The God who remembers and calls

A sound that interrupts

There is a day in the year that does not begin with an explanation, but with a sound. The Torah says remarkably little about it. In Leviticus 23 we hear: a day of rest, a memorial proclaimed with the blast of the horn, a holy convocation. In Numbers 29 again: a day of blowing the trumpets. But what exactly we are to think when that sound comes, the Torah does not explain. There sounds a teruah. A sound. A summons. A signal that interrupts something.

And perhaps that is precisely why this reading fits it so well. For when we lay Genesis 21, 1 Samuel 1 and Matthew 24 side by side, we keep seeing people who live between a word God has spoken and a reality in which that word is not yet visible. Sarah has a promise, but for years no son. Hannah prays and weeps while her womb stays shut. And Yeshua speaks of a future not yet come before our eyes: the Son of Man who appears and gathers His chosen ones at the sound of a great trumpet. Again and again there is time between the speaking and the fulfilment. And precisely there sounds the question of this day: are we still listening?

The LORD visited Sarah as He had said

Genesis 21 begins almost simply:

“And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto Sarah as he had spoken.” — Genesis 21:1

Everything is really already there. As He had said. As He had spoken. Isaac does not begin with Abraham and Sarah — he begins with God’s Word. There was a promise before there was a son; a speaking before anything became visible. And when that son is born, it is not because two old people finally found a human possibility after all. That possibility was gone. The body itself testified against the promise. And yet: God did as He had spoken. So Isaac himself becomes almost a visible witness to God’s faithfulness. Every time Sarah looks at her son, she looks at something that seemed impossible and yet became real, because God had not forgotten His Word.

That is why he is called Isaac — laughter. Sarah says: “God has made me to laugh; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And that is beautiful, for that laughter earlier had a different ring. Sarah laughed when she heard she would still have a son — a laughter in which unbelief sounded: can this really still be? But at Isaac’s birth the laughter changes. The very ground where unbelief first sat becomes a place of joy. God does not condemn her to her first reaction; He brings her to the fulfilment. That says something about grace.

The delay did not make the Word less true

We struggle with time. When God says something today, we would like to see the fulfilment tomorrow. And when it does not come, after a while we begin to think we misunderstood, or that the Word no longer holds, or that we ourselves must arrange something. Ishmael can, in that history, make visible for us how easily we try to bring forth a God-given promise ourselves. And that may be the hardest form of unbelief to recognise. Not saying: God cannot. But: God apparently needs my help to make His Word come true. We still believe the promise, but we seize the process.

And Genesis shows that God’s way runs otherwise: He waits until even the human possibility falls away, and then what He has spoken happens. That does not make Abraham and Sarah passive — Abraham circumcises Isaac as God had commanded; there is real obedience. But the source of the life does not lie in their achievement. The life is given.

To receive a child is not the same as to possess one

When I then read 1 Samuel 1, it came close. Hannah has no child; the text even says pointedly that the LORD had shut up her womb. We must not read over that. We know the ending; Hannah does not yet. We read a few chapters in minutes; she lives in them for years. Year after year to Shiloh. Year after year Peninnah with her children. Year after year the tender place is pricked. And at last she stands before God’s face and prays — not neatly at a distance, but weeping, pouring out her heart. Eli even misunderstands her; the one who ought to hear her does not hear. But God hears. And when Samuel is born, the text says: “The LORD remembered her.” Again that pattern: God remembers, God acts.

And reading this, I had to think of my own children. I have told before that as a father I sometimes look back and think: some things I would have done differently. Not because I am disappointed in my children, but because I have come to see my own responsibility differently. Sometimes I looked mainly at behaviour that had to be corrected, while I have come to understand more and more that my task lies deeper: to disciple my children, to open the Word with them, not only to tell them what is and is not allowed, but to teach them to live before God’s face themselves and to carry responsibility.

And then I read about Hannah. She prayed for this child for years; Samuel must have been more precious to her than we can easily imagine. But when she has received him, she does not grasp him as though he were finally hers. She brings him to the house of the LORD and says: “For this child I prayed, and the LORD has given me what I asked of Him. Therefore I have also lent him to the LORD.” That touches me as a father. For our children truly are our children — we may love them, protect them, raise them. But in the end we did not make them, and their heart we cannot make. They are entrusted to us. That is why raising is not the same as controlling. I can let my children hear the Word, show them how I try to live, correct, pray, disciple. But the life that only God can give, I cannot produce myself.

And Hannah seems to understand this: what she has received, she gives back to the Giver. And make no mistake — this is no weary surrender, no soft letting-go. This woman first made a vow, poured out her soul, prayed until she was taken for drunk. For Hannah, giving back is the last, wakeful act of one who knows from whom the child came.

Samuel — asked for and heard

Even his name is bound up with her prayer: “I have asked him of the LORD.” His whole existence reminds her that God has heard. And that fits this day. Teruah is about sound — and in 1 Samuel we see, on the other side, a God who listens. We cry out; He hears. But later Samuel becomes the very one who must learn to listen when God calls. In chapter 3 his name sounds — Samuel, Samuel — and Eli teaches him to answer: “Speak, LORD, for thy servant heareth.” That lies just outside our haftarah, but it grows straight out of the story that begins here. A mother cries out to God. God hears. God gives a son. And that son becomes one who himself learns to hear. Receiving becomes listening. Listening becomes serving. And so God’s Word goes on.

Hannah’s song grows larger than her own story

In chapter 2 Hannah sings, and her song is remarkable. It begins with her own joy: “My heart rejoiceth in the LORD.” But it does not stay at: I wanted a child and now I have one. Her gaze widens — the holiness of God, pride that falls, the mighty brought low and the weak given strength, the full hiring themselves out for bread and the hungry hungering no more. And then: “The barren has borne seven, while she that had many children is grown feeble.” What God did in her own life opens her eyes to how God acts: He overturns human orders. This is no sweet thank-you song; it is fierce, a song of reversal.

And at the end it even becomes royal: “He shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed.” Remarkable, for Israel has no king yet. Hannah looks beyond Samuel. Her personal answered prayer becomes part of a far larger story. And that is an important movement: God can do something deeply personal without it ultimately being only about us. Isaac is not only the child Sarah finally gets — through him the promise goes on. Samuel is not only the child Hannah finally gets — he becomes decisive on the road to the kingship. What God gives carries a calling.

Yom Teruah — waking up to hear

And then back to this day. The Torah gives no explanation, but says: “a memorial of blowing.” The sound interrupts the ordinary course. That is what a trumpet does. If you are talking together and suddenly the shofar sounds out strongly, you cannot pretend nothing is happening. You hear it. And perhaps that is the first movement of this day: not to understand everything at once, but to wake up. Listen. Where have we grown so used to the ordinary course of our lives that we no longer truly hear? We rise, we work, we arrange our affairs, we care for our family, we perhaps even read the Bible every day — but are we still listening? Or do we know the words so well by now that they pass us by?

Teruah interrupts. The sound says: pay attention. And it is no soft signal — a trumpet is also an alarm, also a battle cry, also the sound of a coronation. It wakes you not to reassure you; it wakes you to hear and to rise.

First He hears

And before this becomes a task — wake up, listen better, do more — we must see clearly what happens first in these readings. For the hearing motif runs both ways. Sarah says: “everyone who hears will laugh with me.” God hears the voice of the lad in the wilderness. Hannah moves her lips, Eli does not hear her, but God hears. And the son she receives, Samuel, becomes the very one who must later learn to answer: “Speak, LORD, for thy servant heareth.” Do you see the order? Yom Teruah does not only ask whether we hear God. The readings begin with a God who hears us. That is why our response is no anxious achieving, but an answer: He hears and remembers first, and therefore we can hear and answer.

God remembers

In the Jewish tradition, kingship, remembrance and the blast of the horn are strongly bound together around this day. That connection is also seen in the rabbinic reading tradition, in which Sarah and Hannah are bound to God’s remembering precisely around this day — for both texts say that the LORD “visited” and “remembered.” Biblical remembering is not a recollection that arises after you had forgotten, the way we forget our keys. It is far more active: God sets His faithfulness in motion, He acts according to His covenant and His word. That gives this day a different colour. When we remember who God is, we do so before a God who Himself remembers His promises. Our faith does not finally rest on our ability to remember everything perfectly. He is faithful. That is the ground.

And there this day touches every one of us. The trumpet calls us again before God’s face with a few sharp questions. What have I actually received? What has God entrusted to me — this child, this work, these years, this body? And do I hold it clenched, as though I had made it and were about to lose it — or do I lay it open under His calling? Hearing is exactly this: to acknowledge that I received it, and not to clutch it but to entrust it to the One from whom it came.

The trumpet of Matthew 24

And then Matthew 24. Yeshua speaks of the coming of the Son of Man. The sun is darkened, the moon gives no light, the stars fall, the powers of the heavens are shaken. And then: “Then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven… and he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds.” The sound of this day makes us think, as a confessional horizon, of that great trumpet at which the Son of Man gathers His elect. For the God who visited Sarah and remembered Hannah is the same who at the end calls His own children together; no name forgotten, no one unheard.

And note where Yeshua ends: “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” The hour, too, does not lie in our hand. I cannot make my child’s heart, and I cannot know the hour — and that is exactly what wakes you: not anxious, but awake. It is the Father who remembers, who hears, who knows the hour. Watch then — not clenched, but with open hands.

Closing

So this day begins with a sound, and not with an achievement. The trumpet wakes us to hear again who this God is: the God who visited Sarah, remembered Hannah, and does not forget His promises. Therefore we too may lay our lives again before His face. What you love, you did not make; what you carry is entrusted to you — receive it as a gift, and dare to lay it back into the hands of the One who hears and remembers. He hears and remembers first. Therefore we may answer.