The first picture shows us the situation. The Lord has already promised a son to Abraham (Gen 15,1-6), but Sara thinks that she can/must find a way-out, therefore, according to the custom of her time, she gives her slave to Abraham. Being the owner, Sara could use her slave as she liked and, after the delivery of the son, the slave turns to be an object, also for Abraham. They never call her by name along the entire narration. Sara speaks of her always as "my slave", and Abraham, turning to his wife, says, "your slave". To Sara, Hagar is identified with a social state: without a name and, therefore, without a face. Effectively, the male chauvinist culture was more benevolent with Sara than with Hagar. Therefore, Abraham accepted the suggestion of Sara "went to Hagar and she conceived" (Gen 16,4).

The second picture shows us the revenge of Hagar. After all, nature had granted her what culture had taken away from her, "but when she knew that she had conceived her mistress counted for nothing in her eyes" (16,5). The competition among women is the classic space for the male imaginary; it arises from the question: "who is greater?" This is a dia-bolic question, not a female one, if it is true that the disciples of Jesus also, on the way towards the cross, "were arguing about which of them was the greatest" (Mc 9, 34). Sara is jealous because she cannot get what has been granted to Hagar. With her husband, she complains that the slave-girl despises her. In reality, the text never says that Hagar despised Sara. The fact is, that Abraham gets incredibly out of the matter, "your slave-girl is at your disposal, treat her as you think fit" (cf Gen 16,6a). The attitude of Abraham and of Sara looks strange. They could go to Hagar, speak with her and see how things actually are. This does not happen: after all Hagar is and will remain only a slave.

The third picture shows us the vengeance of Sara who "ill-treats" Hagar, with acts of abuse. The tern (‘nh) is the same as the one used to express the oppression of Israel in Egypt. There are different ways of denying the other: to kill him (as Cain did with Abel; to sell him (as the brothers did with Joseph); to place the other in the condition of going away, thus throwing him away, (in the case of a woman or of a slave), to the mercy of fate. This is what Sara does, and Hagar runs away from her(cf Gen 16,6). However, God manifests himself just to this woman ill-treated by culture and persecuted by those who, instead, should be in solidarity with her. God does it through his angel, who finds her in the desert and leads her back to her owner. It is difficult for the reader to understand the decision of God, who takes the slave woman under the roof of slavery (cf Gen 16,9), but Hagar returns under the dominion of Sara with a different perception of herself and of her condition, for a series of reasons:

1) the angel of the Lord has called her by name (he is the only personage to call Hagar by her name);

2) the angel makes a promise to her, a woman without future: "I shall make your descendants too numerous to be counted" (Gen 16,10). An endless progeny will be born from her son. The slave woman receives the same promise as Abraham did. She is the first woman in the Bible to receive the promise of a son, the unique woman who receives a divine promise concerning a countless descendents:

3) her son will be called Ishmael, which means, "God listens". She will go back to her mistress. But the name of her son will perennially remind her "that God has listened to her affliction". These are the inscrutable ways of God, before which Hagar cannot but exclaim, "You are the God who sees!" (Gen 16, 13). Before the out-out of our human short-sightedness, before the diabolic glance, which separates and divides, God embraces the contradiction, knocks down the wall of separation that man and woman keep on erecting. The promise to Abraham remains, because God does not withdraw His promises, but there is also another promise for Hagar, the slave, and her son Ishmael.

The successive picture (cf Gen 21) puts Sara and Hagar together again on the scene, according to the will of God, however they are still competitors by their own choice. After giving birth to the son of promise, Sara cannot bear the fact that Isaac plays with Ishmael and she puts Abraham in a difficult situation, "Drive away that slave-girl and her son. This slave-girl’s son is not to share the inheritance of my son Isaac" (Gen 21, 10). The Bible tells us that this thing displeases Abraham a lot, because Ishmael, too, is his son. He appeals to God. This time, surprisingly, God comes to the help of Sara, victim of a strange culture, but he does not break His promise: that of a people that would be born from the womb of a slave woman.

The last picture shows Hagar alone in the desert, with her child, threatened by the sun, by hunger and by death. In a moment of desperation, when there was no more water in the goatskin, "she abandoned the child under a bush, then she went and sat down at a distance, about a bowshot away, thinking, "I cannot bear to see the child die". Sitting at a distance she began to sob" (Gen 21, 15-16). It is the cry of the one who, like her, feels abandoned by men. However, she feels that God also has abandoned her. Now the cry of the mother becomes also a cry of the child, but God, as usual in the history of salvation, listens to the voice of the child and comes to the rescue. "Get up, take the child by the hand, because I shall turn him into a great nation. God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. Then, she went to fill the goatskin and made the child to drink" (Gen 21, 18-19). "God kept his promise with Ishmael, who grew, became an expert hunter and father of a countless people"

This is the story of Sara and Hagar. Two women - as I said above – who carry on their skin not only the personal divisions and the desegregations, but also the lacerations of an unjust world cruel with the poor, a masculine forged world. Out of the many reflections that we could make on this story, I have chosen four of them, thinking about the project of living life starting from what is human, without forgetting the Promise.

To become – as women – subjects of one’s own history and that of others, Sara and Hagar become victims of a world where others establish the canons. Nevertheless, in this world, the slave moves to become – with the help of God - the protagonist of her own history. There is no man in this history, except Abraham who somehow, however, defiles himself. At the end of this story we have Hagar, her child and God. Hagar, made strong by a Promise, starts managing her life. Reading the story of Hagar means, first of all, to highlight the feminine soul that is not resigned to become an "object".

Her story brings to light the contradictions of a world where persons are owners or slaves and shows what the role of a woman may be, even in the reading of the mystery: God himself and His Promise.

Ten years ago, the pontifical Biblical Commission, in a document entitled The interpretation of the Bible in the Church, thinking of the new methods and approaches of the Biblical text, examined also the feminist reading. Though warning us about the eventual risks, the Commission highlighted also the positive aspects, "There is a good number of positive contributions coming from the feminist exegesis. The women have taken an active part in the exegetic research. Often, better than men, they succeed in perceiving the presence, meaning and role of women in the Bible. The feminine sensitivity leads us to unveil and to correct some current interpretations that were tendentious and aimed at justifying the dominion of man on the woman…" (p. 61).

To read the text of the Bible with feminine eyes means to read history with different eyes, with the eyes of women. True, the images of God that the Bible transmits to us are of masculine preference and a dominant masculinity permeates our language. God, as Father and Spouse….male personages are by far the pre-eminent categories in the Biblical world and in our ecclesial language. However, the Bible invites us to think of God and of salvation history also in feminine terms – the history of Hagar and Sara is a demonstration of it. The woman carries the mystery of the creator in her womb, being she a generator of life, like Him.

History narrates this great mystery in the positive: the woman must not allow anyone to imprison her into the labyrinth of power, which does not know the mystery. "The absence of mystery from our modern life is our decadence and our poverty" (D. Bonhoeffer). A world without mystery is a world where people fight for power and personal advantage. Two women, imprisoned by the logic of power, paradoxically remind us that the human creature cannot and must not give up to the perspective of those who want to be lords of everything. Not everything can be in our power. Nobody can imprison the mystery of God and that of man.

The self-realisation of Sara and Hagar – as well as of the woman in the antiquity – is strictly dependent on having or not having children. "Give me children, or I shall die" (Gen 30,1), is the cry of Rachel to Jacob. It expresses wonderfully the feeling of a world where celibacy was something aberrant.

The structural component of man and woman is marriage ("God created man to his image ---male and female": Gen 1, 27) and, according to a rabbinic saying, the celibate (and the virgin) diminishes the image of God. The procreation of sons and daughters carries on the history of salvation! "Sons are a birthright from Yahweh, children are a reward from Him" (Psalm 127,3); "Your wife a fruitful vine in the inner places of your house; your children round your table like shoots on an olive tree " (Psalm 128,3). This is the world of Hagar and Sara, but –making the due distinctions – it is also ours. The celibacy/virginal choice – and the consequent solitude – does not satisfy the yearning of the human heart, the desire of bridal tenderness.

First of all we need to recognise it: the state that a celibate and a virgin choose –even if it is a choice for the Kingdom – remains there as a wound and the jealousy of Sara against Hagar is there to prove it. The body, the heart and the mind live in a vacuum, which God does not fill and does not satisfy, because He does not kill our desire and does not replace the lack. Not to lie, we must recognise, without mystifications, our unsatisfied desire.

Nevertheless, in a different perspective and if lived for love, this cross does not crush us or degrade us, just as it has not crushed and degraded Jesus, who remains celibate. Rather, the cross remains the place of fulfilment, because it becomes a Testimony that no man and no woman can offer unless they go beyond the carnal aspect and know that love is true when it sets free from the voracity of possession.

The celibacy and virginity for the Kingdom witness to the fact that God himself is the rib, which man and woman miss. Since the bridal relation and the son are the search of an infinite fulfilment, the tentative of defeating the provisional state and the limits constitutes a daily fight against death. However, God alone is capable of defeating death: this is the true testimony of the celibate and of the virgin. However, we should never forget that love –and only love – gives sense to the choice of remaining celibate and virgin. We must never forget the warning of St. Chrysostom: a virgin can be spiritually a prostitute and a prostitute, in the economy of Christ, can become a virgin. What matters is love, not the "status"!

The story of Sara and Hagar proves that the common argumentation between men and women – in politics and in religion, in civil communities as well as in religious communities – is through opposition: slave-free, male-female, capable-incapable… It is an argumentation of dia-bolic type, in the etymological sense of the term (dia ballo- in Greek = to separate). Competition is born from this type of argumentation. The two covenants also are opposed for this motive from the time of Paul, taking Sara and Hagar as models. "These women stand for the two covenants. The one given on mount Sinai, namely Hagar, whose children are born into slavery…but the Jerusalem above is free and that is our mother " (Gal 4,24-26).

This way of reasoning through opposition, (the dia-bolic way of thinking) builds up separation walls and is wholly opposed to the thought of God, who sees "beyond" the oppositions, which our classicist mind creates. God "sees" a way for Isaac, son of the promise, and a way for Ishmael, son of Hagar, who does not belong to the chosen people. He is a God with a "symbolic" vision, a vision that re-composes, without piling and confusing, but always finding a peculiarity, in syntony with other ways. The symbolic vision (syn-ballo, to compose, to put together) of the one who loves starts from the point where we give credit to the Promise of God "who sees" infinitely beyond the human shortsightedness. The Promise of God knocks down the cultural and institutional barriers; it starts there, where the armour of the I ends, for which the other is more important than my survival, than my justice or any other guarantee. (C. Yannaras). The Promise of God begins to work from the point in which we find the end of the exhausting competition of self-justification, self-realisation and arrival.

Sara and Hagar witness to a journey of competition, which is contrary to salvation history. It is a downward journey. Sara and Hagar live in a world where power is the thing that matters. The children are a sign of the woman’s power. St.Augustine expresses this temptation in a radical alternative that belongs to Adam, therefore, to man, "either power or love". Every life is before this alternative. Today, like yesterday, man is sick with omnipotence. In this sense, the narration of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11, 1-9) is of extreme actuality, because it presents the story of the human presumption.

We could express all this by saying that we live by giving the primacy to oneself, to one’s role or by giving the first place to the Other, in the radical service to God and brethren. The understanding that man has of himself, today, is often bound to success. Contemporary man must anyhow justify himself constantly, no longer before the tribunal of God, as at the time of Paul, but before that of society, of his job, or the surrounding milieu. Now, we can justify ourselves only through efficiency and success. Today, this the true cursing of the law: I am somebody only in virtue of my personal performances; I can realise myself only by certifying my efficiency with documents. Obviously, we do not intend to argue indistinctly with the human works, with the professional advancement…

The Hebrew/Christian message does not offer justifications to inoperability and, after all, the western civilisation proves it in an enough evident manner. Nonetheless, there is a woodworm in all this: the (known or unknown) compulsion that modern man has of exhibiting always and anyhow his own titles of merit (the works that Paul mentions), offering the illusion that everything is played in the competition of efficiency, which –as we know – often is there without any scruple.

In a lesson on ecclesiology of Vatican 2, held in the diocese of Aversa, in 2001, the then prefect of the Congregation for the doctrine of faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, stated, "… the first word of the Church is Christ, not herself. The Church is healthy as much as her attention is turned to Him ( … ) In fact, a Church that existed only for herself would be superfluous … The crisis of the Church, as she mirrors herself in the concept of God’s people, is a "crisis of God". This crisis is the result of our abandoning the essential reality. Only the struggle for power remains. There is enough power in the world, for which the world does not need the Church".

The way to God is the kenosis/lowering. The term hesed in the Bible is often emphasised by ’emet, in the manner of hendiadys. These are two terms expressing a concept: that of a certain, lasting tenderness or also of merciful tenderness. Another usual term to express the love of God is the plural of rahamîm, the maternal bowels. Once again, the woman bears a fundamental role in her image of God, just as in the very beautiful text of Numbers, where Moses exclaims, "Why do you treat your servant so badly? In what respect have I failed to win your favour, for you to lay the burden of all this people on me? Was it I who conceived this people, was I their father for you to say to me ‘carry them in your arms like a foster-father carrying an un-weaned child to the country which I swore to give their fathers? (Nm 11, 11-12).

This passage shows well that the feeling of mercy is not a mere feeling; it always flows into salvation history, into ethical responsibility. Today humanity is armed –outside, but also within- with thanatos, death. True testimony is that of those who in clear letters cry, "God does not save us in virtue of his omnipotence, but in virtue of His powerlessness" (Bonhoeffer), namely in virtue of his mercy. Perhaps, the woman, with her maternal bowels, is called to witness to this paradoxical truth, author of a new world where "there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female", for we are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3,28).

Massimo Grilli
Gregorian pontifical university
Via del Casaletto 128 – 00151 Rome