Do you know who asks the most questions in the entire Bible?
God. And many of them are these fascinating, peculiar rhetorical questions.
Like when God is strolling (apparently) through the Garden of Eden and asks
Adam, “Where are you?” Or asks Adam’s and Eve’s son, Cain, “Where is your
brother, Abel?” Is there really any chance that the omniscient, omnipresent
Creator of the entire universe doesn’t know Adam’s location? Or what Cain did
to Abel? So then why ask the questions?
This weekend, we have another of God’s mysterious rhetorical
questions. It’s kind of subtle, and rarely the focus of our analysis on this
reading, but I think it speaks to something important for all of us to
consider. Abraham and Sarah are unable to have children. So, in an ill-fated
move, Sarah gives her handmaiden, Hagar, to Abraham, hoping she’ll provide them
with a child. It works… except it doesn’t, and when Hagar becomes pregnant with
Ishmael, Sarah is filled with jealousy and suspicion. Hagar runs away into the
desert, and at this moment, God’s angel finds her and asks: “Hagar, slave of
Sarai, where have you come from, and where are you going?” (Gen. 16:8) It seems
to me that this a spectacularly superfluous question. Doesn’t God know her
circumstances??
I think we can all agree that God isn’t asking this because
God has no idea, or didn’t realize her predicament. I contend that in each of
these rhetorical moments, God is inviting the person to reflect on their own
situation. God wants Adam to ask himself, “Where am I right now? What am I
doing, and where am I going in life?” God wants Cain to reflect on what he has
done: “Don’t you see? Abel is nowhere, he is no more. You killed him, and he is
thus dead forever!” And in our story, God is perhaps challenging Hagar to make
the most of this critical moment in her life. Where has she been, where is she
now, and what lies ahead?
Furthermore, I firmly believe that you and I, the readers, are
also being invited to consider these questions. They are Divine, they are
timeless, and they are poignant at all times. Do we know where we are, and
where we are going? Our Jewish texts and our Jewish tradition do not offer us
answers. Instead, they offer us questions, and then challenge us to sit with
them, feel them, and subsequently spend our lives trying to address them and
actively make this world a bit better. So, what are you waiting for??
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