Isaac is weaned, and Abraham throws a great feast. It is the happiest day the family has had in twenty-five years of waiting. At that feast, with the whole household celebrating the promised son, Sarah sees Hagar's son laughing, and something in her hardens for good. She tells Abraham to cast out the slave woman and her son. She will not say Hagar's name or Ishmael's, and to her they are a threat to be removed.
Abraham does not agree easily. The thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son, and Genesis rarely tells us how hard something was for him. Ishmael is his own boy, and the thought of sending him away wounds him. God settles the matter with a promise that runs in two directions at once. 12"through Isaac shall your offspring be named," and yet 13"I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also." Isaac carries the covenant, and God still remembers Ishmael and says so. Abraham, grieving, is asked to trust that God can hold both.
So Abraham rises early, gives Hagar bread and a skin of water, and sends her and the boy into the wilderness of Beersheba. It is a small provision for a mother and a growing son. Then the water runs out. Hagar puts the boy under a bush and sits down a good way off, unable to watch him die. Years before, when she first fled into a wilderness, she had called the LORD "a God of seeing." This time she sits down, turns her face away, and weeps.
The story turns on one detail. 17"God heard the voice of the boy." The angel says it again, 17"God has heard the voice of the boy where he is." Ishmael's name means "God hears," given before he was born, and for years it was only what he was called. Now, in the one moment his own cry reaches heaven, unquoted and unrecorded, the name becomes true in front of him. The verb is doubled, and the root of his own name is spoken twice over a boy lying under a bush and dying of thirst. His mother had once named a place after seeing God. This time it is the boy whose voice is heard.
19"Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water." Despair had made her blind to provision within reach, and God's mercy was to open her eyes. 20"God was with the boy, and he grew up." God stayed with him into manhood. He became an expert with the bow and lived in Paran, and his mother found him a wife. Isaac inherited the covenant. Ishmael inherited God's continuing presence just the same.
Paul later reaches back into this story to explain the gospel. In Galatians he treats Hagar and Sarah as two covenants, one of law that bears children into slavery, and the other of promise that bears children of grace. Believers are children of promise like Isaac, heirs by a word spoken over us before we could earn it, and Paul says the same hostility Isaac drew should be expected now (Galatians 4:29).
Paul's allegory answers who inherits the covenant promise. Genesis itself keeps a second question open, whether Ishmael was loved, and it will not let the first answer it. God chose Isaac for the covenant, and the same God heard Ishmael's cry under that bush and answered it. God's particular promises to his people come from a God who also hears everyone else.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you are the God who hears the mother who prays and the child too young and afraid even to try. Forgive us for refusing, like Sarah, to say the names of people we would rather not deal with. Open our eyes, as you opened Hagar's, to the wells near us. Thank you that in Christ we are children of promise. In Jesus' name, amen.