COLLEGE CHAPLAIN

Colder, darker, bleaker. That’s how the season turns this time of year and perhaps it’s not just the weather. It can often seem like a bit of let down after the season of Christmas to Easter passes. After all, they are the two best long weekends of the year, the two big events on the Christian calendar, and then it’s all over. Perhaps it seems that Christians and churches just do not much from now until December, or that God takes a long winter break! He’s here for the fanfare, but when it all dies down again, where is he? What’s he doing? Does he care about those nothing much months of May, June and the others?

This term as the weather gets colder and our minds might turn to the unremarkable, we are going to visit a part of God’s word in Chapel where the unremarkable is the focus. We will be set in Old Testament times, but we’re not in the heady days of Noah and the floods, or Moses and the plagues of Egypt. We won’t see the Red Sea parted, or fire come down from heaven. Instead, we will just focus on a bloke named Samuel, who does exhibit a few sparks of the supernatural, but when we finish this term nothing much will have been achieved for God’s people. The mundane remains. So where is God when things are unremarkable? When it’s just so so, God what’s the go?

1 Samuel begins in an unremarkable way, and not just because the names of the people and places are ancient and hard to say. Ramathaim-zophim was also an unremarkable place in biblical times too. It’s not near the holy capital of Jerusalem, it’s not a bustling centre of trade, rather, it’s a ghost town. In addition, Elkanah and his descendants are not heavy hitters in Israel. If there was fantasy league for Bible characters, you would trade him and his relatives Elihu, Tohu and Zuph straight away. 

Of course, we might think it’s a little curious that Elkanah has two wives, Hannah and Penninah, which is not how marriage normally works today, and it’s not how God envisages marriage either. Whenever a man takes more than one wife in the Old Testament, it always ends badly. It’s God’s way of letting us learn from our mistakes and Elkanah’s double marriage is no different. It seems that Elkanah has married Penninah because Hannah has been unable to have children. So he has brought Penninah into the mix for a family fix, which she has done admirably, bearing several children with Elkanah. 

To the original audience this marital scenario would have been unremarkable. It was like ancient surrogacy. Childlessness in a marriage is always devastating, but sadly, it’s also not uncommon. Hannah was certainly not the only childless woman in Israel, but the unremarkable problem of childlessness amongst God’s people is indeed remarkable to God.

Hannah is clearly Elkanah’s true love. We are told that whenever this family wagon would go to Shiloh to offer sacrifices to God and worship him, Elkanah would give a special portion of the meat from the sacrifice to Hannah. This was because as v5 says, ‘he loved her even though the LORD had kept her from conceiving’. 

Penninah, however, would taunt her. You can imagine her saying, ‘Why are you sharing in the meal of worship to God, Hannah? What have you got to thank him for? After all, it’s God who has kept you childless!’ She’s right of course. In v5 and v6, the reason for Elkanah’s kindness and Penninah’s cruelty are the same: ‘because the LORD had kept Hannah from conceiving’. It is remarkable isn’t it, that both Elkanah and Penninah confess the same ultimate truth in Hannah’s life—that God is in control, right down to her womb—yet this ultimate truth produces such different responses. Elkanah sees God’s hand in Hannah’s plight and he has compassion for her. Conversely, Penninah sees Hannah suffering under God’s will and she mocks her.

We might very well ask why Hannah bothers praying if she and everyone else knows that God has closed her womb, but that is precisely why she prays—because she knows God has closed her womb! We will explore this riddle more throughout this Chapel series, but my brief and not particularly compassionate answer to the age old question of ‘Why bother praying to a God who can apparently control everything, but he lets me suffer?’ is ‘Because who else are you going to call?’ Suffering is all too common in our lives, in many ways it is unremarkable, but if God is not absent from it, if he sees it, knows it and is control of it, then ultimately he cares about our suffering. Who else then could you expect to be able to do something about it, but God himself?

Hannah knows this. The prayer that she vows to God is carefully crafted to show her faith in God. She calls on God to ‘take notice of your servant’s affliction, remember and not forget me’ in v11. That might seem like a no-brainer kind of prayer: ‘Hey God, you can see I’m suffering here, help me out!’. However, the language of God seeing the affliction of his people and remembering it, is exactly how God himself has spoken in the past when his people were slaves in Egypt. It was then that he rescued them and brought them into the Promised Land. So in other words, Hannah’s faith is not make believe. She is living in that Promised Land. She is a descendant of those freed slaves that God looked upon and remembered. Her confidence comes from her knowledge of what God is like and how he relates to his people. She may have felt like God had forgotten her and left her to be just another unremarkable childless woman, but she knows that is not the case. 

Hannah is so earnest as she prays, that she is mouthing silently to herself, and when Eli the priest—who we’ll see soon is totally dodgy—sees her praying like that, he thinks she’s drunk. Nevertheless, Hannah replies that she is not filled with wine, instead she has been pouring out her heart before the Lord, praying from the depth of her anguish. 

Eli quickly changes his tune and blesses her and we’re told in v18 that Hannah ate and went on her way, no longer looking despondent.The Hebrew is actually a bit murky there, it’s more like: ‘Her face was not to her again’. She is a changed woman, a woman who has a new face. It’s a remarkable transformation. We know there is power in verbalising, sharing your hidden fears, doubts and anguish. The old phrase ‘it’s good to get it off your chest’ captures that idea of pouring the burdens of your heart out to a trusted friend. It can be a relief to just talk about it with someone. But Hannah’s poured her heart out to more than a friend, she’s done so to the living God.

Many centuries after this event, the Apostle Peter calls Christians to remember the humble sacrifice Christ made for them, and do just want Hannah did: ‘Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you’ (1 Peter 5:6-7). Hannah does this and in v19 ‘the LORD remembered her’. She falls pregnant and in time gives birth to a boy that she names Samuel, whose name sounds like the Hebrew ‘Asked for’ because she requested him from the LORD.

Despite this, what she asked for, or who she asked for, she gives away to the one whom she had asked. When Samuel is weaned, she gives him in service to God, to be trained as a priest by Eli. How could this be God’s plan? Hannah’s childlessness being fixed may have seemed unremarkable to those around her, but Hannah would have known God’s other promise to his people as they entered the Promised Land all those years beforehand. In Deuteronomy 7, God promises that if they obeyed him then they: ‘…will be blessed more than any other people; none of your men or women will be childless’ (v14). So Hannah is able to offer up Samuel because, as Elkanah exclaims at the end of today’s passage, that the LORD may confirm his word.

One unremarkable childless woman, receiving a child is unremarkable enough, but for this child, Samuel, to be set apart for the LORD is a remarkable first step towards the blessings of fertility, prosperity and hope returning to this barren land of Israel. The birth of Samuel is not about the sincerity of Hannah’s prayer, the misery of Hannah’s suffering, or the extremity of Hannah’s vow. Samuel’s birth is about God working out his remarkable purpose in seemingly unremarkable ways. That’s where God is, right in the thick of our unremarkable, hearing our every remark, caring deeply, as deep as the sacrifice of offering up his own son, Jesus, for you. So may our time this term in the unremarkable cause you to cast all your anxieties on the LORD, because he cares for you.

Gareth Tyndall | College Chaplain