Genesis 21:1-21 "Who's Laughing Now?" Scott Hoezee

It's not the way we would have written it. As commentators note, the story of Isaac's long-awaited birth is both understated and brief. That is quite surprising when you consider what a big build-up this event has received in Genesis. Nine full chapters have come and gone since the initial call of Abram in Genesis 12. A good deal of chapter 12, all of chapters 15, 16, 17, and most of 18 had something or another to do with the promise of a son and the various covenant ceremonies God gave to back up those divine vows.

There have been words spoken and there has been laughter in response to those words. There have been rituals like circumcision and dramatic displays like God appearing in the form of a flaming torch passing between animal pieces. There have been doubts and there have even been attempts on Abraham and Sarah's part to do an end-run on God's promise by naming Eliezar the legal heir or by trying to make Hagar's son, Ishmael, the fulfillment of the covenant. Last week we considered the scene of the three visitors, one of whom turned out to be no one less than Yahweh himself, again promising a son in Sarah's old age (and so again eliciting hoots of laughter at the absurdity of it all).

So after all this drama that has been raising the stakes and heightening the anticipation, it's rather surprising to see that the text manages to dispense with the actual birth in just 7 short verses! All along the very thought of someone like old Sarah having a baby was a source of laughter, and so when the boy is finally born, they name him Laughter, or "Isaac" in Hebrew. No sooner did Sarah stop crying over the pain of childbirth and her tears dissolved into chortles. The sight of a baby nursing at her old breasts was almost too funny to believe, and so Sarah laughs and predicts that everyone who hears about this will soon be joining in on the knee-slapping hilarity of it all!

So it's not as though the joy of this birth is absent from the biblical text, it's just that you expect a little more narrative space to be devoted to the event we've been gearing up for over the course of the last 200-some verses in Genesis 12-20. But it's not just the brevity of the text that I find striking but how short-lived the laughter itself seems to be. Only a few scant verses after the report of Isaac's birth, the text fast-forwards us at least three, maybe four, years to the day of Isaac's weaning and the party Abraham threw to mark the occasion.

But Sarah ends up spoiling the party. Who knows how many people were milling around that day, sipping wine, lingering over the various meats and cheeses available at the buffet table. There were probably lots of other children around as well, playing ball in the back yard perhaps. At some point from the midst of the chatter of the adults and the delighted screams of the children at play, Sarah spies something that causes her jaw to set, her fists to clench, and her blood to boil. Verse 9 informs us that Sarah saw Ishmael "mocking" Isaac. And before she knew what she was doing, Sarah had rushed over to Abraham and, in front of everyone, screamed out, "Get rid of that slave woman's son and get rid of him now!" Suddenly the conversation ceased, stunned guests stopped chewing their cheese and sipping their wine. Embarrassed at this public display of a private family argument, some guests began edging toward the door.

The party was over. The laughter dried up. Sarah was upset and angry. Abraham was upset and angry with Sarah and was depressed about what she'd just ordered him to do. Hagar herself had dropped her serving platter and fled the room in tears. Even the children out back knew something was up. The party was over. The laughter dried up.

The laughter of Isaac's birth didn't last long before ugliness and weeping crept back onto the scene. Indeed, there is actually a very curious word used in verse 9. The NIV translates it as "mocking:" Sarah saw Ishmael mocking Isaac. We don't know exactly what that entailed, though knowing how older kids can pick on little kids, it doesn't require a lot of imagination to concoct possible scenarios. But what is interesting about the Hebrew word used in verse 9 is that it derives from the same root as the word for "laughter," the word on which Isaac's name is based. In Hebrew Isaac's name is "Yizhaq" from the root "zhaq."

But in verse 9 we're told that Ishmael was doing "mizhaq." Because of its close tie to the word for laughter, some translations of this, including the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) have rendered verse 9 to say that Sarah saw Ishmael just "playing with Isaac." In that translation, there is nothing bad going on, but somehow just seeing the two boys together was enough to make Sarah worry that Ishmael would some day try to horn in on Isaac's inheritance. But that translation seems unlikely, and so commentators have concluded that we are supposed to read something negative and derisive into Ishmael's behavior. "Mocking" may well be the better translation after all.

But if so, I would further suggest that because of the close connection to the word "laughter," probably what Ishmael was doing was indeed laughing at Isaac but in a nasty, sneering way. This is the kind of a laugh that comes out of a child's mouth right after saying something like, "Look at little ole' Isaac over there. Na-na-na-na-na-na, poor wittle baby, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha." It's a mocking kind of laughter. Ishmael laughs at Laughter but he does it in such a way as to end all true laughter, all true mirth and joy over Isaac's presence in the family.

That's what Sarah sees and that's what sends her over the edge. So for a second time in the Abraham cycle of stories, Hagar is kicked out on her ear, this time not with a baby in her womb but a young adolescent trotting after her into the harsh wilderness wastes. Hagar is weeping. Abraham's old chin is quivering because say what you want about Ishmael, he's still Abraham's boy and Abraham loves him. He's helped to raise him, taught him how to hunt, how to play ball, how to be a man. Maybe even young Isaac is crying, too. Perhaps Laughter also weeps. Despite the teasing he'd endured the day of his party, Isaac may well have liked Ishmael anyway--maybe he even loved his big brother. Sarah may well have been the only dry-eyed one in the bunch as they watched Hagar and Ishmael's figures grow smaller as they wandered ever farther out toward the desert horizon.

It's a sad scene. Granted, Abraham has received some comfort from God in that Yahweh told him that he'd take care of Hagar, he'd make a mighty nation out of Ishmael. Sarah was half-right: Ishmael was not the covenant's main target. If God had had his druthers (and if Abraham and Sarah had had more faith in God's promises in the first place), the whole affair with Hagar would never have happened to begin with. But it did happen and because it involved Abraham, Ishmael would receive collateral blessings after all.

Abraham knows this but still it's difficult to see the mother and her son leave for good. And indeed, for a little while in the text, the situation for Hagar and Ishmael looks grim. But for a second time in Genesis, God hears their wilderness cries, provides them with water, and so allows them to return safely to Hagar's homeland of Egypt where Ishmael marries and starts his own family--a new clan that would live under God's blessing.

As I said, this is not the way we would have written this story. The joy, the hilarity, the literal and the metaphorical "laughter" surrounding Isaac's birth comes but then goes so quickly. The birth that Genesis has been predicting and anticipating for so long is something you expect to flash across the text's sky like a fireworks display. Instead it flares for a moment but then swiftly goes out, like a match that dies on you before you even get the chance to light the candle with it.

So we're left to parse this all out. Why did Ishmael's derisive laughter at Isaac end the laughter of this story altogether? Why couldn't this be only and always a happy story with a happy ending? Why does the laughter have to mingle with the tears (and get replaced by the tears before we're through)? There are no easy answers to such queries. Partly we could remind ourselves that the birth of Isaac was indeed a divine miracle. But God performed this miracle not just to keep Abraham and Sarah busy in their old age but as the start of a project that aimed at nothing less than global blessing and salvation. But when that goal of God intersects with the sinful realities of this world, we can expect a certain measure of difficulty and pain.

As we will most certainly reflect on next week in the context of Genesis 22, accomplishing salvation was never a cinch or a snap for God. We've noted before the observation that for some reason in Scripture, the act of creating the cosmos appears to have been much more straightforward a process than the act of redeeming that same cosmos once it had fallen into the grip of sin. Even Isaac's name may give us a glimpse into that hard reality. Because although there is something humorous and cutely ironic about naming Sarah's son "Laughter," there was something tragic about it, too. God chose that name after hearing first Abraham, and then Sarah, laugh into the divine face because the thing God kept promising was almost too absurd to believe.

They were not at all certain God could or would do this miracle, which is why they sometimes laughed out loud even as at other times they kept pitching alternative suggestions to God for easier ways to take care of this matter. It was as though they wanted to let God off the hook of his own promise. But God persisted, and hence the old couple kept laughing. So contained in Isaac's own name are hints of not just mirth but also of cynicism, unbelief, doubt. As Ishmael's actions in verse 9 remind us, there is more than one kind of laughter in the world, and Isaac's name of "Laughter" points to not just something that is humorous but to something that in and of itself contained a whiff of mockery.

Even before Ishmael laughed in a belittling manner at his younger half-brother, there were other things in Genesis to let us know that when God's promises intersect with our lives in this world, the results are not always pure joy but sometimes wrenching unbelief and cynicism. Maybe it's yet another sign of how deeply entrenched sin and evil are. Sarah is the mother of the promise and yet on more than one occasion, and certainly in Genesis 21, you would hardly label her behavior as noble. There was a bit of a mean and petty streak in Sarah. Also, Ishmael's behavior, though perhaps not worthy of the punishment Sarah ended up inflicting, was less than savory and so serves as another reminder of sin.

So in these stories we see both God's attempt to save a flawed humanity and we see that flawed humanity on glaring display! The irony is that even in those places where God is working in quite dramatic, up-close and personal ways, pure and joyful laughter does not last for long. The bitter and cynical cackles of our sinfulness are never far away. Yet God sticks with his people anyway, and in that there may be more than a few rays of light and hope to shine on us tonight after all.

Some commentators like to suggest that God's blessing of Ishmael and his descendants shows that God's care extends wider than just Israel. Striking a contemporary political note, some preachers like to equate Ishmael with the Palestinians as a way to say that no one should think God is only on the side of the Israelis. That's probably too neat a move on both sides: it is dicey to see today's Israelis as the direct and sole descendants of Abraham and also dubious to make all Palestinians Ishmael's children. Doing that ignores the New Testament theology that identifies the church--Jew and Gentile alike--as the new Israel and as the truest descendants of Abraham and of the promises made to him.

Nevertheless, without politicizing all this, there is indeed some hope to be detected in the fact that God does keep on working and keep on pressing forward with the promises despite our multiple human foibles, our petty vindictiveness, our many-layered sinfulness. Ishmael's birth shouldn't have happened in the sense that the whole idea of Abraham's having a baby with Hagar resulted from a lack of trust. But the plan was carried out, the boy was born, and so God made the best of it by promising to bless also this child.

What choice does God have but to work with us in the midst of our sinfulness? Jesus, too, did not save this world by remote control so that he could nicely stay above it all. No, he got mixed up into this world, rubbing shoulders with the unclean, the sinful, the morally dirty, and the socially unacceptable. God had to get his hands dirty, so to speak, if he was ever going to use those hands to lift us out of sin's quagmire.

Some commentators have even wondered about God's letting Sarah get away with her nasty directive to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. Bad enough Abraham didn't stand up to his wife, but how come even God didn't stand up to her? That's maybe the wrong question to ask, and even those who do ask it come up with no answers. Again, however, it may be no more than a sign that God's grace must be active in and through human sinfulness because where else could it be active? Where else is grace needed if not in the flotsam and jetsam of our sometimes rather greasy lives?

The laughter of Laughter's birth doesn't last long in Genesis 21 before getting drowned out by voices raised in anger, voices raised in weeping, voices raised in lament. But that's often the way of it in this world, isn't it? Sometimes even in the midst of the best God has to offer, bad things crop back up. If God were not endlessly gracious and patient, he would long ago have chucked the whole salvation project. How frustrating it is for even some of us to see some birthday party we had planned get ruined by the sheer ingratitude of other people. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt rebuffed, where your best-laid plans went awry because someone else rained on your parade? If so, then you know that the rather natural reaction to such a thing is to throw up your hands and declare, "Well! Just see if I do something nice for him again if this is all the thanks I get!"

And sometimes we follow through on that, too, don't we? We write people off. We recoil from other people's petty ways and mean-spirited shenanigans. Thankfully, God doesn't operate that way. Genesis 21 begins by saying that God was "gracious to Sarah" because he brought her a son after all. But the grace of God toward Sarah didn't stop there--much more forgiving and forbearing grace will be needed before this very chapter is finished.

The same is true for all of us: God has been gracious to us by bringing us to the Christ. But that's not the end of God's grace. In this Lenten Season, we see with renewed clarity the lengths to which God's grace extended. God is never going to stop being gracious to us, which is profoundly good news given the kind of world in which we live. God will never stop being gracious until that time when the words of Jesus reach cosmic fulfillment: "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh." Amen.