The God Who Sees the Unseen: Hagar in the Wilderness
Faces of the Fast – Movement II, Post 2
“You are the God who sees me.” (Genesis 16:13)
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ
Last week we sat with Abraham and Sarah.
We reflected on the long wait. The altars kept burning across twenty-five years of silence. The laughter that was not the last word. The night under the stars when Abraham looked up at something impossibly vast and chose to believe.
But there is another person in that story. Someone who does not get a movement of the series named after her. Someone who did not choose to be part of Abraham and Sarah’s story at all. Someone who ended up in the wilderness not through her own choice but through decisions made by people with far more power than she had.
Her name is Hagar.
And the word God speaks to her in the wilderness is, I think, one of the most tender and most searching things God says to any individual in the entire book of Genesis.
I see you.
That is where this reflection begins.
Who Was Hagar?
It is worth pausing to understand Hagar’s situation before we enter her story.
She is Egyptian. She is a servant in Sarai’s household. The text does not tell us how she came to be there. She had no say in the matter. In the ancient world, a servant’s life was entirely subject to the decisions of those they served. Hagar’s presence in the household of Abram and Sarai was not her choice. Her future was not in her own hands.
Then Sarai makes a decision that changes everything.
The waiting for a child has gone on too long. The promise has not been fulfilled. Sarai proposes a solution. She will give Hagar to Abram as a wife so that a child can be born through her. This was a recognized custom in the ancient Near East. It was practical and it was legal. It was also, in every meaningful sense, entirely out of Hagar’s control.
Hagar becomes pregnant. And then something shifts in the dynamic of the household. The text says that when Hagar knew she had conceived, she looked on her mistress with contempt. It is a brief note and the Fathers are honest about it. Hagar is not presented as a saint without fault. She is a human being placed in an impossible situation who responds with a very human mixture of pride and vulnerability.
Sarai’s response is harsh. She treats Hagar so severely that Hagar runs away. Into the wilderness. Alone. Pregnant. With nowhere to go.
And it is there, in the wilderness, that God finds her.
The Angel at the Spring
The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness. – Genesis 16:7.
The first thing to notice is that word. Found. God found Hagar. The same language of divine finding that runs through the whole of Scripture. God found Noah in the darkness of a corrupt world. God will find the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. The God of the Bible is consistently, persistently, sometimes surprisingly, in the business of finding people who have ended up in places they never intended to be.
The second thing to notice is where God finds her. Not in a temple. Not in a place of worship. Not among the people of God. At a spring of water in the wilderness. The margins. The place where people end up when the centre has no room for them.
God asks her two questions. “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?”
These are not questions requiring geographical information. They are the same kind of searching personal questions God asked Adam in the garden. Where are you? What has become of you? Not accusation. Genuine engagement. God is present to Hagar’s actual situation and He is inviting her to name it.
Her answer is honest. “I am fleeing from my mistress Sarai.” She does not dress it up. She does not explain or justify or perform. She simply says where she has come from. She says nothing about where she is going because she does not know. She is running away from something. She has no destination.
St. John Chrysostom, reflecting on this encounter in his Homilies on Genesis, makes a point that I find quietly powerful. He notes that God’s first word to Hagar is her name. Hagar. In a world where she was defined entirely by her status as a servant, where she was Sarai’s possession rather than a person in her own right, God addresses her by name. Before anything else. Before instruction or promise or command. He names her.
Chrysostom says this is not incidental. It is the most fundamental thing God can communicate to any person. You are known. Not as a category, not as a function, not as a problem to be managed. You are known by name.
That is the first Lenten word from Hagar’s story. God knows your name. Including the name of the person who feels most invisible, most marginalized, most defined by circumstances beyond their control.
The Command and the Promise
God tells Hagar to return. To go back to Sarai and submit to her. This is, on the surface, a hard word. She is being asked to return to a situation that was painful enough to make her flee it.
The Fathers do not smooth over this difficulty. They acknowledge it honestly. But they also note what accompanies the command. It does not come alone. It comes with a promise.
“I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.” – Genesis 16:10.
This is, in its structure, almost identical to the promise made to Abraham. The same language of multiplication. The same immeasurable future. Hagar, the servant, the foreigner, the woman who had no voice in her own story, receives a promise from God that echoes the covenant promise given to the patriarch.
She is also told that the son she is carrying will be named Ishmael. The name means God hears. God chose the name. And the name is itself a testimony. In the wilderness, at a spring of water, a woman that the world had pushed to the margins cried out. And God heard.
St. Ephrem the Syrian, in his Commentary on Genesis, reflects on the significance of Ishmael’s name with characteristic depth. He notes that the name chosen by God for this child is not a name about the child. It is a name about what happened to his mother. God hears is not a description of Ishmael’s future. It is a testimony to Hagar’s experience. The child will carry in his very name the record of the moment his mother was not abandoned.
That is an extraordinary detail. Every time the name Ishmael was spoken, it said something about God’s character. Not about power or greatness or judgment. About hearing. About the fact that the cry of a frightened, marginalized, pregnant woman running through the wilderness reached the ears of God and received a response.
El Roi: The God Who Sees
Then Hagar does something that no other person in the book of Genesis does before her.
She gives God a name.
“She called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, ‘You are El Roi.’ “ – Genesis 16:13.
El Roi. The God who sees. Or more intimately translated: You are the God who sees me.
This is an act of theological naming. Hagar, in the wilderness, having been seen and heard and spoken to by God, responds not just with obedience but with recognition. She names what she has encountered. And what she names is not God’s power or God’s greatness or God’s law. She names His seeing.
You saw me.
I was in the wilderness. I was invisible. I had no status, no community, no recourse, no plan. I was a servant and a foreigner and a pregnant woman alone on the run. And You saw me.
St. Ambrose of Milan, in his On Abraham, spends considerable time on this name and on what it reveals about who Hagar was as a person of faith. He makes a point that is easy to miss if you read Hagar only as a supporting character in Abraham and Sarah’s story. Hagar, in this moment, demonstrates something that the tradition would normally associate only with the great patriarchs. She has a genuine personal encounter with God. She receives a divine word. She responds with theological reflection and gives the encounter a name that enters the tradition.
Ambrose argues that Hagar should be read not merely as a figure in someone else’s story but as a person in her own right, one whose encounter with God is genuine, who receives genuine grace, and whose response to that grace is itself a model of how a human being receives divine encounter. She does not perform. She does not reach for the appropriate religious language. She simply says what happened. You saw me. And that simple, direct naming of the encounter is itself a form of prayer.
I find this enormously relevant for Lent. Not every prayer is a polished petition with proper theological vocabulary. Sometimes the most honest and most real thing we can bring to God is the simple recognition of what has happened in our interior life. You were there. I did not expect it. I was in a wilderness of my own. And You saw me.
The Second Wilderness
Hagar’s story does not end in Genesis 16.
She returns, as God instructed. Ishmael is born. Years pass. And then Isaac is born, the long-promised child of Abraham and Sarah. And now the dynamic shifts again.
Sarah sees Ishmael and Hagar and something in her cannot contain the tension of the situation. She tells Abraham to send them away. The servant and her son. Into the desert. With bread and a skin of water.
Abraham is distressed. But God tells him to listen to Sarah. And so it happens. Hagar and Ishmael are sent out into the wilderness of Beersheba. Alone again. Further along than the first time and with less.
The water runs out.
Hagar puts her son under a bush. She walks away some distance. She cannot watch him die. And she sits down and weeps.
“And she lifted up her voice and wept.” – Genesis 21:16.
Then God hears the voice of the boy. And the angel of God calls to Hagar from heaven.
“What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.” – Genesis 21:17.
And then God opens her eyes. And she sees a well of water. It was there all along. She had not seen it.
St. Isaac the Syrian, writing on the nature of divine provision and human blindness in his Ascetical Homilies, makes a striking observation about moments like this one. He says that God’s provision is frequently present before it is perceived. The well was already there in the wilderness. Hagar did not need it to be created. She needed her eyes to be opened to what was already there.
Isaac applies this to the life of prayer with characteristic directness. There are seasons when we feel completely alone in the wilderness. When the resources we thought we had have run out. When we cannot see any way forward. The temptation in those seasons, Isaac says, is to assume that God’s provision is absent because we cannot see it. But the well is frequently there before our eyes are opened to it. The work of prayer and fasting and the sustained practices of the spiritual life are, in part, the gradual opening of our eyes to what is already present and already given.
That is a deeply Lenten word. The season of fasting is not primarily about producing something in ourselves that was not there before. It is about clearing away enough of the noise and the distraction that we can see what was already there. The well that was already in the wilderness. The presence that was already in the prayer. The grace that was already being offered before we had eyes to receive it.
What Hagar’s Story Says to Us
I want to draw out three things from Hagar’s story that seem particularly relevant for where we are in the Lenten season.
The first is about who receives grace.
Hagar is not the expected recipient of divine attention in these chapters. She is not a patriarch. She is not the bearer of the covenant promise. She is a servant woman from Egypt who has been pushed to the margins of a story that was not hers to begin with. And yet God finds her. God names her. God speaks to her. God opens her eyes to the well.
The God of the Bible has a consistent pattern of meeting people at the margins. Not only at the margins, but with a particular attentiveness to those who find themselves there. Lent is a good season to ask honestly whether we have, consciously or not, placed limits on who we think receives God’s attention. Whether we have imagined that proximity to God is a reward for the spiritually successful rather than a gift extended to the lost and the overlooked and the frightened and the alone.
The second is about the difference between visible and invisible.
Hagar was invisible to Sarai’s household in every meaningful way. She was a servant. She was a foreigner. She had no status, no voice, no recourse. And God saw her. Not despite her invisibility but in it. He found her precisely in the place where no human eye was looking.
The word El Roi is not just a name for God. It is a counter to every experience of invisibility and abandonment that any human being has ever had. You may be unseen by the people around you. You may feel that your situation, your pain, your struggle is off the radar of everyone who might be able to help. El Roi says otherwise. The God who found Hagar at a spring in the wilderness sees into every corner where a human being is sitting in their difficulty, named, known, and not forgotten.
The third is about the well that was already there.
We do not always see what is already present. The well was in the wilderness before Hagar’s eyes were opened. Grace is frequently present before we perceive it. This is the most personal word of Hagar’s story for me and for anyone walking through a dry Lenten season. The dryness is not evidence of absence. The well is there. Keep asking for eyes to see it.
A Personal Note
I have known what it feels like to be in a situation not of my own choosing, trying to navigate something I did not ask for and cannot easily exit. I suspect most people reading this have known something similar. Life regularly places us in wildernesses we did not select.
What I have found, slowly and not always obviously, is that the wilderness is not where God stops speaking. It is frequently where He speaks most directly. Not with explanations or programmes for how to improve the situation. With presence. With the kind of specific, personal address that names you before it says anything else.
Reading Hagar’s story has been important to me precisely because she is not an obvious candidate for spiritual greatness. She does not fast for forty days. She does not wrestle with God through the night. She does not preach or prophesy or lead a nation. She sits in a wilderness, exhausted and frightened, and weeps. And that is enough for God to find her.
That is enough for God to find any of us.
For Reflection This Week
Read Genesis 16 and Genesis 21:8-21 this week. Read them slowly. Read them as Hagar’s story rather than as a footnote to Abraham’s story.
A Question to Carry With You
In what wilderness of your own life right now do you most need to hear the words El Roi -You are the God who sees me – and what would it change if you truly believed that God sees you there, fully and by name?
Sit with that question this week. Do not rush to answer it. Let it do its work.
Looking Ahead
We have walked through two figures in Movement II now. Abraham, who waited across twenty-five years for a promise he could not produce by his own means. And Hagar, who found God not at the centre of the story but at the margins of it. In a wilderness. At a spring. With nothing left.
Next week we turn to a figure who contains both of those experiences simultaneously.
He waited. He struggled. He wrestled. He failed repeatedly. He was cunning and complicated and deeply flawed.
And he became the man whose name God changed. Whose limp became his most honest testimony. Who went into a dark night of the soul and came out the other side wounded and blessed in the same moment.
His name was Jacob. And his night of wrestling is one of the most searching images of the interior life in the whole of Scripture.
Come back for it.
“You are El Roi – the God who sees me.” (Genesis 16:13)
Next in the series: Movement II, Post 3 – Wrestling Through the Night: Jacob and the God Who Wounds to Bless.
Your brother in Christ
Jobin
