This is a remarkable picture. It’s remarkable in part because it points to a most unremarkable reality. A tragic reality, really. I heard a report recently on National Public Radio that said all the schools in Afghanistan have been closed to girls in grades 7 and up. They used to be open. Not that long ago, I imagine young girls got up in the morning, grabbed whatever books they’d been given, and headed out the door with their brothers and all the other neighborhood boys to go to school, to discover the world beyond. But the report indicated that girls aren’t being given books anymore, not since the Taliban came back into power last year. In fact, now the girls themselves are what’s being given. Many are being given by their own families to be raised by other families, either because it’s simply safer for them to live somewhere else, far away from guns and bombs, or because their parents can’t afford to feed them anymore. What a tragedy. It’s Hagar and Ishmael all over again.
Why it was just last week that her child was playing with the other children. But now a new sheriff has come to town, one who fears equality, and they send Hagar and Ishmael away to the desert, where they know, they just know, the water is going to run out eventually. When it does, Hagar is going to have to decide: go back to the new sheriff and tell them what you know they’re not going to hear anyway, because you’ve already tried to tell them—that you have just as much right as they do to be here. Or, send your child away.
In the case of Hagar, “She cast her child down under a bush, and then went and sat herself down a good way off, about the distance of a bow shot” (Genesis 21:15-16). Like a horrible, murderous car wreck, she can’t look upon it, and yet she can’t bring herself to look away. The child, her child, is going to die. She can see no other way. Her only comfort is to ask the Universe to shield her eyes from it. If this doesn’t work, she figures she can kill him herself with just one arrow. After all, he’s already dead.
For Hagar and Ishmael there comes an angel of God to rescue them. Proof positive that we can put each other away all day long—we can kill each other in body and spirit!—but to God we will always be just on the verge of resurrection.
Ishmael grows up to become an expert with the bow (Genesis 21:20). I don’t know if this means he can hit every rabbit and squirrel within a 50 yard radius, or if it just means he knows what not to use a bow and arrow for. He knows not to use it to kill a child.
It’s a remarkable picture. A child who was once almost killed by a bow grows up to become an expert with the bow, while a child who was robbed of an education in Afghanistan gets a seat on a beanbag chair in a classroom in America. Of course, the hope of this child is that one day, when she grows up, she will become an expert teacher, able to teach the hatred and inequality right out of the hearts of any adult who would try and tell her to sit outside under a bush when the school bell is calling her name.
PleaseGrace 