Sarai has waited ten years in the land God promised, and she still has no child. 2"The LORD has prevented me from bearing children," she tells Abram, and in the same breath offers a solution, her servant Hagar, 2"it may be that I shall obtain children by her." It was an ordinary plan, a recognized custom across the ancient Near East.
Genesis tells the story with a verdict built into its verbs. Sarai 3"took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant," and gave her to Abram, and 2"Abram listened to the voice of Sarai." The same verbs, in the same order, describe chapter 3: the woman took the fruit and gave it to her husband, and the man listened to the voice of his wife (3:6, 17). It is a marriage repeating the oldest sin in the book, dressed as a plan to help God keep his own promise.
It goes wrong as that first sin went wrong. Hagar conceives and 4"looked with contempt on her mistress." Sarai turns on Abram, and Abram washes his hands: 6"Your servant is in your power." Sarai 6"dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her." The Hebrew word for that harshness is the one Exodus later uses for Egypt's treatment of Israel, so the roles run backward: a Hebrew mistreats an Egyptian, and the Egyptian runs.
She runs toward home, out into the wilderness, alone and pregnant, and there at a spring 7"the angel of the LORD found her." No one in the story has yet spoken Hagar's name aloud. Sarai calls her "my servant," and Abram calls her "your servant." The angel is the first to say it to her face: 8"Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from?" No one else has asked her where she is going. God does. He sends her back with a hard word and with a promise that her offspring will be too many to number, and she is to name the boy Ishmael, God hears, because 11"The LORD has listened to your affliction."
Then Hagar gives God a name, a God of seeing. The Hebrew crowds three forms of one root, to see, into that sentence: a God of seeing, I have seen, him who sees me. She names the well the same way, Beer-lahai-roi, the well of the Living One who sees me. Hagar, a slave with no covenant and no standing, looked at God in the wilderness and lived to give him a name.
That is the turn of the chapter. In Abram's tent Hagar is a function. In the wilderness she is a person, called by name and seen all the way through. Centuries later another woman with no standing sat alone at a well and met someone who saw the whole of her life without turning away, and she told her town, "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did" (John 4:29). It was the same God, in the flesh, still finding the overlooked.
Sarai and Abram made Hagar invisible to hurry a promise God had already made. God, in the wilderness, made her seen. Whatever wilderness we are running through, and however we came to be running, it has never been outside his sight.
Ask where you have treated someone as a function, and where you have felt unseen.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you are the God who sees. Forgive us for turning people into functions, useful until they become inconvenient, as Sarai and Abram used Hagar and let her go. Forgive us for running from hard places as though we could outrun your sight. Thank you that you found Hagar by a spring, called her by name, and let her see you and live. Let us live as people who know we are seen. In Jesus' name, amen.