Like  Delores Williams, who draws parallels between the biblical archetype of faith, Hagar, and the experience of Black women’s surrogacy roles, I would like to briefly reread this story as a lesson in Christian hope. Mainly, that the manifestation of hope in the wildernesses of our lives is not initially apprehended as hope, but lament. Moreover, hope is always tied to the reality of promise; specifically, God’s ultimate promise of healing and restoration of all creation, especially those who love God and have been called according to God’s purposes.

The story of Hagar begins in Genesis 16 and is picked back up again in Genesis 21. The text says that Hagar and Ishmael are sent away after Sarah, Abraham’s wife, witnesses her son Isaac playing with Ishmael. After receiving some resources from Abraham (i.e., food and water), Hagar is left to wander about in the wilderness of Beersheba. When her resources run out, she sits Ishmael under a bush and goes and sits opposite of him, “lift[ing] up her voice and we[eping].” Upon hearing her cries, God responds with the provision of a well, followed by a promise to make Ishmael a great nation. Let us first examine the line that says she began to weep. 

Religious scholar James A. Noel writes that the cry or “moan,” especially as it is encountered and experienced in Black worship spaces, is the “language of the sacred.” A language that emerged aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage, the moan became “the first vocalization of a new spiritual vocabulary – it was [not only] a cry, [but] a critique, a prayer, a hymn, a sermon, all at once” (Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World, 152). Being the believer’s most primal form of prayer (Romans 8: 26-27), the moan not only expresses “loneliness, [and] pain,” but that of a fledgling hope (152). Thus, its power rests in its ability to invoke the sufferer’s intuition of God’s presence in the midst of their suffering. 

Biblical studies scholar Scott A. Ellington further writes in his book, Risking Truth: Reshaping the World through the Prayers of Lament, that the necessary preconditions for genuine lament include intimate and trusting relationships built on mutual love and safety, especially in our relationship with the divine (7). What exactly does this mean? It means, as theologian Emmanuel Katongole writes, that lament serves to remind “God that God’s sovereignty is exercised to the benefit of God’s covenant partner, and therefore not only…tolerate[s] human input, [but] requires it” (Born from Lament: The Theology and Politics of Hope in Africa, 95). Ellington makes the equally powerful observation that acts of lament also involve risk, our prayers becoming forms of protest that destroy conventional and stable language about God. What this means is that lament has the power to fracture how communities of faith structure and render reality with no assurance that something else might be offered in its place. In short, “lament reaches toward the hiddenness of God, rejecting every pious platitude that insists…everything is as it should be and rais[es] fundamental questions about God’s faithfulness and justice” (Ellington, xi-xii).

Hagar’s initial act of prayerful sorrowing mysteriously invokes the presence of God in the wilderness, establishing them both as covenant partners. Furthermore, grace in this story is experienced as both an encounter with God’s gift of self-communication, and the provision of survival tools, i.e., a well. Hagar’s encounter with God is further marked by a promise; one day Ishmael will be a great nation. In the Bible, notions of lament are intimately connected to themes of covenant and promise, the following ensuring that divine-human relationships are alive and open to challenge. Hence, the presence of lament does not reflect a lack of faith, but the presence of a dynamic one, becoming “the material base from which [the] power of God is activated to transform, destabilize, and reorder the world” (Katongole, 95).

So, we can approach and apprehend this reading from the book of Revelation through the eyes of Hagar. Lament orients our gaze upward toward the “God that sees me,” this divine-sacred encounter being filled with the anticipation of the fulfilment of God’s everlasting promises. James A. Noel reminds us that each moan is destined to become a shout, the shout being the inverse of the moan which not only signifies God’s grace and mercy, but also God’s love. Citing Matthew V. Johnson, Noel says that the shout is really an “eschatological moment,” a counter-logic to the way things are since in it, not only are we able to enter spaces of “otherworldliness,” but we are also able to experience the euphoria of complete restoration and wholeness. An alternative history whereby we taste, if even for a moment, the bliss of freedom (Noel, 166-7). Let us embrace with hopeful anticipation the promises which this text embodies: Never again will they be hungry or thirsty; the sun and its scorching heat will never beat down on them, for the Lamb, who is at the center of the throne, will be their shepherd and will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe every last tear from their eyes.