Wednesday • 1/26/2022
Wednesday of 3 Epiphany, Year Two

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:49–72; Genesis 16:1–14; Hebrews 9:15–28; John 5:19–29

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

Genesis 16: getting ahead of God. When do you wait, and when do you act? When do you let events unfold, and when do you take things into your own hands? It’s not always easy to tell. By the time we get to Genesis 16, Abram and Sarai are in their mid-80s and mid-70s respectively, and it’s been ten long years since God promised them a child. They can be forgiven for wondering if they are supposed to continue letting nature take its course, or whether they need to help God’s promise along.

Sarai recommends they follow a path that enjoys legal sanction in surrounding cultures: see if Abram can father a child through her handmaid. A child born from a handmaid “at the knees” (see Genesis 30:3) of the wife could be counted the legal child and heir of an otherwise childless couple. Hagar’s becomes the original “handmaid’s tale,” and it is a tale filled with its own measure of pain and strife and abuse.

The story shines a light on aspects of human sin that, in the long arc of the story, the God of the Bible has set about to address. Abram’s faith proves to be weak in going along with the plan in the first place, the fruit of which will be self-help religion (see Paul’s commentary in Galatians 4:21–31, where he calls Hagar’s child a “child of the flesh”). Then Abram slothfully backs out of the picture when conflict emerges between Sarai and Hagar. After giving birth to Ishmael, Hagar pridefully and scornfully declares her superiority to childless Sarai. Sarai shifts all the blame for the relational breakdown onto her husband. Envious of Hagar, Sarai banishes her and the once sought-after child into the wilderness and to their likely deaths.

The story, yet more fundamentally, shines a light on the truth of Psalm 103:13–14: “As a father pities his children, so the LORD pities those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (RSV). He redeems human error and protects the wronged (Reformation Study Bible notes).

Gerhard Von Rad notes the shifting identity of God’s intervening presence. Here the text says it is the messenger/angel of Yahweh who speaks (Genesis 16:7,9,10,11). There the text says it is Yahweh himself who is speaking (Genesis 16:13). Von Rad suggests: “[The one who speaks] is God himself in human form. … The angel of the Lord has conspicuous Christological qualities. … He is a type, a ‘shadow’ of Jesus Christ.” * God’s mediator “heeds the affliction” of the outcast Hagar, “sees” her plight (Genesis 16:13), and promises her a great progeny through Ishmael, even if that line is to be marked by an independence and pride of spirit like her own (“his hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him” — Genesis 16:12 NASB).

Hebrews: mediation by death. The mediation that is foreshadowed in Genesis comes to full expression, says the writer to the Hebrews, in Jesus Christ: “For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant” (Hebrews 9:15). And it is unavoidably true from the Bible’s point of view that this mediation comes only through death. Transgressions that separate us from God: our self-made religion, our vacillating faith, our manipulation of circumstances—they can only be covered by death. And transgressions that separate us from one another: our pride and envy, our abuse, our “hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against” us—they too require the shedding of blood.

For the longest time, the Old Covenant provided sketches of the shedding of reconciling blood of “goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow” (Hebrews 9:13). At long last, though, God’s own Son of the line of promise to Abram (for Genesis 16 is but an interlude in the story of God’s promise to bless the nations through Abram and his progeny), “has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26b). One and done! Praise be!!

John: the hour of resurrection is coming. Not only does transgression require death, it calls for resurrection and for a final settling of all accounts. Jesus is the one who reconciles sinners by his shed blood, and he is also the one who raises dead people by his life. The utter tragedy of Jesus’s contemporaries is that they fail to see the life-giving promise of his signs, like the raising up of the lame man. They fail to see the healing and restorative promise of Sabbath itself; they fail to recognize the Lord of the Sabbath; and they fail to see their own hope for “the resurrection of life” (John 5:29).

We can’t raise ourselves from pallets of lameness or sloth. We can hardly resist the urge to manipulate circumstances to what seem to be good ends to us. We can’t kill the beasts of pride and envy within ourselves. We can’t seem to control hands “against everyone” and “hands against us.” We can’t solve the problem of millennia-long grudges between people from different tribes. That’s why God’s Mediator came. He came to interpose his blood to pay for our sins. He came to usher in the power of everlasting life.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Robert Dunkarton , CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

* Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev., The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), pp. 193,194.