Fighting the Flesh

This year we've walked with Abram up from Ur 'round the Fertile Crescent to Canaan; taken a questionable trip to Egypt and back; watched him part ways with his nephew; seen him raise an army to rescue that same nephew and his neighbors; accept a blessing from Melchizedek; show a faith in God worth reckoning as righteousness; enter a covenant with this trustworthy God; and then play fast and loose with his marriage, yet again, to try and make for himself the heir he was promised. The Bible stuffs all these things into an eleven-year window in the man's lengthy life. But this chapter opens thirteen years later, “when Abram was a son of ninety-nine years,” by which time his faith unto righteousness is further in the rear-view mirror than Ur was when last we saw him. Having been quiet all this time, now again, out of the blue, “the LORD appeared to Abram” (Genesis 17:1).

What does God have to say? “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless” (Genesis 17:1). Faced with the Almighty, Abram is obligated to be a subject of the King of Kings. To walk before him is a demand for “absolute loyalty” to “condition the entire range of human experience by the awareness of his presence and in response to his demands.”¹ Earlier, it was enough for Abram to walk through the land God was promising him (Genesis 13:17); now, he'll have to walk not to a direction on a compass but to the face of the Creator, not in the sight of man but in the sight of God Almighty, processing and parading in the presence of the Perfect One.²

God also tells Abram to “be blameless” (Genesis 17:1). Usually, that word applies to sacrificial animals with zero physical defects to disqualify them from use (Exodus 29:1), for “you shall not offer anything that has a blemish” (Leviticus 22:20). But that represented what God's people were meant to be, “blameless before the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 18:13).³ And this links Abram back to Noah, “blameless in his generation” as he “walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). No wonder Abram “fell on his face” before God before he could walk; being a new Noah is a tall order that'll take great grace (Genesis 17:3).⁴

And just like God made a covenant with the blameless-walking Noah (Genesis 6:18), so to Abram God “will give my covenant between me and you” (Genesis 17:2). But that's not quite new: over thirteen years ago, “the LORD cut a covenant with Abram” (Genesis 15:8), the Covenant Between the Pieces. That covenant was pretty unconditional on Abram's end; God assumed all the obligations himself. Now, for the first time, Abram – or Abraham, but more on that next week – is told to “keep my covenant” (Genesis 17:9). Here, “God summons him to be an active partner in the covenant,” with something to do.⁵ And not him alone, but “you and your seed after you throughout their generations” (Genesis 17:9). All down through, something's got to be done.

But what? Well, “this is my covenant which you shall keep between me and you and your seed after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised” (Genesis 17:10). This was “the covenant of circumcision” (Acts 7:8). I know circumcision is hardly a common subject for us here, and I take it I don't have to define it for anybody. The more interesting thing is, neither does God here. Abram doesn't run for a dictionary here, because this was not a new word or new idea in his world.⁶ In fact, the Bible itself notes that many other nations had practiced some form of circumcision, including the Egyptians (Jeremiah 9:25-26).⁷ We can't ask them outright what they meant by it, but in all these cultures, it was performed either at puberty, marking a boy entering male society on account of being capable of fathering a child, or shortly before marriage, marking a man entering the male role expected to bring about fathering a child.⁸ You can see what those have in common: masculinity and fertility.

Moses complains he's got “foreskinned lips” (Exodus 6:12), and Jeremiah objects to people's “foreskinned ear” (Jeremiah 6:10) – in both cases, body parts that don't function right because they get in their own way. And when Israel came into their land and found its fruit trees, for three years they were to regard its fruit as the tree's foreskin (Leviticus 19:23), which had to pass away to make room for 'real' fruit. A fruit tree required pruning, circumcising, in order to discipline it to further fruitfulness – and so, the idea went, did men.⁹ Many ancient peoples thought circumcision physically removed an impediment to virility and success in reproduction.¹⁰

But God took this circumcision that was culturally common and “transformed it in a fundamental way.”¹¹ God doesn't tell Abraham that his people shall circumcise before marrying, or circumcise at puberty; the norm from this point forward is that “a son of eight days shall be circumcised among you” (Genesis 17:12). To Egyptians and Ethiopians and Canaanites, this suddenly makes no sense: what they did to initiate into manhood is now imposed, almost like a mockery, onto babies just over a week in the world!¹²

Abraham's family is initiated into this alternative masculinity, this strange custom. But they won't be alone in it. This command is laid down on “every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with silver from any son of a foreigner who is not of your seed – certainly circumcised must he be who is born in your house and he who is bought with your silver” (Genesis 17:12-13). The covenant is meant first for Abraham and his seed, but even those who aren't born to his seed are embraced by this command and marked the same way, just for coming under the power of the house of Abraham. “By circumcision,” many people from many backgrounds could be “aggregated to the body of the faithful,” the covenant community.¹³

And there's one more thing he's got to know. “So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant. Any foreskinned male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant” (Genesis 17:13-14). Failure to be cut is a covenant violation that merits being cut off.¹⁴ This is a thing God must take seriously, to penalize even a child as a covenant-breaker. Exactly what the Law means by cutting a soul off from its people is debated, but this is one of the only two sins of omission that carries that consequence in the Bible.¹⁵ The bigger point is that this new circumcision practice “is not optional but mandatory for everyone who belongs to the household of Abraham,” however they got there.¹⁶

Okay, but isn't this all pretty strange, this once-for-all ritual surgery on the body? What did it do, what does it mean, now that it's been “adapted and invested with new meaning” by God for Abraham and his people?¹⁷ That is the question that matters. In a way, it might be a form of sacrifice, a safer substitution for the child sacrifices of Israel's neighbors.¹⁸ After all, Israel could only offer an animal in sacrifice once it was at least eight days old (Leviticus 22:27), and while some sin-offerings required a female animal (Leviticus 4:32) and peace-offerings could be either male or female (Leviticus 3:1), a whole-burnt offering required “a male without blemish” (Leviticus 22:19). Circumcision, then, is a form of sacrifice and dedication, by which “a child and all his potential future generations are symbolically offered to the way of God.”¹⁹ It might also enable a man to be a living sacrifice, because it removed the one thing in Abraham's body needed to become 'unblemished.'²⁰

More to the point, circumcision “shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you,” God tells him (Genesis 17:11). In Noah's covenant, the sign was God's bow placed in the clouds, so that “I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant” and not destroy the world (Genesis 9:12-17). Circumcision is like that rainbow, but made by human hands instead of set in place by God.²¹ If it's for God to see, then maybe, instead of 'naturally' boosting fertility like other cultures thought, it was like an implicit prayer, a sign crying out for God to step in and bless the marriages of his covenant people with fruitfulness.²² That'd be why God had Abraham put it on the body part where he did: so it becomes visible at the right time, like the rainbow, to display the promise of seed as uncountably great as the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:5).²³ The result would be that the next generations would be all children of promise, children of blessing, an almost supernatural community elevated from nature.

On the other hand, circumcision might be a double-edged sword. Last time Abram heard of a covenant, he cut animals in half to establish a covenant curse: if the person obligated by the covenant fails, may he be ripped in two like this (Genesis 15:9-10, 17). Maybe this has a similar meaning: if the person so cut breaks the covenant, may he be cut off or cut up further.²⁴ Whether so or not, circumcision might be a sign to the man who gets it.²⁵ Then it was given by God as “a sign for the people dedicated to him..., a perpetual reminder... to prevent them from overstepping the mark.”²⁶ It became “a sacrament by which they were to be reminded that they were the people of God,” and that they needed therefore to walk before God blamelessly.²⁷

Paul adds that, for Abraham at least, he “received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised” (Romans 4:11) – that Genesis 17 builds on Genesis 15 by sealing it, symbolizing it outwardly. Where Abram's faith had been reckoned for righteousness, now it was signed and sealed on his body. But by sharing this sign with his sons and servants, Abraham invited them to share that faith and to acquire his righteousness. Circumcision functioned “in order that man might profess his belief in one God,” El Shaddai, the LORD,²⁸ and to “ratify God's lordship over them” who were signed with his sign.²⁹

Abraham was asked that his whole household, his covenant community, must “be circumcised in the flesh of your foreskins” (Genesis 17:11). By my count, this is the twentieth time the word 'flesh' crops up in the Bible, and most of what came before was in the story of the Flood when “all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth” so that God determined to “destroy all flesh” (Genesis 6:12-17). When Paul looks back, he sees 'flesh' as a decent way to sum up those aspects of our creatureliness that corrupt us, those aspects that seek to magnify themselves to compensate for our fleshy vulnerability, those things in us that lead to “every attempt to become more than human that makes humanity inhuman.”³⁰ Hence Paul warns against “gratifying the desires of the flesh” or performing “the works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16, 19). “Human beings can live as God intended only if flesh is put to death,” hence God's determination to oppose the principle of flesh in us.³¹

So that's where God reached Abraham: “In his own flesh he incised the ordinance” (Sirach 44:20). No wonder one ancient Jew said Abraham and his household were here called “to strip off the flesh.”³² To them it meant “to cut off superfluous and excessive desires,”³³ “the excision of pleasure and all passions,”³⁴ and was a symbol of “laying aside the likings of the flesh.”³⁵ If Noah's covenant meant a truce with the flesh of the earth, Abraham's covenant means a craftier warfare against it than the flood. And so “the circumcision of Abraham begins a divine invasion of our flesh” by placing “a sign in the flesh that supersedes the law of the flesh.”³⁶

Circumcision pronounces natural flesh to be impotent, powerless, and untrustworthy; so circumcision cuts off flesh, attacks flesh as a hostile power, rejects flesh as a principle for living.³⁷ Unlike their neighbors, babies in Abraham's house aren't circumcised to assert their manly toughness or to enhance their sexual prowess or to amplify their blood-and-soil identity; they're overturning all the fleshly boasts and works of Egypt and Babylon and Greece, and calling every boy brought under Abraham's tent to from youth “renounce flesh with all its pomp.”³⁸ It was practically a rebirth into a new way to be human, a way distanced from the power of flesh; it was an initiation into an Abrahamic army joining God's war against flesh.³⁹ They committed by this sign to not “present their body parts as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness” (Romans 6:19), but instead to consecrate their body parts, starting with that one, “to God as instruments for righteousness” (Romans 6:13).

Naturally, Abraham enlisted promptly, without question or hesitation. Abraham “meekly submitted to pain..., anxious to carry out God's command,” whether or not he understood.⁴⁰ “Abraham took Ishmael his son and all those born in his house or bought with his silver, every male among the men of Abraham's house, and he circumcised the flesh of their foreskins that very day, as God had said to him” (Genesis 17:23). This same law was later included in the covenant law given through Moses (Leviticus 12:3), but during the decades Israel was in the desert, they didn't put it into practice (Joshua 5:5-7), maybe because they could never know when their camp would have to move.⁴¹ But as soon as they reached the promised land, God bade Joshua “make flint knives and circumcise the sons of Israel a second time” (Joshua 5:2).

Eventually, there they met the Philistines, immigrants who didn't practice circumcision (1 Samuel 17:26) – though maybe, centuries later, even the Philistines finally started circumcising.⁴² And yet they continued to deal with uncircumcised “sons of foreigners” whom they eventually allowed into God's temple, profaning it and breaking their covenant (Ezekiel 44:7), hence why they were scattered among the uncircumcised Assyrians and Babylonians in exile. Now they had a growing sense of foreigners as “all of them foreskinned” (Ezekiel 32:26), and dreamed of a day when Jerusalem would be freed from “the foreskinned and the unclean” (Isaiah 52:1).

But exile ended, and that dream didn't come true. They fell under the dominion of Greeks, who not only didn't practice circumcision but mocked it as a disgusting mutilation born from superstition. Now more than ever, for the Jews circumcision became a marker of their ethnic identity, the very thing a Jew was made of. They came to see it as God's way of stopping the seed of Abraham “from mixing with others,”⁴³ and Gentiles likewise judged it as meant to “distinguish them from other peoples.”⁴⁴

But sometimes, under Greek rule, they didn't want to be so distinguished. Greek social life for men centered in venues with lots of nudity, and Jews both at home and abroad began to be embarrassed to be seen circumcised by Greek men; some therefore “disguised their circumcision” (1 Maccabees 1:15), “cut by physicians to bring forward their foreskins”⁴⁵ and “remove the marks of his circumcision” (1 Corinthians 7:18). Some Jews were so alarmed that they judged this an “eternal error” for which there could be “no forgiveness or pardon,”⁴⁶ an error which damned circumcision-removers eternally because such an act “voids the covenant of Father Abraham.”⁴⁷

Meanwhile, their Greek overlords, upset at the separateness of their Jewish subjects, went so far as to try to stamp out Judaism by, among other things, banning circumcision. In one case, “two women who were arrested for having circumcised their children were publicly paraded about the city with their babies hanging at their breasts and then thrown down from the top of the city wall” (2 Maccabees 6:10), and “their families also, and those who had circumcised them, were killed” (1 Maccabees 1:61). More radically than Abraham might have guessed it, circumcision marked out faithful Jews as sacrificial victims for God in martyrdom.⁴⁸ Out of this crisis were born apocalyptic nightmares of “a king of the kings of the earth who, having supreme authority, will crucify those who confess their circumcision.”⁴⁹ But faithful Jews faced those fears and defiantly kept the covenant.

Amidst this crisis, they began to develop a new theology of circumcision, where circumcision had been “an eternal ordinance ordained and written in the heavenly tablets” because “the nature of all of the angels of the presence and all of the angels of sanctification was such from the day of their creation.” Hence, when God gave this commandment to Abraham, “he sanctified Israel so that they might be with him and his holy angels..., he sanctified them and gathered them from all the sons of man.”⁵⁰ Circumcision somehow conformed Israelites to the angels in heaven, making them holy and angelic on earth, exalted over the rest of humanity. Circumcision became “a supernatural commandment..., a sanctifying commandment.”⁵¹ Downstream from that came the thought that, albeit with exceptions, every circumcised man might on that basis obtain eternal life, while the uncircumcised Gentiles were, as a rule, destined for the fires of hell.⁵² No wonder one ancient rabbi proclaimed that circumcision was so important that without it, God would never have bothered creating this world at all!⁵³

When the crisis with the Greeks ended in the temporary establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom, the victors “forcibly circumcised any uncircumcised boys whom they found in the territory of Israel” (1 Maccabees 2:46). Fair enough, but some of these Jewish kings went on to conquer neighboring nations and “compelled the inhabitants, if they wished to remain in their country, to be circumcised and to live in accordance with the laws of the Jews.”⁵⁴ Circumcision became “that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law.”⁵⁵

What could get lost in all this was that Moses and the prophets warned that outward circumcision wasn't going to be quite enough. It was only a token enlisting a man in God's war on the flesh; but there was a deeper battle to fight. “All the house of Israel,” no less than the Gentiles they came to resent, “are foreskinned in heart” (Jeremiah 9:26; cf. Leviticus 26:41). To deal with that, they needed more than bodily “ritual observances carried out in carnal fashion.”⁵⁶ In the desert, Moses told them that, having been chosen by God for Father Abraham's sake, “circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and no longer be stiff-necked” (Deuteronomy 10:6). “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah!” cried the prophet (Jeremiah 4:4). But alongside this demand came a promise: “the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deuteronomy 30:6). This inward circumcision would be a “divine work and gift.”⁵⁷

And to make that happen, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son..., born under the Law to redeem those who were under the Law” (Galatians 4:4-5). Though he was “Lord and God of circumcision,”⁵⁸ “Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs” (Romans 15:8). And so the baby Jesus was circumcised “at the end of eight days” (Luke 2:21), “in order to show his approval of circumcision, which God had instituted of old.”⁵⁹ By this time, the rabbis began to emphasize that circumcision was “a bloody institution,”⁶⁰ saying that in it “the blood of the covenant... must be made to flow.”⁶¹ And this eighth-day moment, when Joseph carefully circumcised the Son of God, was the first shedding of “the precious blood of Christ” for us (1 Peter 1:19).

But when Paul later refers to “the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11), he seems to mean, not that day in the Messiah's infancy, but the day when Jesus was hanged on the cross.⁶² Having spent a Jewish life walking blamelessly before his Father's face, the True Circumciser was crucified by the kings of the earth (sadly with support from leaders of those circumcised in the flesh [Acts 2:23]); and yet, in and by this crisis and “through the eternal Spirit,” he “offered himself without blemish to God” (Hebrews 9:14) and so “condemned sin in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). Stripped entirely of his body of flesh and blood, there could be no more radical circumcision than that! But then this must be what Abraham's circumcision was always aimed toward: the command relayed to Abraham was “made in the figure and image of future truth.”⁶³

Whether he knew it or not, Abraham circumcised himself as a declaration that the child of promise would only be born through this sign; and his descendants kept circumcising as a visible prophecy of their hope that the Messiah who would win the war on flesh was the Seed of Abraham, a child of circumcision.⁶⁴ But what's more, it was a prophetic profession of faith that this Seed would then be crucified, thus circumcising the entire body of the flesh by his death. Abraham's household practiced circumcision as “a sign of Christ's future passion.”⁶⁵ It was anciently done with stone knives because Christ is the Rock (Joshua 5:2; 1 Corinthians 10:4).⁶⁶ It was done to each boy as “an affliction and a cross” with pain,⁶⁷ because it was an advance participation in the cross of Christ. It was done on the eighth day after birth to prophesy that Jesus would rise from the dead on the eighth day of Holy Week.⁶⁸ One of the earliest Christian writings therefore says that “Abraham... circumcised as he looked forward, in the Spirit, to Jesus.”⁶⁹ No wonder Paul trumpets circumcision as a sign of faith (Romans 4:11-12) – because, for those who did it right, it was “a profession of faith in Christ.”⁷⁰

Practiced that way, under the Law, circumcision “was beneficial and gave life.”⁷¹ Christians reasoned that if even infants needed to be enlisted in God's war on sinful flesh, then theirs must be sinful flesh; but at the same time, circumcision had to address that original sin in infant flesh, had to give life in lieu of Adam's death.⁷² And so “from the time that circumcision was instituted in the people of God, it had the power to signify the purification from the original and ancient sin even in little ones.”⁷³ Circumcision, as an Old Testament sacrament, became “a remedy against original sin,”⁷⁴ such that “original sin was remitted in circumcision”⁷⁵ – but only because it pointed in faith toward the coming Christ and the power of his cross to conquer sinful flesh.

When that implicit hope became reality, his circumcised disciples pleaded with their circumcised neighbors to receive the real meaning of the circumcision they outwardly bore. Sadly, like the generation critiqued by the prophets, they'd been “uncircumcised in heart and ears” by betraying the Righteous One sent to save them (Acts 7:51-52). But some were convicted by these words, which circumcised their ears, so that “a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7), as did a number of the Pharisees (Acts 15:5). So it isn't a surprise that in the early church there emerged a circumcision faction (Acts 11:2), who maintained that “unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1).

Their logic is fairly easy to follow. To some rabbis, although Abraham was reckoned righteous already, he wasn't complete until he'd been circumcised;⁷⁶ so how much less could Jews or Gentiles be complete without it, even if they shared Abraham's faith? If circumcision conformed Israel to the angels, then oughtn't the church offer such sanctity to converts who come in search of eternal life? Circumcision was mandated, not only for Abraham's seed, but for all those bought from among foreigners to serve his house (Genesis 17:12-13); so if Gentiles had been purchased by the Son of Abraham, shouldn't that commanded sign be imposed on them now? Circumcision was a prerequisite for eating the Passover (Exodus 12:48); so if Christ is the Passover Lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7), then how can anyone lawfully partake of Christ before being circumcised? After all, “so shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:13) – surely an eternal covenant hadn't changed? And then Gentile converts who fail to be circumcised are “cut off” from God's people as covenant-breakers from the start (Genesis 17:14). So reasoned the circumcision faction; such was, perhaps, their logic.

And it was this logic against which St. Paul – himself “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel” (Philippians 3:5) – reacted so fiercely. Even while granting that for Jews circumcision has great value (Romans 3:1-2), he warned Christians that “a person is not justified by works of the Law,” including circumcision, “but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:15). Paul understood that the Judaizers were working out a deeply defective theology of circumcision, one which perverted the sign of enlistment in God's war against the flesh into merely another work of the flesh to boast about.⁷⁷ “It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.... They desire to have you circumcised so that they may boast in your flesh” (Galatians 6:12-13). Paul warned vulnerable Gentile Christians that “if you accept circumcision” in the flesh, “Christ will be of no advantage to you,” since, in seeking to complete one's righteousness by one's own means, “you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the Law; you have fallen away from grace” (Galatians 5:2-4).

St. Paul exhorts Christians, Jew and Gentile alike, to “put no confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3). Since God will “justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith” (Romans 3:30), a new community is created in which “there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised...., but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). And so “in Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has power, but faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6) to bring about “a new creation” (Galatians 6:15).

St. Paul goes on to explain that the covenant commandment still applies, now more thoroughly than ever before. “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands,” deeper than that given to Abraham, “by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God who raised him from the dead” (Colossians 2:11). This is what Abraham's circumcision had been aiming at; the Old Testament “sacrament of circumcision preceded baptism as a sign of it.”⁷⁸ Hence, early Christians urged people to accept “a spiritual circumcision... by means of baptism,”⁷⁹ and so to “be circumcised with the true circumcision,”⁸⁰ “circumcised by the Holy Spirit through the laver of baptism, not in the foreskin of the body but in the heart.”⁸¹

That's how Paul can answer the Judaizers: Christians, Gentile as much as Jew, have been circumcised in the way that counts most, the way that has eternal relevance (Romans 2:29); and it happened when they were baptized into Christ. And this is because the spiritual heart-circumcision accomplished by God during baptism goes so much deeper and “bestows grace more copiously than does circumcision” cut into the flesh with human hands.⁸² “Whatever in the former case circumcision achieved by way of putting off the flesh, in this case baptism achieves by way of putting off sins,”⁸³ “not simply enduring but laying aside sin's burden and finding pardon for the faults of all time.”⁸⁴ And so this spiritual circumcision most mightily defeats the power of flesh and clears the way for us to walk before the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit.⁸⁵

Now “circumcision for the faithful servants of God has begun to be spiritual,”⁸⁶ but it's more than a metaphor, it's more than a shift from visible to invisible, because in both its Jewish and Gentile members, “the body of the church must be stamped with the image of Christ,” of Christ circumcised on the cross and rising again on the week's eighth day.⁸⁷ For “our circumcision circumcises us from idolatry and from every other sin” of the body and the soul, from the flesh and all its pomps and all its works.⁸⁸ In receiving this spiritual circumcision, we've pursued Abraham's fight against the flesh to the point of having “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24), “in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:4), having been “circumcised from the world, serving God and having truth in the heart.”⁸⁹ Such a circumcision enables the open-hearted love we're made for.

That's why one of the oldest Christian hymns invites us to sing that “the Most High circumcised me by his Holy Spirit, then he uncovered my inward being toward him and filled me with his love; and his circumcising became my salvation, and I ran in the Way in his peace, in the Way of Truth.”⁹⁰ That's what this is all about, because “you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, [Christ] has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard” (Colossians 1:21-23). The Most High has circumcised us after the likeness of Christ's cross and resurrection; he's cut away the principles of flesh that bound us to sin; he's uncovered a new me and a new you; he's pruned us to bear the fruit of love. That circumcision is our salvation, making us blameless in Christ, and bidding us to walk before him in holiness and faith, to continue running in the Way of Truth until at last we reach the Father's face. Christ, to whom the circumcision of the household of Abraham always pointed, has now won God's war against the flesh. “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57)!  Amen.

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.