A Closer Look
At the other end (at the bottom, really) of the power spectrum in this story, however, is a distressed and seemingly powerless woman at prayer. Shiloh is a very important place of worship, with the ark and the tabernacle present (the temple, of course, does not yet exist), so the priest Eli must have a heightened sense of his own importance and responsibilities, and keeping the order would be one of them. A person can’t just come into the holy place (walking right past the important man at the door) and be odd, or drunk, or out of order. We have to maintain our decorum! But there is something deeper going on here. There’s the problem, the uneasiness, of people going “straight to God” with their prayers, without the intermediary the priest represents. That, too, may ring a bell for us today, if we think we can’t speak directly to God but need a minister to do so for us. Eugene Peterson has described the scene beautifully as a contrast between the highly ritualized, liturgical worship of Eli’s priesthood and the deeply personal “prayer of the heart” uttered by the desperate Hannah, who takes her case directly to God. Ironically, Peterson observes that the rabbis would consider Hannah a “model of authentic prayer.” And of course, through Scripture, her prayer has been long-remembered, and was even echoed by Mary, the mother of Jesus, in her own time of maternal need. When we remember and tell the story of Hannah in every generation, her model of trusting prayer influences the life of the world far beyond the beginning of one monarchy long ago.
The content of her prayer, however, is strangely confounding. Reading only this passage from the lectionary makes us wonder why Hannah vows to give back the very gift she wants and needs so desperately. Jo Ann Hackett’s commentary is very helpful as she reminds us, first, that having a son would validate Hannah in her society, and second, that Hannah was taking the long view about childbearing. We know from the verses that follow this week’s passage that God answers Hannah’s heartfelt prayer with the child that she then returns to God right after the baby is weaned (and after she has given him a name that marks him as a gift from God). Can we imagine taking a baby to the place of worship, as the end of chapter one recounts, “She left him there for the Lord” (v. 28c)? Hannah has achieved respectability by producing a son, even if she doesn’t get to keep him. We might wonder how she can bear to give up such a precious gift. Hackett explains that Hannah had a plan, and it worked, because a “firstfruits” gift – of animals, of the harvest – was given “in hopes of receiving in return the blessing of continued fertility”; we know it works because we read in chapter 2 that Hannah, remarkably, produced five children after Samuel.
Still, there was no assurance of those other children when Hannah fulfilled her vow and took Samuel to the house of the Lord and left him there. While our theme this week speaks of praise for the Holy One, Bruce Birch urges us to see such praise as “the giving back of grace,” a spiritual practice we would do well to learn. What does “giving back grace” look like in your life?
Hannah is important in the history of Israel long after the story moves on to (male) prophets and kings who have much more power and receive much more attention in the Bible. Her name, which means “grace,” fittingly begins the story of the monarchy, what Walter Brueggemann calls “a tale of ‘grace alone.'” However, this broken-hearted, misunderstood and mis-judged woman also leads us to further reflection on our own prayer life. Brueggemann provides a thought-provoking commentary on where prayer has gone in most of our churches and our lives today. He is keenly observant and discomforting as well, not unlike those Old Testament prophets about whom he writes so evocatively. Hannah comes from “a praying people” who put God not just in the center of their life but all through it. And…