” (Genesis 16:14), and while we don't know where Bered is, Kadesh is the 'Spring of Judgment' where the eastern kings trounced the Amalekites, on the edge of the Sinai desert (Genesis 14:7). This is already several days' journey from where Abram was encamped, which journey in Hagar's condition testifies to her tenacity and skill in navigating.¹⁹ And along the way, though Genesis says nothing about it, many have supposed that during her trek Hagar surely “entreated God to take pity on her”²⁰ – though what god she would've chosen to call on is an interesting question.

While Hagar's resting at the spring to catch her breath and haul up a drink of precious fresh water, she isn't left to herself; a stranger comes, apparently a fellow traveler also seeking water and a travel break, and the man strikes up a conversation with this lone woman. Female, pregnant, vulnerable, isolated, and now approached by an unfamiliar man in the middle of nowhere... One can't imagine she feels wholly safe in this scenario. But we know what Hagar doesn't: that this stranger isn't a man at all, but a messenger from above, “the Angel of the LORD” (Genesis 16:7). This is the first time the Bible uses the word 'angel,' and he represents the LORD, God Most High, while walking and talking on the earthly plane. The same LORD who seemed silent when Sarai suggested surrogacy has now “sought Hagar out and found her”²¹ – one ancient reader suggested that this should make us “recognize the virtue of Hagar and also to realize that she is not despicable, since an angel converses with her and displays an interest in her that is not idle.”²²

What's the first word to come out of the heavenly messenger's mouth? “Hagar” (Genesis 16:8). For the first time, her name appears in dialogue – Pharaoh hasn't used it, Abram hasn't, Sarai hasn't, but this Angel will; he calls her by her name. I've heard it said that in all the ancient writings of the Middle East, this is the one and only time where a heavenly being ever addresses a woman by name.²³ Hagar is known, first and foremost, as a person – and known so by heaven, if not by earth. In just a moment, though, the Angel adds a title: “maidservant of Sarai” (Genesis 16:8). It might be a subtle hint that Hagar's flight has been misguided, that she's still Sarai's maidservant, she's in the wrong place.²⁴ Now, unless Hagar had this info tattooed on her face or something, Hagar sees that this is no chance encounter with a mere fellow traveler. Short of jumping to a preternatural assumption, she has to assume Abram has hired a bounty hunter.

But he puts two natural questions to her, as a fellow traveler might: first, “from what place have you come?”, and second, “and where are you walking?” (Genesis 16:8).²⁵ She knows where she's come from: “From the face of Sarai my mistress I am fleeing” (Genesis 16:8). The sum total of her thoughts have been escape.²⁶ But it's interesting that she answers so honestly (especially if she maybe fears he's come to coerce her on her mistress's behalf). Hagar doesn't lie or obfuscate; she “admits everything truthfully.” She also doesn't point a finger, or complain about her mistreatment, or aim to justify herself.²⁷ She admits she's a runaway slave, and that Sarai is the great lady to whom she's bound – in effect, this is Hagar's confession, her guilty plea. Notice that Hagar never answers the second question, about where she's going; maybe the act of confessing has left her in doubt.²⁸

So the Angel answers for her in the form of a commandment: “Return to your mistress” (Genesis 16:9). It isn't what Hagar wants to hear, and seems to confirm her natural suspicion that this man was sent by Sarai to bring Hagar back. Regardless, now that she's confessed Sarai is her mistress, this command is just the logical course of action. More unsettling, though, are the words that come next: “Afflict yourself under her hand” (Genesis 16:9). Almost every English Bible I could find renders this verb as 'submit' here, but it more precisely means 'afflict' or 'humble.' In fact, it's a new form of the same verb from three verses ago when Sarai 'afflicted' or 'humbled' Hagar (Genesis 16:6). The Angel tells Hagar to return to the same situation, to the mistress who in anger has punished and afflicted her – and to now embrace and accept it? This can't be right, can it, for Hagar to be expected to return to an abusive situation, to lose her hard-won freedom, to run back toward injustice, to let the wrong done to her be upon herself and herself alone?

This language of 'afflict yourself,' 'humble yourself,' shows up later in the Law on the Day of Atonement, when “you shall afflict yourselves and present a food offering to the LORD” (Leviticus 23:28) – Israel was thus to fast and do penance. So for Hagar to return to Sarai will be her Day of Atonement, a Lenten journey; Hagar will do penance for her past pride by a willing humility, submitting herself to affliction. This will heal what she's done wrong. (It will also protect Hagar from the desert road otherwise looming ahead, which might be more hazardous to pregnant Hagar than Abram's tents ever were; and it tells us that real deliverance isn't found in Egypt's independence but in surrendering to the hope which the house of Abram, despite its matron's present actions, is meant to represent.²⁹)  Returning penitentially is the way.

After a pause for Hagar to digest the command, there follow two new declarations which add three messages of consolation which make Hagar realize that this messenger wasn't sent by Sarai and Abram. First, though not first in order, is the news that “the LORD has heard your affliction” (Genesis 16:11). The Angel speaks the name of Abram's God, Sarai's God – but says that this God pays attention even to an Egyptian maidservant, to her needs and wants, her pains and fears. Hagar's sobbing in the night hasn't gone unnoticed; her prayers, addressed specifically or generically, haven't gotten lost in the mail. Her sorrow and woe and hurt have reached a caring ear and found there not only sympathy but active redress. Hagar has been afflicted, and it isn't one of the gods of Egypt who rallies to her cause; it's the LORD. It wasn't Amun-Re shining on her, wasn't Ptah speaking justice to her, Osiris shepherding her, Hathor caring for her – no, Egypt's gods now fade from view, and there, there is the LORD. Had she been tempted before to identify the LORD's character and care with the worst behavior of his elect lord and lady, the Angel has hereby corrected her.

And how can Hagar know that the LORD has heard her? Because this messenger declares that not only is she pregnant (which may, by now, have been visibly obvious to anyone), but also that this baby yet unborn, whom the LORD (and not Khnum or Hathor) has given her, is a boy. Until this moment, nobody on earth had the power to know whether that baby was a boy or a girl; they had no ultrasounds. But Hagar's talking to someone not of this earth, one who declares the unknown truth: Hagar will give birth to a son. This child won't miscarry, and he won't die in infancy. He'll live to receive his name, 'Ishmael,' which will forever remind Hagar: the LORD heard her.

Not only that, the Angel tells her Ishmael will grow to manhood. But to what kind of life?  Hagar is being sent back to humiliation as a slave woman; Abram already said she was in Sarai's hand, and now the Angel's told her to accept affliction under Sarai's hand (Genesis 16:6, 9). But as for her son, the Angel says, everyone's hand might reach out to control him, but his hand will rise against the hands of all the grasping world.³⁰ The result is, he'll be “a wild donkey of a man” (Genesis 16:12) – a creature which “hears not the shouts of the driver” (Job 39:7); if there's one thing a wild donkey will never be, it's anybody's slave. Hagar can return to slavery with sure knowledge that her submission and sorrow will sow the seed for her son's freedom – that he'll cast off every chain and live in defiant freedom.³¹

That'd be hope enough to persuade and sustain her, but notice also the dignity given to Hagar by this birth announcement. She's conceived, she will bear, and she “shall call his name Ishmael” (Genesis 16:11). So far, only one woman has named her sons, and that's Eve (Genesis 4:1, 25). Hagar is in Eve's exclusive club. What's more, the Angel refers to Hagar's “seed” (Genesis 16:10), and the only prior reference to a woman having her own 'seed' was the promise that the seed of the woman would battle the seed of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). But where the LORD told Eve that “greatly I will multiply your toils and your conception” (Genesis 3:16), now the Angel of the LORD tells Hagar that “greatly I will multiply your seed so that they cannot be counted for greatness” (Genesis 16:10). And if you didn't know better, you'd assume those were words spoken to Abram, the only one who's yet heard about his uncountable future seed like the earth's dust and the sky's stars (Genesis 13:16; 15:5). Hagar now receives the promise of a patriarch in her own right.³² Though a slave, her promises rival those of the chosen friend of God!

The Angel of the LORD has told her, “I will multiply your seed” (Genesis 16:10) – this 'Angel' is speaking for God in the first person. Finally the narrator lets slip that, directly or indirectly, it was “the LORD who spoke to her” (Genesis 16:13). Though she was being sent back to a lowly condition, she'd been consoled with a mighty experience of God, having been “granted attention from on high... on account of her being humble.”³³ She had not merely been interacting with a run-of-the-mill spirit; she “saw God in the angel,” as a great teacher once put it.³⁴ She recognizes him as God of Abram, God of Sarai, but also, yes, God of Hagar.

And to make that clear, Hagar gives the LORD a new name, one all her own. “She called the name of the LORD who spoke to her 'You are the God of Seeing!'” (Genesis 16:13). Don't let this slip past you: Hagar is the only person in the entire Bible who is explicitly said to assign a new name to God, instead of the other way around!³⁵ Abram doesn't do it, Sarai doesn't do it. Enoch and Noah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezra and Nehemiah – they don't do it. But Hagar does it. She names God out of her own experience of him, because she so abundantly finds him new and fresh and exciting and wonderfully beautiful to her.³⁶ She's heard, how she loves to proclaim it! But she's saved, not from her afflictions, but from them being meaningless and anonymous and unredeemed. She knows she is known, hears she is heard, sees she's been seen, because she herself has seen the One who sees her. “Prior to this moment, it seems that no one has ever seen her...; it was only God who saw her” – and let her see him.³⁷

All along, this has been what it's about. If you look, her story is full of eyes. Once she sees she's pregnant, she looks at Sarai, who is “diminished in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). Abram thus invites Sarai to act according to her own 'eyes' (Genesis 16:6). Sarai then afflicts Hagar – and in Hebrew, 'affliction' is just a letter scramble of the word for 'eye.' So Hagar runs off until she reaches a spring – and in Hebrew, a 'spring' is literally an 'eye' (Genesis 16:7)! Because of how Hagar used her eyes, Sarai acted from her eyes to eye Hagar, who ran from Sarai's eyes to the eye of the desert. This watery eye is on the road to 'Shur,' which could be read as a Hebrew verb for seeing. There at the eye on the way to seeing, chastened and comforted by the LORD, Hagar renames the desert's eye as the sacred site where she's seen and been seen by a God of Seeing (Genesis 16:13-14)!³⁸

For, proclaiming the LORD as El Roi, “God of Seeing,” she explains that “also here have I seen the back of the One who sees me” (Genesis 16:13). This new definition of God proclaims the LORD as “a god who cares for the needy and the outcast,” the discarded and downtrodden.³⁹ She then embeds her experience into the name of the spring, which is now called a well. She names it Beer-lahai-roi, “Well of the Living One Who Sees” (Genesis 16:14). A medieval monk remarked that Beer-lahai-roi's waters “signified the profound mysteries of divine providence,” revealing to Hagar “the living and unfailing water” that comes from the Living One to all who thirst (Isaiah 55:1).⁴⁰ A slave suffocating in sorrows and shame, driven to the desolation of the desert, has come to see the God she never quite knew – and the Living One has quenched her thirst, given her new life.⁴¹

Genesis jumps over the days of her return journey back into Canaan, but picks up again once she's rejoined the camp of Abram; it doesn't, however, mention her returning to Sarai, per se. Hagar gives birth to the son as her own, not Sarai's; yet she does bear him “to Abram,” not only to herself. It isn't now Hagar who gives the boy a name, but “Abram named his son, whom Hagar had borne, Ishmael” (Genesis 16:15). Abram could only have picked that name if Hagar had “recounted to [them] the vision that she had seen” and the promises that came with it.⁴² Hagar has testified of the God who hears and sees her! From now on, Sarai must know that God hears and sees Hagar, and so Sarai can't treat Hagar just any way that's good in Sarai's eyes without pausing to wonder if that treatment is good also in the LORD's eyes, or if it will provoke Hagar's groan unto the LORD's ears. And in honor and celebration of that promise, Abram names his precious son after the maidservant Hagar's prayer.

This story only deepens when we remember Abram's plunge into darkness, when he heard how his seed would be “sojourners” in a land not their own, made “servants..., and they will be afflicted for four hundred years” (Genesis 15:13). The Hebrew word for 'sojourners' is gerim, so you could actually read the name 'Hagar' as 'The Sojourner.'⁴³ She's also a slave and afflicted – exactly fitting the bill of what Abram heard about.

The prophecy to Abram was, we know, fulfilled in Exodus when the Egyptians began to “afflict” his seed “with heavy burdens” (Exodus 1:11). Though Moses was exempted through his mother's cunning, “one day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens” and took violent action (Exodus 2:11-12). When word thereof reached the king, “Moses fled from Pharaoh,” just as Hagar fled from Sarai (Exodus 2:15). Moses sat down at a well in the desert (like Hagar!), and when his first son was born there, “he called his name Gershom, for he said, 'I have been a sojourner in a foreign land'” (Exodus 2:22). In Moses' absence, “the sons of Israel groaned from their slavery..., and God heard their groaning..., and God saw the sons of Israel” (Exodus 2:23-25). As a result, while Moses was in the desert, “the Angel of the LORD,” who first encountered Hagar, “appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush” (Exodus 3:2). “God called to him out of the bush,” identified himself as the God of Abraham, and told Moses, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people..., and I have heard their cry from the face of their oppressors” (Exodus 3:4-7). And then this God-Who-Sees-and-Hears sent Moses back whence he came to face up to the afflicting Pharaoh and to rescue the afflicted (Exodus 3:10). In light of Exodus, Hagar is being set up in Genesis as “a heroine with the same characteristics as Moses,” as almost a Moses before Moses, maybe even “a liberator like Moses.”⁴⁴

Ultimately, after the LORD had heard and seen and acted, “the people fled” (Exodus 14:5) – just like Moses, just like Hagar. “Then Moses made Israel set out from the Red Sea, and they went into the wilderness of Shur” (Exodus 15:22), with an “Angel of God who was going before the host of Israel” (Exodus 14:19). For as they'd later say, “when we cried to the LORD, he heard our voice and sent an angel and brought us out of Egypt” (Numbers 20:16). At the mountain, they all heard a stern warning to “not oppress a sojourner..., for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). But Israel “heard the sound of words, but saw no form” (Deuteronomy 4:12), while Moses had the unique privilege, like Hagar, of seeing the LORD's “back” (Exodus 33:23). And only after all that did they at last move to Kadesh (Numbers 13:26).

Again, these are no coincidences. Hagar is a foreshadowing of Israel – she's The Sojourner like them, enslaved and afflicted like them, flees like them, meets the Angel of the LORD like them, is linked to places like Shur and Kadesh like them, and finds she's heard by God like them. Hagar got a promise like Abram, an exodus like Israel, and a vision like Moses – an incredibly impressive lineup.⁴⁵ And what's so surprising is that, to foreshadow Israel being afflicted by Egyptians, Genesis gives us an Egyptian afflicted by the future grandmother of Israel – almost as if what the Egyptians did to Israel was only retaliation in kind!⁴⁶ It's shockingly subversive, the sort of story I can't imagine a later Israelite just making up. When the Law commands Israel that “you shall not afflict any widow or orphan; if you afflict them in any way, and if they cry to me, surely I will hear their cry, and my wrath will burn hot” (Exodus 22:22-24), it tells them not to repeat the sins of Grandma Sarai, because God's still hearing the Hagars of the land. For “God is justice, and [Hagar] stands for those for whom God has special concern,” whom God sees and hears even when Abram or Israel (or we!) betray the call of justice and fail to seek the lost.⁴⁷

Through ages of judges and of kings, often Abram's seed “were rebellious in their purposes and were brought low through their iniquity,” so that the LORD “gave them into the hand of the nations... and they were brought into subjection under their power.” But “nevertheless, he looked upon their distress when he heard their cry” (Psalm 106:41-44). And so they kept abiding in the hope David preached in magnifying the LORD who'd “heard him and saved him” (Psalm 34:3-6): that “the LORD is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18), so “the Angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them” (Psalm 34:7). But what about after the Temple where the LORD sees and hears is gone (1 Kings 8:28-30)?

Centuries unfolded, and the people were subjected and afflicted beneath the hands of Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome – until, at last, another woman met an angel of the LORD, who conveyed a birth announcement to her, God's most highly favored lady: “You will conceive in your womb, and you will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:31), “for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).⁴⁸ She confessed herself to be, not the maidservant of a mortal mistress, but “the handmaiden of the LORD”; and she fled not from her Master, but bowed to his hand: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Standing where Abram and Sarai and Hagar once pitched their tents, she sang that her soul magnified the LORD because “he has looked on the humble estate of his maidservant” (Luke 1:48). More deeply even than Hagar, Mary knew that the LORD had seen her in her humility, in her lowliness, in the affliction she shared with her people Israel.

When the months had passed and she had given birth, her baby boy opened his eyes, and Mary was the first to look him in the face – and then, with Hagar, she saw the God who saw her. But in this child, that very God of Seeing had “emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). As he grew to human manhood, he became his people's New Moses, teaching from the mountain, so that now “the ministration of the Law... is, in a way, a servant of the gospel teachings..., ordered to submit to the oracles given through Christ,” as was foreshadowed by Hagar's mandated submission to Sarai.⁴⁹ If Hagar knew God heard her, how much better did the Son know his God and Father heard him (John 11:41)! And “in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications..., and he was heard because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7).

To David's city he'd come, “humble and mounted on a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9); “and being found in human form, he humbled himself” more radically than was ever asked of Hagar – for Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8), being “crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). But yet he had “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the One who was able to save him from death; and he was heard” (Hebrews 5:7). The Father's hearing the Son didn't omit the cross, any more than his hearing Hagar immediately voided her afflictions. Christ tasted death, but, having already been heard by his Father who saves from death, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death” (Acts 2:24), and “has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that's above every name” (Philippians 2:9) – better than Hagar's! Now the “Son of God who has eyes like a flame of fire” declares: “I am the First and the Last, the Living One; I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore!” (Revelation 1:14-18) – he's the Living One who sees, he's the LORD El Roi of Beer-lahai-roi!

When we're “found in him,” we have “a righteousness which comes through the faith of Christ” (Philippians 3:9), and so ours is the old promise that “the eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous” (Psalm 34:15), that “the eye of the LORD is on those who... hope in his steadfast love” (Psalm 33:18). With him we are not anonymous slaves with muted voices; we are heard, we are seen, and we are named. Hagar's hope has become our hope, for the LORD is a God who “hears the needy” (Psalm 69:33). We are sojourners on the earth (1 Peter 2:11; Psalm 119:19), yet he will hear us (Psalm 39:12). Already we're on an exodus “out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). He himself, the Living One, has promised that “whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matthew 23:12), and so our hands are free to be for all those who set their hands against us.

Hagar had the privilege of saying, “Here I have seen the One who sees me” (Genesis 16:13); but each of us must confess a “God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). For now, “though you have not seen him, you love him” (1 Peter 1:8). But we have a more blessed assurance: that “we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). The Living One who sees us will then be the Living One whom we see, as we drink eternally from his living spring of love (Revelation 22:1). And then, only then, shall we have been “saved to the uttermost” (Hebrews 7:25). Until we reach that place, we persevere through these desert days of Lent. So at this holy oasis, the Beer-lahai-roi that is this day and hour, “humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (1 Peter 5:6). For we are heard, we are seen – and if our eyes be refreshed by this water and disciplined under his hand, then shall these eyes grow strong enough at last to see God who sees us. Amen.

Building a Family

By my count, up to this point in Genesis, we've heard the name 'Abram' forty-five times. The name Sarai? Six times. But now is her time in the spotlight. When first we heard that “the name of Abram's wife was Sarai,” the very next line let us know that “she had no child” (Genesis 11:29-30). When the two married somewhere near Ur, neither expected that they'd not be expecting. But a year went by, two years, and Sarai wasn't pregnant. Then Terah had them pack their bags for Harran; but when they got there, still Sarai didn't conceive with Abram. Ah, but then Abram got that stunning call, with a promise that in Canaan he'd at last be blessed (Genesis 12:2-3). God kept talking there to Abram: his seed this, his seed that; Abram must have wondered if there were a hidden meaning. Only once Abram cracked open his despairing heart did a ray of clarifying light fall therein: “One from your own innards, he will be your heir” (Genesis 15:4). And time marched on. Here we are, “after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 16:3), “and Sarai, wife of Abram, had not birthed for him” (Genesis 16:1). “Sarai was barren” (Genesis 11:30), suffering from primary infertility.

That's a heavy burden for anyone to bear – and common, with about one in seven American couples these days struggling to conceive. The stress of coping with infertility has been known to bring “depression, anger, mood swings, anxiety, guilt, and isolation.”¹ It's a safe bet that Sarai has gotten on a first-name basis with all six woes. “The barren womb” is “never satisfied” (Proverbs 30:15-16). She's also no doubt caught glimpses through these years of her husband Abram's anguish, even if he's tried to hide it for her sake (Genesis 15:2). And if infertility is a troubling burden naturally to anybody, it was all the more so in Sarai's world. Although in reality men and women are equally likely to contribute to fertility issues,² in her world the default assumption was that childlessness was a woman's issue and negated her value. In the ancient world, “infertile marriages ended in divorce” all the time, a prospect which “was devastating for the woman.”³ 

And in her case, much more was at stake. Sarai's surely heard Abram recount his encounters with his God, so Sarai knows Abram's seed will get the land of Canaan, multiply like the dust, and inherit a future by the terms of a solemn covenant (Genesis 12:7; 13:15-16; 15:13-14). And Sarai knows that this seed, once it's a great nation, has the responsibility to mediate divine blessing to all families of the earth (Genesis 12:2-3). Sarai has an inkling that the fate of the world rests on Abram's seed. So maybe Sarai wonders: Is she in the way of the world's salvation?

Hard-pressed by weights natural, cultural, and covenantal, Sarai has probably long been vexed; maybe she's tried out some of the many medical solutions of the ancient cultures, not that they could've been effective in the slightest.⁴ But now Sarai is, if we do our math, apparently seventy-five years old. Now, the Bible attributes big lives to our Genesis friends, and we can argue about whether the ages are always literal or not; but biblically, Sarai is now 59% of the way through her natural life (Genesis 23:1), and so now she's hit menopause.⁵ She's a smart woman; she knows her body. So she declares: “The LORD has restrained me from bearing” (Genesis 16:2). As she sees things, God chose never to open the locked door, and now the chance is gone.⁶

All this time, it occurs to her, a question has gone unspoken. Abram now knows, since God swore on God's life, that the coming heir must be Abram's biological child (Genesis 15:4). But there's been zero mention of who the mother is to be.⁷ They've surely always assumed it'd be Abram's life-long wife, but Sarai now sees reason, in the absence of a specific promise to her, whether she fits into that blurry little spot on the covenant. But Sarai is a determined woman; if she can't get through the locked door, she'll throw bricks through the window.

That's why we hear, as this story opens, that “Sarai had a maidservant, an Egyptian, and her name was Hagar” (Genesis 16:1). It's not hard to piece together how she got there. Four chapters earlier, there was a famine, and Abram took Sarai on the run for Egypt (Genesis 12:10). Imagining danger from lustful Egyptian men and their lethal jealousies, Abram talked Sarai into passing herself off as his little sister for his protection (Genesis 12:11-13). A harrowing dalliance with Pharaoh himself, staved off only by the hand of God, led to Sarai's safe return but also the deportation of the pair (Genesis 12:15-20). Yet Pharaoh didn't take back his gifts to Abram, which had included “slaves and maidservants” (Genesis 12:16). Now we get to meet one.⁸ And the repeated note that Hagar is Egyptian “was that we might refer back to that incident” that brought them together.⁹ Hagar's Egyptian eyes are a constant reminder. How did Sarai really feel about Abram's plan and its outcome? Hurt, betrayed, used, exploited? Has she forgiven? Or is resentment lurking still in the shadows?

That we don't know, but we do know that Egypt was proverbial for its fertile soil, a reference point for other places that were “well-watered... like the land of Egypt” (Genesis 13:10). It was Egypt's fertile soil that solved their last problem; now Sarai sees Hagar as a portable patch of fertile Egyptian soil,¹⁰ which suggests “an easy solution to Sarai's dilemma.”¹¹ Sarai suggests “surrogate motherhood” as the plan.¹² Hagar's living womb, a surrogate for Sarai's dead one, will be her brick through the window. “Go in to my maidservant,” she decrees (Genesis 16:2). Abram must inseminate Hagar the old-fashioned way, who, if all goes well, will conceive a child who, while biologically Abram's and Hagar's, will be legally Sarai's. Thus, as Eve was “built” out of the raw matter of Adam's side, Sarai hopes “maybe I'll be built up from her” (Genesis 16:2).¹³ This procedure of traditional surrogacy “may be the oldest form of assisted reproduction” known to man – or to woman.¹⁴

To Sarai, and to Abram too, it all makes perfect sense. The laws they knew often had stipulations where if a man's wife didn't provide him with children, he was entitled to take a secondary wife.¹⁵ Archaeologists have dug up Middle Eastern marriage contracts that outright stipulate that if a wife didn't bear her husband a son in a certain number of years, then it was her responsibility to get a slave girl to do the job, and the slave girl's son would count as the son of the first-ranked wife.¹⁶ In their culture, this was normal, understandable, ordinary, to use a maidservant as a surrogate; it's almost surprising it's taken them this long to try it.¹⁷ And some readers stop with that observation: it was accepted custom, so that's that. But I can't help but wonder: Was this a good idea? Was this a good plan? It might be normal, it might be effective, it might even be the only thing they can do. But does that justify it morally? Does this surrogacy scheme pass ethical muster? Is it wise, is it godly?

The very fact that Sarai's proposed tool is an Egyptian woman – a person, not a thing, though Sarai's forgotten that – should make us pay close attention to how this story compares with the one from four chapters back.¹⁸ Then, the problem was an infertile land, and Abram found an Egyptian solution; now, the problem is an infertile body, and Abram's wife finds an Egyptian solution. On the border of Egypt was the first place we heard Abram speak to Sarai; now is the first time we hear Sarai speak to Abram. Both even open with the same words, “Behold, please,” though where Abram invites Sarah to behold her own beauty, Sarai invites Abram to behold her barrenness. In each story, “behold, please,” is followed by a problem and a plan of action. Abram's plan involved obscuring the nature of his relationship to Sarai – and isn't that ultimately what Sarai's plan would do, obscure her wifehood and Abram's husbandhood (Genesis 12:11-13; 16:2)?

Abram, of course, thought his plan was quite crafty: he could outsmart the men of Egypt and leverage their lust to his advantage, all without really surrendering what mattered to him. But Abram hadn't foreseen all the real-life consequences of his choice. When Egypt's king entered the picture, Sarai was just 'the woman' taken into the house of Pharaoh (Genesis 12:15). Sarai thinks her plan very crafty: she can leverage Hagar's Egyptian fertility to her advantage, all without really surrendering what matters to her. But we have to wonder if Sarai's realy foreseen the real-life consequences of her choice after all (Genesis 16:4-5). And the deepest irony is that in Egypt, Sarai was objectified as a thing to be gazed on and owned; hence she was taken, without a voice, and we still haven't resolved how she feels about that. But now she's objectifying Hagar, treating her as a pawn or even a commodity, giving her no voice or choice whether to share her body with the 85-year-old patriarch.¹⁹ Sarai is just “repeating the treatment she received at her husband's hands in Egypt,”²⁰ and maybe subconsciously giving Abram “measure-for-measure payback” for having put her in a precarious position then.²¹

That doesn't look good, but it gets worse. Take away the names, and picture a story where a woman takes and gives something to her man and the man hearkens to the voice of his wife. All those words show up in this passage; they also show up in the Garden. There, the woman took fruit from the forbidden tree, and she offered it to the man (Genesis 3:6), and God charged him with it: “You have hearkened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree” (Genesis 3:17). Now, “Sarai the woman of Abram took” a woman, “and she gave her to Abram her man” (Genesis 16:3), for “Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai” (Genesis 16:2). That can be no coincidence; Sarai and Abram are reenacting the tragedy of Eden.²² Adam tasted the fruit that wasn't his; Abram “went in to Hagar” (Genesis 16:4). His motivation wasn't lust, but to please and appease his wife and assent to her goals.²³ So “he went in to Hagar, and she conceived” promptly (Genesis 16:4).

Abram's ploy in Egypt led Egypt's princes setting eyes on Sarai (Genesis 12:14), and after Adam tasted the fruit “then the eyes of both were opened” (Genesis 3:7). The result of this reenactment is that “when Hagar saw that she had conceived, her mistress was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:4). This sparked a fall and a fallout, “a breakdown in the expected relationship dynamics,”²⁴ for which Sarai curses at Abram (Genesis 16:5). Like Eve and Adam (Genesis 3:9-13), now Sarai and Abram play the blame game (Genesis 16:5-6). But we should have seen trouble coming from the story's start, a sentence beginning in Sarai's name and ending in Hagar's, catching Abram literarily between his two women (Genesis 16:1).²⁵ Where Sarai describes her action as having given “my maidservant into your lap” (Genesis 16:5), the narrator describes her giving Hagar “to Abram her husband as a wife” (Genesis 16:3). Now there's a third person in this marriage. Sarai hadn't foreseen Abram's courteous care for Hagar for the sake of his unborn child in her womb. Now she wonders if she's altered their relational dynamic forever.²⁶ In Sarai's eyes, Hagar “had now become her rival wife.”²⁷

As if that weren't enough, “when she saw that she had conceived, I was lessened in her eyes” (Genesis 16:5). Hagar, now functionally a wife of Abram, is no longer looking up at Sarai with reverent fear; she's barely seeing Sarai at all, and when she does, Sarai feels like Hagar is looking down on her, boasting over her as completion to incompletion and as the new to the old. Sarai thinks that Hagar thinks she can stake a claim to be at least Sarai's equal, if not now her social superior in the household. Ancient laws from the time noted how a servant girl who bore her master's children might aspire to equal status with her mistress,²⁸ and sages ranked “a maidservant when she displaces her mistress” on their list of the most intolerable things (Proverbs 30:23). And maybe Hagar now even thinks that, when the baby is born, she can refuse to surrender parental rights to Sarai.²⁹

Now, since Abram had his own tent and Sarai and Hagar each had theirs, Abram could be totally oblivious to all the drama playing out behind his back.³⁰ It's not for nothing that one Jewish philosopher quips that Abram was “clearly inept in the matter of women, wives, and marriage” – a perfect sitcom husband, leaving Sarai to roll her eyes and nag like a sitcom wife.³¹ This story is a cautionary tale for husbands and wives not to let things fester behind closed doors, and instead to strive for sound communication, for confession, for forgiveness.³² But Abram and Sarai hadn't yet learned that lesson, and from the harshness of Sarai's words to him now, it's obvious there's a long-stewing grievance rendered rancid with age – how Sarai forsook her roots to join Abram's journey, how Sarai risked her purity to save Abram's bacon, how she'd put up with his thoughtlessness, how she'd now swallowed her pride and abased herself in giving him Hagar, and how Abram hadn't safeguarded her status but instead enabled Hagar's seeming threats to Sarai's position and dignity.³³ It's little wonder she charges Abram with guilt for the 'violence' or 'savagery' meted out by Hagar's judgmental Egyptian eyes, which have brought back on her the memory also of Egyptian eyes undressing her in an unsafe foreign land.³⁴ If she's being unfair, well, this whole episode is a toxic byproduct of Abram's past missteps, the delayed consequences of the faithlessness without which Hagar wouldn't have been with them to begin with.³⁵

So now Sarai is fed up. She wants Abram to step in as the man of action he's been for others but never for her, and to make his loyalties plain and clear. She wants belated reparations for what he'd talked her into doing for him in Egypt. She wants him to put Hagar back in her place and to fix the situation.³⁶ And she closes her tirade by appealing over her husband's head: “May the LORD judge between you and me!” (Genesis 16:5). Of course, Sarai might regret those words. In Genesis 3, the LORD did judge the situation – that's why Sarai could find herself with so much agony in the quest to conceive in the first place (Genesis 3:16)!

Ultimately, the surrogacy scheme Sarai concocted to implement through Hagar has proven a bit of a boondoggle.³⁷ Sarai acted from a heartfelt desperation that cries out for a compassionate eye, and it worked in the sense that there now exists a magnificently precious unborn child who will be born as an effect of her plan (Genesis 16:15). But the experience has been acid thrown in the face of their marital health; in the end, it will lower Sarai down rather than build her up (Genesis 16:16); and through this ordeal, “the entire household loses.”³⁸ Sarai's plan was “neither necessary nor correct..., not what God willed,”³⁹ but it remains for Abram and Sarai to see what the LORD will judge.

Whatever excuses we might try making for Abram and Sarai, what they've done doesn't at all match a Christian vision of marriage. Building on the Edenic proclamation of humanity as the image of God, Jesus spoke of man and wife as “no longer two but one flesh” (Mark 10:8), while Paul adds that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the Church” (Ephesians 5:29). A Christian mentality developed that the marriage union is consummated in an act where husband and wife make “a total and mutual exchange of persons” which activates their unity as one flesh and includes their offering of their fertility to each other; it both unites the couple and invites new life, because it's an earthly mirror of God “who is both one and life-giving.”⁴⁰ In this mystery, the man and woman acknowledge each other as made in God's image with an irreducible dignity, and at the same time they affirm the equal human dignity of any child whose life the Lord will give as a gift to crown their marital act. And from that vision, from these principles, Christians listened as the Holy Spirit showed the Church how to honor love, honor marriage, and honor life.

But over the past century, that listening has been in free-fall. The churches began to compromise the Christian mentality with a new vision, one that suggested couples could unite as one flesh while actively refusing to offer their fertility, could keep sex's unifying aspect without its procreative dimension. That competing contraceptive mentality is what Planned Parenthood was founded to advance, and in 1965 the Supreme Court (in Griswold v. Connecticut) ripped away the barriers between that mentality and the law, laying precedent for all later decisions redefining marriage and enshrining an alleged right to abort children in the womb. Yet thanks to those first steps of compromise a century ago, many churches took little notice of the foundational change in vision; we certainly didn't. But the few who did notice still warn that a marital act contracepted, rendered deliberately sterile, “undermines the integrity of the gift of self” so that the couple are effectively “lying to each other with their bodies” and, whatever their best intentions may be, “inevitably treat one another as objects to be used rather than as persons to be loved and mysteries to be contemplated.”⁴¹

But there's a third vision that's emerged with even less notice, posing (under its guise of pronatalism) as the opposite of the contraceptive vision and making a persuasive plea from a heart of compassion for those burdened not by fertility but by infertility. We now have hopes Sarai couldn't dream of. A modern Sarai, consulting the doctors of today, could make use of our shiny new assisted reproductive technologies. She could have Abram's sperm and her own egg, or sperm or egg cells from a third-party donor, combined in a laboratory through in vitro fertilization; and a few of the resulting embryos, after being screened for health through preimplantation genetic testing, could then be implanted in either the modern Sarai's own womb or that of a gestational surrogate (a modern Hagar). The process seems as if it must work reasonably well, since over a million IVF-conceived babies have been born so far just in this country.⁴² And it sounds so pro-life that the current president has issued an executive order celebrating it and promising to “ensure reliable access to IVF treatment.”⁴³  (And no wonder, when his wealthiest friend is an enthusiastic user of IVF for producing a multitude of sons with a number of women.)

But this third vision actually isn't so far from the second one. For if the second vision wanted union without procreation, this mentality wants procreation that doesn't proceed from the act that unites man and woman as one flesh, displacing “the way indicated by nature” with “artificial methods of procreation.”⁴⁴ Even this vision's defenders may freely admit that “our medical technologies have outstripped our cultural understandings” of life and pregnancy and parenthood,⁴⁵ and notoriously the United States has fewer regulations on assisted reproduction than any other advanced nation on the planet.⁴⁶ Procreation thereby becomes production, a personal project whereby a Sarai can build herself up using the agency and maybe the matter of others (Genesis 16:2).

In Sarai's day, surrogacy was enabled by slavery. Today, it's more often enabled by the power of the dollar, as commercial surrogacy,⁴⁷ but Hagar would probably have nodded sadly to one bioethicist's warning that “surrogacy contracts create the conditions for abuse,”⁴⁸ and to one feminist scholar's objection that the surrogate's “labor is alienated, because she must suppress her emotional ties with her own child... She is degraded, because her independent ethical perspective is... demoted to the status of a cash sum. She is exploited, because her emotional needs and vulnerabilities are not treated as characteristics which call for consideration, but as factors which may be manipulated” for the advantage of others like Sarai and Abram.⁴⁹ Case in point, various custody battles between surrogates and intended parents, or legal cases of intended parents suing to coerce surrogates into abortions when circumstances change.⁵⁰

Just like Sarai with Hagar, modern assisted reproduction always “introduces a third person... into the intimacy of marital life,” whether that's a surrogate, a sperm or egg donor, or a lab technician.⁵¹ One modern philosopher sees here that in these methods, “the man and woman no longer procreate through the act that is proper to them as man and woman,” and so the intended parents “assume a secondary and inferior role in the procreation of their own children,” effacing their own human dignity.⁵² No wonder another ethicist's reflections on Genesis led him to conclude that “concubinage and surrogacy are incompatible with marriage rightly understood.”⁵³

Even some secular experts recognize that everyone involved in a child's coming-to-be thereby acquires some non-transferrable obligations of relationship to that child, and that includes sperm and egg donors, surrogates, even the lab techs – obligations which are never honored in these processes as realistically carried out.⁵⁴ And those who uphold the original Christian vision urge that a child has an even deeper right to be conceived as a fruit of parents' love expressed maritally, and that every child conceived otherwise has been deprived of something he or she had a right to.⁵⁵ Instead, these processes treat “the child as a product, the result of a project they have undertaken,”⁵⁶ “like an object of market exchange, something manufactured, sold, and bought.”⁵⁷ That's a betrayal of each child's “equal personal dignity” by which he or she exists for his or her own sake, not to please his or her manufacturers or sellers or buyers.⁵⁸

This new vision, as much as the contraceptive mentality it pretends to oppose, feeds on a philosophy of “the freedom of the unencumbered self... for whom relationships are... always instrumental” in “enabling the projects of the will” without concern for “the natural functioning of the organism” of the human body, and its winsome appeals to compassion feed a massive industry that kills more 'excess' embryos than abortion each year (via 'selective reduction') and has another million children lingering in the limbo of the freezer.⁵⁹ One Lutheran ethicist remarks that once we've separated unity from procreation in marriage and made reproduction no longer the natural outcome of marital love, then “we enter a world in which it is hard not to think of children,” all children, “as products we produce to satisfy our desires,” and “a society that allows itself to begin to think of children this way is one that, over time, may find it difficult to affirm the equal dignity of all of its members. For, after all, some of them exist to satisfy the desires of others.”⁶⁰ And that is not a pretty picture; it is not a good world we're making.

That's the thing with Hagars new and old, in this sense: they're “fraught with ethical and psychological problems.”⁶¹ We need to look at the problems of our day with a Christian vision, not one of its familiar competitors. We need to be ready to say yes to options the world finds unthinkable and no to options the world deems obvious.⁶² And that means we need a thoughtful faith, a faith that reflects and thinks clearly and doesn't blindly endorse custom in the way that Abram and Sarai did in facing their burden of infertility.

But even had their custom not been unethical (and it was), the root of Sarai's wrong would still have been this: she acted as though God's promise needed her plan, her help, her works. Judging that God had withheld children from her womb, Sarai sought to circumvent the roadblock God had placed; judging that God's promise was imperiled by God's non-provision, Sarai sought to supplement God's work with her own “human resourcefulness”; judging that God's work was waylaid on the road, Sarai sought to hasten it by seizing God's initiative and making things happen her way.⁶³ She and Abram “do not wait for God to fulfill the promise,” but strive “to manufacture an heir” for themselves.⁶⁴

St. Paul asked the Galatians, who were tempted by a false gospel, whether, “having begun in the Spirit, now in the flesh will you be made complete?” (Galatians 3:3). He wants to know whether they think that their efforts in the flesh, their wit and skill and strength, are what's required to bring God's promises and purposes to pass. Do we expect that, on the foundation of a supernatural faith, we must build with the blocks of nature a fleshly Babel?⁶⁵ Is it nature that perfects grace, and not the other way around?

That's what the Galatians implied, and it's what Sarai and Abram are here assuming and enacting. Sarai, with her husband meekly following her lead, is trying to perfect faith by a project of flesh rather than yielding to the work of the Spirit.⁶⁶ The result is a “spiritual disaster” for them, as we can already tell and as the sequels will tend to show.⁶⁷ Now, in their case, it's one God allowed for a prophetic purpose. The Apostle shows us that “allegorically, these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar” (Galatians 4:24). Hagar's role foreshadows the Old Testament itself. As Sarai tried to solve her plight through the flesh, so Hagar boasts over Sarai in her pregnant flesh, much as the nations were all too often demeaned in Sinai eyes that “boast according to the flesh” and its works of the Law (Romans 2:17-20; 1 Corinthians 11:8). Sinai was bearing fleshly children for slavery because the people became so impatient for the promise that, with Sarai-style initiative, they supplied their own golden calf (Exodus 32:1), and so much of the Law was “added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made” (Galatians 3:19). Hagar shows us that the Old Testament, for all its youth and beauty and vigor and fertility, would not be able to complete what Abram's faith had begun; the Spirit would have to do a new thing.

We know that a new creation has come, because Christ has been born, not to Sarai's handmaid, but to the Lord's – Mary, whose supernatural fertility in virginity was just as initially perplexing to Joseph as Sarai's barrenness in marriage was vexing to Abram. In Christ, those who share the burden of Abram and Sarai can recognize that burden no longer as just a burden but as a cross; and, even as they pursue legitimate medical options for healing, they can raise their cross up with the cross of Christ, embracing it and turning it to profound spiritual good for the sake of others.⁶⁸ For the bigger catastrophe is not the infertility of the body but the infertility of the soul, a soul that bears no spiritual offspring for its Heavenly Bridegroom. And when we find our souls barren, we have to know that there are no surrogates who can bear for us. There are no techniques by which we can outsource our need for holiness. We must cry out, treating ourselves with salutary spiritual disciplines, and knowing that the flesh can avail nothing here, but the Spirit of God alone can set our longed-for Hagars aside and make us spiritually fertile and fruitful in and for Christ. May he so take away all barrenness of soul from us. Amen.