Running Away
A story in two parts (see 21: 8-20). Begin with a few simple questions. Who is the hero? Who is the villain? With whom do you have most empathy? Who comes out best? Who worst? Traditionally it is a story of the still childless Abraham, Sarah’s attempt to solve the problem and a Hagar rejected when no longer needed, but there may be more to it.
Phyllis Trible, for example, asks how it could ever be seen as a story about Abraham. It is a story of two women: Sarah (power) and Hagar (powerlessness), and since Hagar is the first woman in scripture to receive a divine visit and the first to receive an annunciation Trible suggests it is a story of Hagar (and Sarah) rather than Sarah (and Hagar). So think of Hagar as ‘the suffering servant’ (Isaiah 53) or maybe the forerunner of the stone that the builders rejected. (Acts 4: 11).
When three groups of middle-to-upper class Catholic and Protestant women were asked ‘to identify Hagar’ there were four answers. Privileged but barren women in North California saw Hagar as an accomplice, a fixer and an opportunist. Divorced and rejected women in the same group saw her as an outcast. Refugees and exiles from Mexico and Central America, women who were displaced, unwanted, isolated from family and friends and all things familiar, who knew what it was to run away and were still looking for an escape, saw her as an exile whom God did not liberate but for whom he provided the means for survival. Black South Africans, who had grown up under apartheid, saw her as an Egyptian slave and an exploited worker.
For three of the four groups she was a victim. Isolated and living in the desert, she hears a voice, and (in the marginal reading of the Jerusalem Bible) responds with the words, ‘Surely this is a place where I, in my turn, have seen the one who sees me’. What makes the difference, says Trevor Dennis, is not Hagar ‘seeing God’ but the realisation that God has seen her. She goes back, but with a new name for God — ‘the God who sees’.
