Genesis 21:8-21 Commentary

Whatever else a person may think about the Bible and about the Old Testament in particular, you have to say this: it’s honest.  The text does not generally shy away from presenting less-than-savory facts about even some of the most important characters in the biblical story.  It’s often the proverbial “warts and all” presentation.  The story before us in Genesis 21 is surely one of these.

Because after reading these dozen-plus verses, it’s hard not to notice that neither Abraham nor Sarah comes off looking very good here.  It starts with Sarah.  She along with Abraham was selected by God to be the progenitors of a mighty nation that will in the long run become the source of nothing short of cosmic salvation.  That’s a pretty important vocation!  And although our traditions tend to remember and focus on the man more than the woman—we never think of identifying Israel’s deity as “the God of Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel” for instance—Sarah is as involved in all of this as her husband.  But in this story she comes off as bitter, petty, and not a little mean.

Yes, apparently at some family gathering to celebrate the weaning of young Isaac, Abraham’s other son Ishmael acted up.  We are told he was “mocking” something or someone.  That’s pretty vague but he was after all just a kid himself.  Kids misbehave.  All of us who are parents have at some point or another been embarrassed by something our kids did or said in front of other people.  Kids sometimes say and do stupid things, things that cause parents to say, “I raised you better than this!”  So, you know: cut Ishmael a break, Sarah.

But no.  This strikes a raw nerve in Sarah and it is no doubt all wrapped up in her jealousy of her husband’s having had sexual relations with the slave woman Hagar and her envy over the relative ease with which she had been able to bear Abraham a son after Sarah had struggled with infertility for years.  But of course what makes all of this worse is that Abraham’s having pursued getting himself an heir via Hagar was Sarah’s idea and suggestion in the first place!  She all-but insisted on it.

Now, however, it’s just all too much.  She has her own boy now and does not need to have Hagar around to remind her of past failures and struggles.  And worse yet, now that she has Isaac in her life, she gets highly proprietary and insists that the other son of Abraham (whose very existence owes to her own urging years ago) will never, ever get any inheritance from their estate.  Everything will be settled irrevocably on Isaac and Isaac alone.

That’s just sad.  It’s pretty ugly.  This is not the behavior you want to see in a key character in God’s salvation history.  This is not the loving Walton family from the 1970s TV show The Waltons.  This is more like the cut-throat dysfunction of the Ewing family from the 1980s TV show Dallas.

Yes, God intervenes and tells Abraham to accede to Sarah’s snarky request and assures Abraham further that in some way Ishmael would get in on the “great nation” action that was all wrapped up in God’s covenant with Abraham.  But the story remains a sad spectacle.  Abraham quite literally sends Hagar and Ishmael packing.  And from the looks of the story, the provisions Abraham sends them off with are pretty sparse and it’s not as though Abraham gives Hagar any idea in the whole wide world where she is supposed to go, either.

Unsurprisingly it does not take long before they are in dire straits and the young boy Ishmael is clearly not going to make it.  Their location may be remote at this juncture in the story but they have not strayed from the caring gaze of God.  God is in that place and assures Hagar they will live and then provides a well of water to make sure this will happen.  And eventually Ishmael will have a people of his own.

We don’t hear a lot about the Ishmaelites in the rest of the Old Testament other than the irony that some decades hence when a grandson of Isaac named Joseph gets sold into slavery, he is bought by the Ishmaelites who were on their way to Egypt at the moment Jacob’s other sons decide to get rid of their pesky and spoiled brat brother Joseph once and for all.  The Ishmaelites also get a passing reference in Psalm 83 but in a negative context as being among the people who plot against God’s chosen people.  So Ishmael got himself a people but they are not exactly cast in the best light in the Bible.

Anyway, that’s the story and, again, it’s not pretty despite something of a “happy ending.”  What do preachers take away from this story if in fact any of us choose to preach on this difficult text in the first place?  Well, three cheers for the integrity and the honesty of the biblical text in not sweeping this story under the biblical rug.  But perhaps there is here a reminder of our abiding brokenness even as people who try to follow God and who have been called by God to so follow.

Abraham and Sarah in the Bible are not plastic saints.  They are not sanitized figures on a stained glass window.  That is good news in a way because neither are any of us.  It may seem odd to take comfort from Sarah’s failures of attitude and love in a story like we have in Genesis 21.  Most certainly we ought never take away from a story like this an excuse for us to go and act likewise in our lives.  Sarah’s failures of love are not a license for us to be unloving and neither does it give us a pass when we similarly fail.

However, it reminds us that when we fail and when, as in Genesis 21, such failures lead to grave circumstances and consequences for other people, God is still in the mix.  One of the most important truths to emerge from the Bible’s “warts and all” presentations of characters is that God’s work continues and God is not undone by our sins.  God makes lemonade out of lemons, though that trite old saying hardly captures the fullness of God’s abilities to work through imperfect people.  If ever we fool ourselves into thinking that God will only work when we have all of our spiritual and theological ducks in a row, passages like Genesis 21 tell us otherwise.  Again, file this under the heading of “Good News” since as a matter of fact the church, its leaders, and its members rarely get all their ducks so neatly lined up.

So we can preach on Genesis 21 as a counter example of how not to behave as the people of God’s covenant.  But we can also preach on it as a reminder that God is always greater than the sum of all our sins and that it is never all up to us to make sure the purposes of God move forward in this world.  Yes, we are called to strive and to do our best to be Christ-like.  But when we fall down on that, God in Christ and by the Holy Spirit keep moving forward even as the Spirit picks us back up, dusts us off, and has us try again.

Illustration Idea

“Imagine setting out consciously to write a novel about a saint” Frederick Buechner once mused.  “How could you avoid falling flat on your face?  Nothing is harder to make real than holiness.  Certainly nothing is harder to make appealing or attractive.  The danger, I suppose, is that you start out with the idea that sainthood is something people achieve, that you get to be more holy more or less the way you get to be an Eagle Scout.  To create a saint from that point of view would be to end up with something on the order of Little Nell.  The truth is of course that holiness is not a human quality like virtue.  If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something that God does in them . . . It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who not virtuous at all, at least not to start with” (The Clown in the Belfry, San Francisco: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1992, p. 18).

This is something the Bible knows too.  Saints aren’t people different from you or me or who are made out of plastic.  Saints in the Bible are warts-and-all people with foibles and failures in whom and through whom God manages to do amazing things despite the long odds of it being otherwise.