A Reflection for Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
“..his wife Sarai took her maidservant, Hagar the Egyptian,
and gave her to her husband Abram to be his concubine.
He had intercourse with her, and she became pregnant.
When [Hagar] became aware of her pregnancy,
she looked on her mistress with disdain.
So Sarai said to Abram:
"You are responsible for this outrage against me.
I myself gave my maid to your embrace;
but ever since she became aware of her pregnancy,
she has been looking on me with disdain.
May the LORD decide between you and me!"
Abram told Sarai: "Your maid is in your power.
Do to her whatever you please."
Sarai then abused her so much that Hagar ran away from her.” (Genesis 16:3-6)
Wives, do not give your maidservants to your husbands to be their concubines in order to have a child.
Husbands, do not accept maidservants to be your concubines.
Maidservants, if you become pregnant, do not look on your mistresses with disdain.
Wives, do not take this disdain personally.
Husbands, when your wives do take it personally, do not tell the outraged wives to do with those maids as you please.
Wives, do not do what you please to your maid. Do not abuse them until they flee from you.
Latter-day messengers of God, do not tell those maids to go back and submit to the abuse of their mistresses.
Maids, do not go back and submit to abuse!
People of God in 2025, do practically nothing that the people in today’s Scripture passage from Genesis do: Abram having intercourse with his wife’s maidservant Hagar; Sarai abusing Hagar when she becomes pregnant and looks upon Sarai with disdain; the messenger of God telling the fleeing Hagar to go back and submit to the abuse. (Hagar, for that matter, sleeping with her master in order to give him a child in the first place, though whether Hagar the servant had any real power to say no to Abram is highly questionable.)
Harper’s Bible Commentary notes that, in regards to Hagar giving Abram a child, “Such substitute childbearing…was apparently an accepted social institution in the ancient Near East,” but the church clearly rejects it today. What Hagar did on behalf of Abram’s future progeny back then could be compared to “surrogate motherhood” today, a common practice particularly in Europe and the United States today. Kevin Clarke reported in America on a research company that declared surrogacy “is an exciting new market with a ‘staggering’ compound annual growth rate of 6.25 percent.”
In other words, the market for buying and selling newborns is hot! In the Vatican document “Dignitas Infinita” Pope Francis declared surrogate motherhood “deplorable.” He cited it as “a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”
Exploiting a 21st-century woman’s material needs is not too far off the mark from exploiting the material needs of a maidservant in 2000 B.C., whose very livelihood depended on obeying her masters.
The point being: The actions and attitudes and customs of the members of an ancient near eastern tribe, no matter how vaunted those people have come to be through the ages, are not necessarily an instruction for how to live 21st-century domestic life. Given a passage like today’s reading, our job as discerning readers and hearers of Scripture is to find the “faith statement” embedded in this somewhat horrifying story.
As my novitiate Scripture teacher Arthur Zanoni would put it, any given bible passage is “a faith story told by people of faith to people of faith to make a faith statement.” This “origin story” of how Ishmael came to be (the child of Abram and Hagar) is ultimately a faith statement.
And what is that faith statement arising from concubinage and abuse and pregnancy and running off and then going woefully back? It is the line from God’s messenger, when he found Hagar in the wilderness. “I will make your descendants so numerous … that they will be too many to count....You are now pregnant and shall bear a son; you shall name him Ishmael, For the LORD has heard you, God has answered you.”
Your descendants will be numerous. (Tradition has Ishmael going on to settle in Mecca, and he is known as the progenitor of the Arabs.) The Lord has heard you. God has answered you. God is here. This, this is enough. This is the gold dust beneath all of that poison. This is what the passage is getting at. That God is here, he is at work, and he can bring beauty and glory and new life out of anything.
Abuse, disdain, jealousy, rage, surrogacy ancient or modern: God can spin something great out of it. Everything else we can leave behind.
