When God ‘sees’ us - it is our eyes that are opened.
Last Sunday we heard the Lord’s wonderful promise to Abraham and Sarah that Sarah would give and give birth to a son, despite their very advanced years. The Lord promised that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as grains of sand on the beach and the whole land of Canaan would be his inheritance.
Today we enter this story before all that happened, when the promised child, Isaac is a very young boy.
When Sarah sees Ishmael playing with her son Isaac, she realizes how insecure the nature of Isaac's claim on the promise is, and if she doesn’t do something, her son Isaac may well be shut out of the promise and Ishmael’s descendants inherit the promised land.
Even though the acquiring of a son for Abraham through her Egyptian slave, Hagar, had been Sarah's idea (Genesis 16), she now regrets her suggestion and demands to Abraham to “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (v.10).
Abraham is distraught, as would any parent be. But God intervenes and eases Abraham's anguish at expelling his son and says to him in vv. 12-13, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; … for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named after you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”
This is a beautifully and artfully written piece of God’s story. The two anguished characters in the passage, Hagar and Abraham, are both ‘seen’ by God, and the writer sort of parallels their experience of God’s faithfulness taking away their anguish. God first comforts Abraham after seeing his anguish (vv.9-14), then comforts Hagar after seeing her anguish (vv. 15-21).
Sarah's demand that Hagar and "her son" (Ishmael is never referred to by name in these verses!) be cast out offends our sense of justice (v. 10). In her culture, however, she was within her rights as the primary wife, now that her own son had survived the early years of life. By expressing her demand in the words of God's earlier promise to Abraham (15:4) she effectively justifies her terrible demand.
In verses 11-14, the depth of Abraham's pain is seen. The literal reading is, "the thing was very evil in the eyes of Abraham" (v. 11). Abraham loved Ishmael – truly a gift in his old age through his wife’s servant Hagar. More distressing to our ears is that Abraham’s aguish seems only to be for his son, and not Hagar – who was also cast out into the desert with just a skin of water.
The lack of sensitivity to the plight of Hagar by both Abraham and Sarah is beautifully dealt with in God’s response. God truly ‘sees’ Hagar, her heart is not on any future greatness for her son, but just his survival. She can’t even bear to look at him dying of thirst and hunger.
An important part of this text is God's promise to Abraham that though Isaac is the principle heir, God will not leave Ishmael and his mother in the lurch (v. 13). They, too, will receive blessing by becoming a great nation. And all because of God's faithfulness to the promise made to Abraham in way back in Genesis 12:1-3 when we first hear of this man called Abram.
Just as Abraham had reluctantly cast out Hagar and her son, so now in the mirror image of our parallel story, Hagar is forced to cast her son under a bush (v. 15)
Again, like Abraham before her, Hagar is distressed over the plight of her son and cannot bear to hear his cries (v. 16). But just as with Abraham, God hears their cries and comforts Hagar with the same reassurance of future nationhood for her son that eased Abraham's distress. And just as Abraham had provided her with a skin of water, God provided a well of water (vv. 17-19).
Though Ishmael's name does not appear in this story, the story is all about Ishmael's name! Genesis 16:11 reminds us that Ishmael means "God will hear" in Hebrew. That is certainly the case here.
The parallels in the telling of this story suggest that God is not only concerned with the chosen people of Abraham's descendants. In God's initial statement of the promise, the purpose behind the choice of Abraham was revealed, namely, that in Abraham "all the families of the earth shall be blessed," (Genesis 12:3b). The promise comes through Isaac, but there is blessing enough for all!
Now, when we look to the person of Jesus Christ, in whom the very fullness of God dwells, we see that God has always shown himself to be the God of the outcast.
Everywhere we turn in the New Testament, we find Jesus looking for the outcasts of society and welcoming them into his presence. And Jesus is always easier on those who have fallen into sin than he was on those filled with pride and eager to condemn those with sins more visible than theirs.
God always shows himself as the God of the outcasts.
Our impression of the Old Testament is that God was busy selecting the people of Israel as his chosen and special ones, and rejecting everybody else. We almost get the picture of a clubby God who bans certain people and tribes just because they were not the Chosen Ones.
But God is always faithful to what he has promised. Of Isaac’s two sons, Jacob was chosen but not Esau. Yet Esau was also the father of a great nation, the nation of Edom, just as Ishmael was father of the descendants of the Araba and the nation of Islam.
God chooses the most unlikely all of the time. His chose Ishmael but for a different purpose than Isaac. He chooses all of us for different purposes and he never ever abandons us. He always gives us water enough to leave the desert, just as he did Hagar. God is also the God of the outcasts, and we never know what is in store for us except that it will be better than we thought possible.
An Anglican priest in the UK tells the story that he was born out of wedlock just after WW2 in small village in Yorkshire, the son of a local girl and a black American serviceman, at a time when there was nothing more shameful, in his case doubly so. He was always told he was illegitimate. Not a legitimate human being, but some other sort of creature.
He was cast out.
Other boy’s mothers didn’t want him hanging around their sons – it wrote ‘it was like I was truly a leper.’ A new priest came to the local church and he used to sneak in late to the service and leave early so the priest wouldn’t ask him whose son he was.
One Sunday, though, he was so caught up in the service that he forgot to slip out before it was over. Suddenly he felt a big hand on his shoulder, and as he turned around, he saw the face of the priest. The priest said, “Who are you, son? Whose boy are you?” His young heart sank at the question, but then the priest went on: “Wait a minute. I know who you are. The family resemblance is unmistakable. You are a child of God!” And with that he patted the boy on the back and added, “my brother, that’s quite an inheritance. Go and claim it.”
Let me pray.