Saturday, August 16, 2014 (Holy Women of the Old Testament)

Saturday, August 16  

1 Samuel 2: 1 - 10

What a strange song/prayer this is!  It sounds so sure and victorious - God has everything in his immediate control and defeats the strong and arrogant while raising up and caring for the weak and poor.

What makes it strange, for me, is that it is prayed by Hannah, not when her prayer for a child is answered (that might be an expected response), but rather when she is leaving her toddler in the temple (?) at Shiloh - for ever!!!  He has just been weaned so would have been under 4 years old.  Having had children, and now grandchildren, myself, I know how strong are the parental instincts to hover, to protect, to love.  The idea of leaving such a young child as a gift back to God, to serve the priests in the temple, and never to see him again, does not make me feel like singing praise!!

It is also strange since all I have to do is look around to see that very often the strong and arrogant win, and the poor and marginalized suffer.  The Psalms are full of cries out to God saying just that, and I recall how Jesus on the cross expresses himself the feeling of being abandoned by God - his Father!  At low and hard times in my own life, while I could say that I believed that God loved me, I sure didn’t feel loved!! 

So what is this prayer about?  Perhaps rather than a statement of observable fact, it is a statement of trust, of faith.  She is praying this, just as we say Thy will be done on earth as in heaven. Perhaps it is Hannah acknowledging that God’s desire for this world is for justice, for mercy.  She already knows what Micah says is God’s desire for us: Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. (Micah 6:8)  She experiences this not just as a far off goal, but as a present reality.  She is living in God’s kingdom in the present.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he often told his disciples that the kingdom of God was within them, here and now.

The response that Hannah has to that awareness seems now not so strange.  She is singing the equivalent of the familiar modern spiritual “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”  Sing it. Believe it. Act it. Feel it.

Blessings

Ann