When we are introduced to her in Genesis, she is the servant of Abram’s wife. Every modern writer will tell you servitude
is the worst of all possible fates, so it must be so. Then Hagar’s mistress,
too old to conceive, comes up with the bright idea of using Hagar as a means of
perpetuating her own family line.
Despite his years of
experience, Abram goes along with Sarai’s plan. After all, he’s a guy, and
he’s just been given permission — by his own wife, yet — to have guilt-free
sex with a younger woman.
What could possibly go
wrong?
Rivalry, unexpected emotions,
jealousy, cattiness and a lack of ability to keep the big picture in view are
what goes wrong, among other things.
Hagar gets pregnant,
it goes to her head, and she forgets her place and begins to snub Sarai. Abram,
who should have quashed the surrogacy idea with one stomp
of his patriarchal foot when it was broached by his wife in the first place,
quite reasonably gets the blame for everything that has gone wrong with his
wife’s plan and abdicates responsibility entirely. The end result is that Sarai
feels justified in mistreating her servant. Hagar makes a run for it, figuring
that things cannot possibly get worse.
(As is frequently the
case in both scripture and in secular history, the much-maligned patriarchy
declined to flex its muscle. That’s not quite the way feminists might tell the
tale, but that is neither here nor there.)
Still, for Hagar, it’s
get used, get used again and then get dumped on. Not a pleasant experience. I’d
run too, and so would you. Probably.
The Angel of the Lord
I can’t help but
notice, though, that when the angel of the Lord finds Hagar in the wilderness,
he has a very peculiar way of addressing her: “Hagar, servant of Sarai”.
If you didn’t know
better, you might think “Servant of Sarai” was Hagar’s last name. That surely wasn’t the way Hagar saw herself. Such a form of address doesn’t seem terribly
flattering. After all, the normal way to disambiguate a person with a common
first name in those days involved referencing their father: “Milcah, the daughter of Haran”, or “Rebekah, the daughter of Bethuel” or even “Rachel, the daughter of Laban”.
Hagar presumably had a
mother and a father like everyone else but, as it turns out, the angel of the
Lord is not interested in discussing her family tree. He’s interested in making a point,
and the point is that Hagar’s identity and destiny are all tied up in choices
made for her by others; choices of which Hagar may not have approved and about
which it is unlikely she was ever offered a chance to express her opinion.
Can you relate? I can.
Can you relate? I can.
It’s Not All Fun and Games
But this is the angel
of the Lord after all. He doesn’t coddle Hagar. He doesn’t offer her
meaningless assurances that things back in Abram’s tents will be wonderful, or
that Sarai didn’t really mean to be abusive. He doesn’t pretend that being a
pregnant servant in someone else’s household is satisfying or fulfilling. He simply
says, “Return to your mistress and submit to her”.
Short version: This is
who you are, Hagar. You are the servant of Sarai. Be that. It’s not all
fun and games, but that’s not the point.
Now the angel of the
Lord does offer something to Hagar: the promise of a son, and offspring so
multitudinous they cannot be numbered. More importantly, he tells Hagar “The
Lord has listened to your affliction”. And that matters to Hagar, who, until she became pregnant by Abram, had
probably lived her life all-but-invisibly. She says, “Truly
here I have seen him who looks after me”. She had been looking after people her entire life. Now she had Someone looking after her. That mattered to Hagar.
Sometimes it doesn’t take much. Just
somebody to say, “I get it”.
Back
to Square One
Still, the angel of the Lord sends Hagar
back to her mistress, and Hagar dutifully goes. She serves Sarah for another 16
or 17 years until Sarah, provoked by Ishmael’s mockery of her son Isaac, tells
Abraham it’s time to send Hagar and her son packing. So Hagar is dispatched once again into the wilderness with the fine severance
package of a little bread and water.
But notice that when the angel of God meets
her a second time in the wilderness, he doesn’t call her a servant anymore. He
simply asks, “What troubles you, Hagar?” She’s a free woman now, and she didn’t have to run away to accomplish that. And
God still sees her and looks after her.
The
End of the Story that Nobody Could See Then
The story flatters neither Abraham nor
Sarah. It was probably not ideal for Hagar. But serving Sarah against her own
natural inclinations for those 17 years was the will of God for Hagar, and
I guarantee you there was no better place for her to be. It was who she was.
Later, she became the mother of a great nation. She is defined today not by servitude to Sarah but by a legitimate place in history and a spiritual legacy as part of a critical New Testament illustration of the difference between the covenants of law and grace. We live under the latter. Those differences are not trivial.
Many of us find
ourselves not thrilled with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, to
say the least. Maybe we find them as intolerable as Hagar found hers: Wife of
Bob [list complaints here]. Husband of Mary [list complaints here]. Disgruntled employee of [fill in tyrant’s name here]. One
of very few serious Christians in a local evangelical church environment that
seems to be rapidly going to the dogs. Living in Town X when we think the
grass might be greener in Town Y.
Like Hagar, we are
tempted to run for it. After all, we tend to see ourselves as independent
agents with a right to pursue happiness on our own terms and by our own
standards. That is what our culture unceasingly tells us. We have a right to be
happy. We have a right to define ourselves as we see fit.
Servant of Somebody
But we do not always
remember that, like Hagar, being somebody else’s servant is part of our
identity. It’s who we are. What matters is not how we define ourselves, it’s how we are currently defined
by heaven. We need to grasp that reality and make it ours.
In 1
Corinthians 7, Paul says, “Every one should remain
in the state in which he was called”. Cail Corishev has an interesting take on that here.
The upshot? My
less-than-desirable circumstances may be precisely what God intends for me at
the present time. I say this as someone who has made a career of squirming from
the frying pan into the fire: there is no safer place and no better place than
the place in which you are now, at least until the Lord moves you on.
Be who you are.
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