The Promise and the Long Wait: Abraham and Sarah
Faces of the Fast – Movement II, Post 1
“Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. He did not wait to see the fulfillment of the promise before he trusted. He trusted first. And the fulfillment followed the trust.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ
Something shifts in the series today.
Movement I took us through hard places. The gate closing on Adam and Eve. Cain walking away from a question he refused to answer. Even Noah, hopeful as his story is, begins in a world so broken that God grieves over it.
But now we move into different territory.
Movement II is about trust. Specifically, it refers to the trust we need when God makes a promise that makes no obvious sense. Then, He asks us to live by it for years. We do this before seeing any sign of it being fulfilled.
There is no better school for this kind of trust than the lives of Abraham and Sarah. And there is no better season to sit with them than the long middle weeks of Great Lent.
Where We Meet Them
We meet Abraham, at this point still called Abram, in Genesis 12. He is already an old man. He lives in Haran with his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and everything he has built over a lifetime. And then God speaks to him.
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” – Genesis 12:1.
No map. No destination. No timetable. Just go.
And attached to this impossible instruction is a promise that is equally impossible. God will make of Abram a great nation. He will bless him. He will make his name great. Through him, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Abram is seventy-five years old. Sarai is sixty-five. They have no children. The promise of becoming a great nation, given to a childless couple in their old age, is not just improbable. It is biologically absurd.
And yet Abram went.
“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” – Genesis 12:4.
Four words. So Abram went. No record of deliberation. No list of objections. Just the going. As though trust, in its purest form, does not require a full explanation before it moves.
What It Cost to Go
I want to stay with that going for a moment. Because I think we smooth it over too quickly.
Abram was not a young man with nothing to lose. He was not setting out on an adventure at twenty-five with the whole of life ahead of him. He was seventy-five. He had roots. He had a household. He had a place in the world he had spent seven decades building.
To leave all of that, at that age, for a destination that had not been named, on the basis of a promise that defied every reasonable expectation, was an act of extraordinary vulnerability.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage in his Homilies on Genesis, makes a point that has stayed with me. He says that God did not tell Abram where he was going because the destination was not the point. The leaving was the point. What God was asking Abram to do was to relinquish his grip on the life he had constructed and to place himself entirely in God’s hands. The unknown destination was not a gap in the information. It was a feature of the call. You cannot hold on to your old certainties and simultaneously move into a future that only God can see.
Chrysostom draws a direct parallel with the life of faith in general. Every person who is genuinely following God is, at some level, living with an unknown destination. We know the direction. We know the One who is leading. But the precise shape of what lies ahead is not visible to us. That is not a design flaw. It is the condition in which trust is either developed or discovered to be absent.
That resonates with Lent in a particular way. Lent asks us to let go of things. Not just food. Not just comfort. But the deeper attachments. The certainties we have built our lives around. The habits of control and self-sufficiency that feel like security but are actually a form of the same thing God was asking Abram to leave behind in Haran.
The Years Between the Promise and the Fulfilment
Here is what the Bible does not rush through, even though we often do.
Between the promise in Genesis 12 and the birth of Isaac in Genesis 21, twenty-five years pass.
Twenty-five years of waiting. Twenty-five years of carrying a promise that showed no signs of being fulfilled. Twenty-five years of being childless in a culture where children were the primary measure of a person’s standing and blessing. Twenty-five years of explaining to yourself and to each other why this has not happened yet.
Those twenty-five years are not a footnote. They are the substance of Abraham and Sarah’s story. The waiting is not the gap between the interesting parts. The waiting is where their faith is actually formed.
St. Ephrem the Syrian, writing in his Commentary on Genesis, reflects on the quality of Abraham’s trust through those years with great tenderness. He notes that the text does not record Abraham complaining about the delay. It does not show him walking away from the promise or deciding God had forgotten him. What it shows instead is a man who continued to build altars. Who continued to worship. Who continued to live as though the promise was true even when there was no visible evidence that it would be fulfilled.
That continued living by the promise, Ephrem says, is what the text means when it speaks of Abraham’s faith being counted as righteousness. It was not a single dramatic act of belief. It was the sustained, daily, sometimes costly choice to keep facing in the direction of a God who had spoken and not yet delivered. To keep the altars burning when nothing was happening.
I find that enormously relevant for where we are in the Lenten season. Great Lent is long. The middle weeks are the hardest precisely because the initial freshness of the season has worn off and the destination still seems far away. The temptation in those weeks is to go through the motions without real engagement. To keep the external forms while letting the interior trust quietly thin.
Abraham’s story says something important to that experience. The years in which nothing visibly happened were not wasted years. They were the years in which his faith was being developed into something real enough to bear what God was eventually going to ask of him on the mountain in Moriah.
Sarah and the Laughter
We have to talk about Sarah.
Because Sarah’s part in this story is not a supporting role. It is a fully inhabited account of what happens to faith under the pressure of long waiting.
When Abraham is ninety-nine years old, God appears to him and renews the promise. Isaac will be born within the year. Sarah, listening at the entrance to the tent, hears this.
And Sarah laughed. Genesis 18:12.
Her laughter is not the joyful laughter of anticipation. The text makes clear that she laughed to herself, privately, with a kind of incredulity that could not help itself. “After I am worn out, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” She is ninety years old. The idea is not just unlikely. It is absurd. And her body’s knowledge of its own condition tells her so with absolute authority.
God’s response is one of the most extraordinary moments in the whole of Genesis.
“Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Genesis 18:14.
Not a rebuke. Not a punishment for the laughter. Just a question. A quiet, direct, non-defensive question that cuts right through the laughter and the biology and the accumulated weight of twenty-five years of disappointment and asks: have you placed a limit on what I am capable of?
St. John Chrysostom, reflecting on Sarah’s laughter, is characteristically pastoral rather than judgmental. He does not condemn her. He points out that her laughter was the entirely natural response of a person whose experience of the world had taught her that certain things do not happen. Her body had not been lying to her for twenty-five years. The biology was real. The impossibility was genuine. What God was asking her to believe required not just trust but the surrender of her right to assess the situation by her own categories of what was and was not possible.
Chrysostom’s point is a searching one. There are moments in the life of faith when God asks us to believe something that our accumulated experience tells us is not going to happen. Where the gap between the promise and the apparent reality is so wide that laughter is the only available response. Not mocking laughter. Just the helpless, private, overwhelmed laughter of a person confronted with something their categories cannot contain.
The question God asks Sarah is the same question He asks us in those moments. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Not as a slogan. As a genuine inquiry into where we have placed the limits of divine possibility in our own interior world.
When Faith Wavers
I want to be honest about something the text does not hide.
Abraham and Sarah’s faith was not a smooth, unbroken line of confident trust. There were moments of significant wavering.
In Genesis 16, after years of waiting and no child, Sarai suggests a solution. She gives her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram as a wife. The child born from that union, Ishmael, will be the heir. They will make the promise happen on their own terms, by their own means.
It is a deeply human moment. The waiting has gone on long enough. God’s timetable is not working. Let us take matters into our own hands.
The consequences of that decision are painful and complicated and, in a very real sense, still being lived out in human history.
But what is striking is that this moment of failure, this reaching for a human solution to a divine promise, does not end the story. God does not withdraw the promise. He does not disqualify Abraham and Sarah because they tried to solve the problem themselves. He returns. He renews the covenant. He keeps the promise on His timetable, not theirs.
St. Ambrose of Milan, in his work On Abraham, reflects on the significance of this moment with great pastoral sensitivity. He notes that the story of Abraham is not the story of a man with perfect faith who never doubted or strayed. It is the story of a man whose faith, though real, was also human. He was subject to the same pressures and impatience that every person of faith experiences. What makes Abraham the father of faith is not that he never faltered. It is that he kept returning. He kept facing God after the failures as well as after the successes.
Ambrose draws from this a word of enormous comfort for anyone who has tried to engineer a solution to something God has asked them to wait on. The attempt itself is not disqualifying. The return is what matters. And the God of Abraham is always ready to receive the return.
The Stars
There is one moment in Abraham’s story that I find myself returning to more than any other.
In Genesis 15, after years of waiting, Abraham is honest with God about his uncertainty. He raises the question directly. Lord, I am still childless. What are You going to give me? How do I know this promise is real?
God does not rebuke the question. He takes Abraham outside.
“Look toward heaven and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So shall your offspring be.” Genesis 15:5.
Abraham looks up. At a sky full of stars beyond counting. And God says: that many.
And then the verse that has become the cornerstone of the entire biblical theology of faith.
“And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” Genesis 15:6.
He believed. Standing under a sky full of stars, with no child, at an advanced age, with no visible evidence that any of this was going to happen. He believed.
St. Paul returns to this verse in his letter to the Romans and in Galatians as the paradigmatic example of what faith actually is. Not faith as intellectual agreement with a set of propositions. Faith as the orientation of the whole person toward a God who has spoken. Faith as the willingness to live as though the promise is true before there is anything visible to confirm it.
St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his commentaries, reads this scene as one of the great revelatory moments of the Old Testament. He notes that God did not show Abraham a nursery. He showed him the sky. He pointed to something so vast and so far beyond human capacity to produce that the promise itself was elevated beyond the merely biological. This was never just about one child. It was about a multitude stretching into an unimaginable future. It was about all the families of the earth being blessed through one old man standing under the stars saying: I believe.
What This Has to Do With Us
Great Lent is, among other things, a season of promise.
Not the promise of feeling spiritually better. Not the promise that the disciplines will be emotionally rewarding. But the deeper promise that runs beneath everything the season asks of us. The promise that the God who called us into this fast is the same God who called Abraham out of Haran. That He knows where He is taking us even when we do not. That the destination does not have to be visible in order for the journey to be real.
The Lenten practices are themselves a kind of living by the promise before it is fulfilled. We fast before we feel the freedom fasting is meant to produce. We pray before the prayer feels alive. We prostrate ourselves before we feel the lifting that the prostrations are meant to anticipate. We are doing, in the rhythm of the season, what Abraham did under the stars. Orienting ourselves toward a promise that has not yet fully appeared, because we have chosen to trust the One who made it.
St. Isaac the Syrian writes that the soul which has learned to trust God in the darkness, without visible confirmation, without emotional reward, without the comfort of tangible results, has arrived at a maturity of faith that the comfortable seasons cannot produce. The long Lenten weeks, precisely when they are dry and unremarkable and feel like nothing much is happening, are the weeks in which something real is being built in the interior life. Something that will matter when the hard things come, as they always do.
A Personal Note
I have had seasons of waiting in my own life that I did not handle with anything like Abraham’s grace.
There have been things I prayed for across years that did not come in the way or at the time I asked for them. There have been Lenten seasons where I went through the disciplines dutifully but with very little sense that any of it was going anywhere. There have been moments when, like Sarah, I laughed. Not a happy laugh. The laugh of someone who has stopped expecting much.
What has helped me in those seasons, more than any argument or explanation, has been the image of Abraham standing under the stars.
Not because it answers the questions. It does not. The gap between the promise and the present reality is still the gap. But the image does something to the interior orientation. It reminds me that the one I am waiting on is bigger than my categories of what is possible. That the story is not over because I cannot see the end. That standing under the stars and saying I believe, even with the laughter still echoing in the background, is not naivety. It is the most realistic thing a person can do when they have understood who it is they are dealing with.
For Reflection This Week
Read Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 18 slowly this week. Try to read them as a continuous story of two people and a promise rather than as isolated episodes.
Then sit with these questions.
Is there something in my life that I have been waiting on for a long time? Something I asked God for years ago and have not yet received? Can I bring that honestly to prayer this week, as Abraham brought his uncertainty to God in Genesis 15?
Where have I tried to make the promise happen on my own terms? Where have I taken matters into my own hands rather than waiting on God’s timetable?
And underneath all of it: What would it look like for me to stand under the stars this Lent and say, genuinely, I believe? Not because the evidence supports it. But because I have chosen to orient myself toward the One who spoke.
Looking Ahead
Abraham and Sarah teach us what it looks like to trust across a long wait.
But what happens when the waiting is not just long but utterly lonely? When you are in a wilderness with no community? When you have no support and no sign that God even knows where you are?
That is the experience of our next figure.
She is not one of the central characters of Genesis. She is, in many ways, a woman the story passes over quickly. A servant. A foreigner. Someone who ended up in the wilderness not through her own choice but through someone else’s.
And yet it is to her that God speaks one of the most intimate and personal words in the whole of the Old Testament.
I am the God who sees you.
End of this week we turn to Hagar. The one who was abandoned at the margins. And the God who went looking for her there.
Come back for it.
“He believed the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.” (Genesis 15:6)
Next in the series: Movement II, Post 2 – The God Who Sees the Unseen: Hagar in the Wilderness.
Your brother in Christ
Jobin.
