Canter Bridge

The unselfconscious cackles of the gratefully redeemed become all too suddenly the sullen scheming of unhealed hearts.

When YHWH had done the impossible by bringing a child from the desiccated womb of an elderly woman whose dubious heart was at least as resistant to reproduction as her nether parts, she surrendered her practiced enmity towards hope and laughed out loud.

Sarah no longer found it necessary to deny that she had laughed in the face of heaven’s promise. What is more, she memorialized the absurdity of her skepticism by giving her unlikely son a laughter-name. Yet even this fell short of expressing her change of heart. She all but invited everyone upon whose ears the good news should fall to laugh with her, which in this case was a transparent half-summons to laugh at her.

The story constitutes one of biblical narrative’s finest moments. Yet God’s gift and Sarah’s receptivity do not change the game entirely. The darkness that haunts this scarred woman persists. There will be victims if Sarah has her way. Someone must suffer for the pain she has known.

Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.’ And she said, ‘Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.’ The child grew, and was weaned; and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. So she said to Abraham, ‘Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.’ The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son.

As the story flows on, it becomes apparent that YHWH will protect the son of the servant-woman whom cynical Sarah gave to her husband as reproductive proxy. Sarah, in point of fact, will not have her murderous way.

Yet we are served notice by the complexity of Sarah’s experience that redemption and celebration heal only some things, not everything.

Sarah remains scarred and vindictive in the midst of her altar call. The white dress of her First Communion covers bruised and bruising arms. Her Hallelujah song is as real as they come, yet her lip curls with derision and need on the backbeat.

It will take more than a miracle child to heal what ails Sarah. And us.