to become a mother was really waiting to give up control.
The creation stories in Genesis identify all of humankind as God’s children, made in God’s image. Yet a specific, intimate relationship that mirrors mother and child is quite different from God’s general love for all people. For this, God waits. The pattern of God reaching out to chosen people in the ancestor stories of Genesis is like a series of adoption processes, only made official when the children live into the relationship, responding in trust. There is trauma too, as each of them loses connections with their birth families and former lives when they follow God into the future. Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, and eventually, Moses are each children whom God chooses, and who respond by allowing the relationship to define who they are. It takes a lot of waiting to get there. Were there false starts to God’s parent-child relationships that we do not read about in the Old Testament? Did God just have to decide to move forward although the fit was questionable? Parents might love as unconditionally as possible. But the slow growth of mutual attachment strengthens us into the mothers we want to be.
Before reading Kelley Nikondeha’s Adopted: A Sacrament of Belonging in a Fractured World, I had never considered how the relationship formed between Abraham and God resembles an adoption. Now I cannot see it any other way. The waiting is part of this story too, in multiple ways. God waits as Abraham uproots his family from the land of his ancestors and heads off at God’s instruction. When God promises to make of him a great nation, he and his elderly wife Sarah scheme to conceive a child through Sarah’s handmaid Hagar. Do not tell me this story makes the case that adoption does not last once a child-by-blood is in the picture, though. All it proves to me is that even the most revered patriarch and matriarch of our religious lineage messed up when it came to setting life-giving adoption boundaries and relationships.
The grievous power dynamics and lack of boundaries would make anyone involved with foster care or adoption shudder. Abraham and Sarah used their power over their servant Hagar to make her conceive a child with Abraham who would be “birthed on Sarah’s knee,” and therefore a legitimate heir. Genesis recounts that Sarah became deeply jealous of both the birth mother Hagar and child Ishmael once she had birthed Isaac, but I wonder if she had ever bonded with “her” child Ishmael, or always kept him at arm’s length. Ishmael represented Sarah’s own inability to conceive not just for her many years of marriage, but specifically as she saw her part in bringing God’s promises to fruition. Sarah did not try to be the adoptive parent, as far as we can tell. Sarah is not the parent I have my eye on in this situation, anyway.
There is so much heartbreak in this story of who is to mother the promised child that we almost get distracted from the mothering activities God is doing: waiting while children attempt their own solutions, reminding them of promises and assuring them of God’s ability to deliver on those promises. Our mothering God turns the heartache Abraham and Sarah have caused toward a new future. God claims and makes promises to the child Ishmael at Abraham’s pleading. “As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year” (Gen. 17:20–21). Once Isaac is old enough to play with his half-brother Ishmael, the sight of them together stirs up the old resentment in Sarah. She wants Hagar and Ishmael gone, and God seems to realize that there is no repairing this complicated family dynamic.
The matter was very distressing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.”
Genesis 21:11–13
Sarah would not do the work, so God would have to make a new way for Ishmael and Hagar. The followers of Islam, who share Abrahamic ancestry with Jews and Christians, testify to the great nation God promised to create from Ishmael.
This next part of the family story is of primary interest to only one of those three branches of faith rooted in Abraham: the Christians to whom I belong. God bringing Jesus into the world as God’s own begotten child is the foundation of our faith. How long did God wait to become a parent by birth? Although many of God’s interactions with Abraham and other chosen leaders resemble parenting, the analogy has some holes. For example, the leaders live into their relationship with God during their own adulthood. God experiences parenthood in a different way with Jesus’s birth, a child who from the beginning knows he belongs to God. According to Matthew 1:7, “all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations.” What must that biding of time have been like for God, waiting to form the intimate relationship of parent to a helpless, vulnerable child? Was God waiting for the right timing, when the “family” was stable, or at a crisis point? Or for the right earthly partner in Mary? Did God wait for all the resources to be lined up, for this child to survive and become all he needed to be for the sake of everyone else? For what do we wait in planning for children?
Christians take a kind of comfort in reading the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures as “foretelling Jesus” yet since the prophets declared their messages to their own time and place, we are always reading anachronistically. Still there is something about this tendency: what happened long before sets the stage for this and every birth. Even things we never noticed, like how we were parented or who was included in our family circle, subtly influence the families we envision or create. Maybe potential parents think we are waiting on the right time, the right conditions, to have enough money or a settled home or the right partner to have children. At least half of pregnancies are unplanned but are still a product of our histories and choices, or in some cases the choices imposed upon us by society. When a pregnancy is the result of rape, misogyny and toxic masculinity overshadow women’s individual choices about having children. Living in such a society is still part of our story. Whether we planned it or not, this much is true: we did not get here alone, and we cannot move forward alone.
Jesus is a child of God in a different way than Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Moses or David. According to Christian theology, God depended on a human woman to bring the One fully of God’s own being and yet fully human into our world. For this, God needed Mary’s participation. How might we view this: God used a surrogate? Is God a previously arranged adoptive parent, foreshadowing with the announcement to Mary but making God’s parentage official at Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River? With Mary as Jesus’s mother, then must we see God as Father (but—oops—Jesus has that in Joseph too)? Instead of attempting to definitively label the relationship, perhaps we can recognize that in waiting and depending on others to become a parent, God experiences as we do the necessity of letting go and trusting others, in order to take on this new role. Perhaps God had to acknowledge too: some of the characteristics the child gets from me will be problematic for them and some beautiful; the same will be true from my partner.
If we did not recognize the miraculous nature of women’s bodies before, let this be the time. Women pastors and preachers are an embodied testimony to how much God trusts our bodies. God depends on a woman’s body and waits on a woman’s body to become a parent, the pinnacle of relationship with humankind. Not only do women’s bodies expand and reshape to hold, nourish, protect, and bear humans into the world, but we believe that Mary’s body bore the Divine. So much of our waiting on our bodies to conceive or carry to term can be fraught with worry or self-blame over genetics or behaviors. When an unplanned pregnancy brings risk and brutal hardships for the mother, we look for whom to blame. Does the claim that God entered our world and became an intimately invested parent through one such fragile yet powerful unplanned pregnancy change anything? That belief puts my own self-scrutiny to rest a bit because God trusted a woman’s body to grow, deliver, and raise God’s only begotten child, in a time when birth outcomes and survival to adulthood had frightening odds. God trusts and thanks
