Isaac: The Child of Laughter

Listen. In a tent in the south of Canaan, a newborn baby is crying. And beside him, a woman of ninety is laughing. Not the quiet, doubtful laugh she once hid behind a tent wall. This is the other kind.

To feel the joy of this day, you have to remember the waiting. Abraham was seventy-five when God first called him. Leave your country, God said, and I will make you into a great nation. Abraham went. Years passed, and no child came. One night God took him outside and told him to count the stars. So shall your descendants be. Abraham believed him. More years passed. Sarah tried her own plan, through her servant Hagar, and it brought heartache. Still no child of Sarah’s own.

When Abraham was ninety-nine, God spoke again. He gave Abram a new name, Abraham, father of many nations. He gave Sarai a new name too, Sarah, and he said, “I will bless her, and give you a son by her.” Abraham fell on his face, and he laughed. A hundred-year-old man, a father? A ninety-year-old woman, a mother? And God said, “Your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac.” Not long after, three visitors came to the tent at Mamre, and Sarah overheard the same promise. She laughed too. And the Lord asked, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

And now, Genesis chapter twenty-one opens with words that sound like a door swinging open. The Lord visited Sarah, as he had said. The Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant, and she bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the very time God had spoken of. After all the years, all the stars, all the doubts, God kept his word. Not early. Not late. At the set time.

Abraham gave his son the name God had chosen. Isaac. And when the baby was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God had commanded, the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham’s family. Genesis pauses here to note one fact, almost with a smile. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

“God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”

Imagine the neighbours hearing the news. The herdsmen. The servants who had grown old in Abraham’s household. A baby, in Sarah’s tent! Some of them must have laughed out of sheer surprise. Sarah does not mind. Let them laugh, she says, laugh with me. The laugh that once meant this can’t be true has turned into a laugh that says it really happened.

In the Bible, names often carry meaning, and Isaac’s name is a small joke with a big point. In Hebrew it is Yitzhak, which means he laughs. Genesis plays on that word again and again. Abraham laughs in chapter seventeen. Sarah laughs in chapter eighteen. And here Sarah says God has made laughter for her. Every time someone called the boy by name, they were saying, he laughs, and remembering how God turned disbelief into delight.

The birth of Isaac is told in Genesis chapter twenty-one, verses one to seven. Abraham and Sarah waited twenty-five years, and they did not always wait well. But God did what he had said. So here is something to wonder about. What promise of God are you still waiting for, and how might you wait with hope?