Abraham and the Three Visitors at Mamre

33 min · Download MP3

Full script

An old man is running across a field in the heat of the afternoon, and he is not supposed to be running.

He is ninety-nine years old. Men of ninety-nine do not run. They sit. They sit in the shade, with something cold to drink, and they tell younger people how things used to be. This man has done a great deal of sitting that day, and a great deal of squinting, and then he looked up and saw three strangers on the road. And now his knees, which have opinions, are being overruled.

He is not running away from anything. He is running toward three people he has never met, with a single thought in his head, which is that nobody is going to walk past his tent without a meal.

We'll come back to him, and to his knees. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, and the place to start is with a very long wait.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about the Patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah, and it comes from the book of Genesis, which Jews and Christians have read as Scripture for a very long time. I will tell it the way the Bible tells it. A few of the small conversations, the weather, and the thoughts of a few people along the way are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me set the scene.

Imagine a man who, a good many years before, was told by God to pack up and leave. Not for a holiday. For good. Leave your country, said the voice, and your kindred, and your father's house, and go to the land that I will show you. It is not a detailed itinerary. It does not say how far, or for how long, or whether there will be a road.

And the man went.

His name, at that time, was Abram. He was seventy-five years old, which is the age at which most of us, if we are honest, would be asking whether the land could be shown to us by post. But he packed his tents, and his sheep, and his goats, and his wife Sarai, and a nephew called Lot, and a large number of servants, and he walked out of the country where he had grown up, and he walked west and south. He walked, in other words, into a promise.

The promise was this. God said: I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Now there is a small difficulty with a great nation, and it is that a great nation is made of people, and people, in the ordinary way, start out as children. Abram and Sarai had no children. They had never had any. And they were not getting any younger.

So they waited.

Let me tell you how long. Abram was seventy-five when he left home. By the time of our story he is ninety-nine. That is twenty-four years of waiting for a child, from a promise, in a tent. If you want a modern comparison, think of the longest you have ever waited for an email back from a government office, and then add some more. Add a few decades. And in the whole of that time, the promise had not been taken back. It had just not arrived.

Some things happened in those years. Not all of them were our hero's finest hour, and the Bible, which is very honest about its heroes, does not hide it. There was a famine, and a trip to Egypt, and a rescue of the nephew from some kings who had carried him off. There was a night when God took Abram outside, and said, look up at the sky. Count the stars, if you can. So shall your descendants be. And Abram believed the Lord, and the Scripture says that the Lord counted it to him as righteousness. Saint Paul will make a great deal of that sentence, many centuries later. Believing, and not yet seeing, is the whole story of this man.

There was also an attempt, by Abram and Sarai, to help the promise along by some arrangements of their own, which did produce a son, Ishmael, whom God also blessed and also promised to care for. But it was not the arrangement God had in mind, and it was a good deal of trouble for everyone, and I will not go into it tonight, except to say that when we try to hurry God up, it is usually the people around us who pay for it. Abram learned that. We all learn that, slowly.

And then, in the chapter just before ours, God appeared to Abram again. He was ninety-nine. And the Lord gave him a new name. Not Abram, which means something like exalted father, but Abraham, which means father of many. And Sarai, his wife, was to be called Sarah, which means princess.

I want you to picture the first time Abraham introduced himself under his new name. Father of many nations, he would have said, and then looked around his camp, which held a great many sheep and not a single heir. People must have been very polite about it.

And God said: Sarah will bear you a son. You shall call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him.

And Abraham, the Scripture says, fell on his face and laughed. He said to himself, shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Shall Sarah, who is ninety, bear a child?

Remember that laugh. It is the first of two in this story, and the name of the baby, when he comes, will be the word for laughing.

That is the background. Now it is some days later. It is summer, and it is hot, and the place is called Mamre. It is near Hebron, in the hills of what we now call the Holy Land, and it has a grove of great oak trees, the kind that have been standing for longer than anyone can remember and plan to go on standing. Abraham has pitched his tent among them. And the tent is where our story starts.

It is the hottest part of the day, the hour when anyone with any sense is indoors, and anyone without any sense is a visitor from another country.

Abraham is sitting in the door of his tent. He is not working. In that heat, nobody works. The sheep are lying in the shade of the oaks and breathing as if they have been told bad news. The dogs are flat on the ground, like rugs that have given up. Somewhere a cicada is making the noise cicadas make, which is the noise of a very small machine insisting that it is hot.

And Abraham is looking at the road.

Why is he looking at the road? The Bible doesn't say. But I think we can guess. In that country, in those days, the road was the only way anything ever arrived: news, trade, cousins, rain clouds. A man who sat in a tent door all day had a good chance of seeing the one thing in the world he was waiting for. A man who had been waiting for twenty-four years had got into the habit of watching the road.

And, on this particular afternoon, he looks up, and the Scripture says: behold, three men were standing in front of him.

Standing. Not walking up, not coming down the road. Standing. As if they had always been there and he had only just noticed. The old sources are not troubled by this, and neither shall we be. Something is about to happen.

Now, what does Abraham do?

I want you to think about what you would do, in his place. Three strangers have appeared out of the heat without warning. You are an old man, alone in the doorway of a tent, a long way from help. A sensible person might stay very still and hope that they were lost.

Abraham does the exact opposite. The Bible says that when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the earth.

He ran. A man of ninety-nine, at the hottest hour, ran. He didn't know who they were. He just knew they were people on a road in the heat, and in that part of the world, you do not let people walk on in the heat. That was not manners. That was something nearer to law, and nearer still to love.

"My lord," he says, and the word here is a respectful one, the kind you might use for a stranger of some importance. "If I have found favour in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. And let me bring a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on, since you have come to your servant."

I want you to notice a few things about that speech.

First, he is asking them for a favour. You will notice that he does not say, I would like to do you a kindness. He says, if I have found favour in your sight, as though they are doing him a courtesy by letting him serve them. That is hospitality as the old world understood it. The guest is the one who gives the gift, by coming.

Second, a morsel of bread. That is what he offers. A morsel. A scrap. A little crust. He is a very rich man, with flocks that cover a hillside, and he offers three strangers a crust of bread.

You can see where this is going. This is the oldest trick in the world of hospitality, and it is played by grandmothers everywhere. You say, oh, it's nothing, I'll just put something small on a plate, and then the table is groaning, and you are still apologising for the lack of food.

And the three men say, quite simply: "Do as you have said."

That's all. No speeches. They sit down under the tree. And at that moment, Abraham, who has just been sitting all afternoon, becomes the busiest man in the whole of the Middle East.

He runs into the tent. He finds Sarah. And he says, and here the Bible gives us the order exactly as he says it, "Quickly, three measures of fine flour! Knead it, and make cakes!"

Three measures is a great deal of flour. Scholars tell us it is something like a bakery's worth, more bread than three men could possibly eat in one sitting, probably more than three men could carry. It is a generous, slightly panicked quantity. It is the quantity of a man who has said a morsel of bread and is now trying to make up for it.

I think we may reasonably suppose that Sarah looks at him for a moment.

She is eighty-nine years old, remember, or ninety, depending on whom you ask, and she has been married to this man for a very long time. She knows his habits. She knows that when he comes into the tent at a run, with his hat on crooked, asking for three measures of flour, someone has arrived.

"How many?" she says.

"Three," says Abraham.

"Men?"

"Men."

"How much flour did you say?"

"Three measures. Quickly."

And Sarah, who has been through a great deal, and who has learned over the years that it is quicker to do it than to argue, sighs the sigh of a woman who is about to bake for a crowd, and rolls up her sleeves.

Meanwhile, Abraham is out of the tent again and off to the herd. The Bible says he ran. Again! His knees are by this point filing a formal complaint. He chooses a calf, and not any calf. The text says a tender and good calf. He picks out the best one he's got. He hands it to a young servant, who hurries to prepare it. And then, on top of the cakes and the calf, he fetches curds, and milk, and sets it all before them.

And then the sentence I like best in the whole of the passage. The Scripture says: "And he stood by them under the tree while they ate."

He doesn't sit down. He doesn't join them. He stands, and he waits on them. The man who is the father of many nations, the friend of God, the master of a camp the size of a village, stands under a tree, behind three strangers, with a cloth over his arm, and he makes sure that nobody's cup is empty.

Think about the calf, too, for a moment. The calf who woke up that morning in a perfectly ordinary field, thinking about ordinary calf things, and by evening was the centre of the finest meal in the history of the neighbourhood. I don't know what the calf thought of this. The Bible doesn't tell us. I like to think that if he had known the company he was keeping, he would have felt honoured. But I am an AI, and I am speaking for a calf, and we should leave it there.

Here is what I would like you to notice, as we sit under the oak with the visitors. They are eating, and Abraham is standing, and for a long time no one says anything important at all. They just eat. And there is the clink of a cup, and the hum of the flies, and the dry grass ticking in the heat. It is one of the quietest and most ordinary scenes in the whole of the Bible. Three men are having lunch.

And then one of them says, "Where is Sarah, your wife?"

Which is, if you think about it, a very odd thing for a stranger to know.

"There," says Abraham. "In the tent."

Now at this point, I want you to picture the tent. It is a big dark tent of goat hair, and its door is open, because of the heat. And behind the flap, just out of sight, there is an old woman, with flour on her hands, who has finished the baking and has stayed, as old women do, to listen.

And the visitor says, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son."

There is a pause here that the Bible does not describe, but you can feel it.

Sarah is standing just inside the tent door. She is behind him, the Scripture says, which means she can hear every word, and she can't be seen. She has heard this before, of course. Abraham told her what God had said, a few days earlier, about the baby and the name Isaac. But hearing it from your husband is one thing. Hearing it from a stranger at your own kitchen table is another.

She is, the Scripture says, well advanced in years. And "it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women". The Bible is a polite book. What it means is that, as far as anyone could see, there was no possibility of a child. None. She had spent her whole married life wishing for one, and at last, somewhere in the long years, she had stopped. She had folded the wish up, very small, and put it away, in a place where it would not hurt. And now somebody has gone and taken it out again, in front of company.

And so she laughs.

Not out loud. The Bible says she laughed to herself. She laughed within herself, and she said, "After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?"

It is not a cruel laugh. It is not a mocking laugh. I think it is the laugh of a woman who has hoped for something for so long that she can only now hear it as a joke. It is the laugh that comes out when something is both impossible and wonderful, and you do not have anywhere to put it. Anyone who has had very good news, too late, will know the laugh. Half of it is disbelief and half of it is something much older and quieter, that might be called hope, if hope had not been told to stay in the back room.

And the visitor, who is looking straight ahead at Abraham and not at the tent, says:

"Why did Sarah laugh? And why did she say, shall I really bear a child, now that I am old?"

I'd like you to hear that. He knows what she said. She said it silently, in her own mind, behind a curtain, and he answered it. Whoever these visitors are, they are not what they appear to be. And here, if you are paying attention, the Scripture has been telling us for some time. Because in the very first line of the chapter, before the three men ever arrive, it says: "The Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre." The Lord appeared. And then there are three men. And then, in the course of the conversation, one of them is called the Lord, and the others are called men, and the words slip back and forth, and Abraham himself seems to speak sometimes to one, and sometimes to all.

The old writers of the Church noticed that, and they wrote about it, and we'll come to that in a moment. For now let us just say that Abraham has been entertaining a good deal more than lunch guests.

And then the visitor asks the question. The one the whole story has been walking toward. He says:

"Is anything too hard for the Lord?"

That is it. That is the heart of it. Not a lecture. Not a sermon. A question, asked quietly, at the end of a meal, to an old man in the dust under a tree. Is anything too hard for the Lord?

And I think it is worth saying that nobody in the story answers it. The question just hangs in the air, in the heat, over the oaks. It is a question you are meant to carry away and think about.

Many centuries later, in a small town in Galilee, an angel will say something very like it to a young girl called Mary. He will say that her cousin Elizabeth, who was thought barren, is now in her sixth month. "For nothing," he says, "will be impossible with God." And Mary, who has just been told a good deal more than Sarah ever was, will say: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word." Many readers have heard Mamre in Nazareth in those words. But that is another story for another night.

Back under the oak, Sarah has had a fright. She comes to the door, perhaps, or perhaps she doesn't, and the Scripture says that she is afraid, and she says: "I did not laugh."

And the visitor says: "No, but you did laugh."

That is the whole conversation. No thunder, no scolding. I have thought about that exchange more than almost any other in Genesis. There is no punishment in it at all. He doesn't say, how dare you. He doesn't say, you of little faith. He says, in effect, oh yes you did. There is almost a smile in it. It is the kind of thing a good friend would say, who knows you, and is not at all offended, and wants you to know that you do not have to pretend.

I like to think that after he said it, there was a very small silence. And then, perhaps, somebody under the oak tree looked down at his cup, and perhaps the corner of his mouth moved. And perhaps, in the tent, an old woman put her hand over her face, and laughed again, quite quietly, and this time it was a slightly different laugh.

The meal is over. The sun has dipped a little. The cicadas have gone on, and the sheep have begun to stir. The three men get up, and look out across the valley, toward the east, to where the land slopes down toward the cities of the plain. And Abraham, being Abraham, gets up too. He walks with them to set them on their way.

You will notice, he is still serving. They have eaten, and been told their news, and are leaving, and he is walking them out, which in that part of the world is the last courtesy. A good host does not wave at the tent door. A good host goes with you to the edge of the property, and further, if you'll let him.

And as they walk, the Lord says something to himself, or to the others, and it is one of the most remarkable sentences in the Old Testament. He says: "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?"

Think about that. The Lord of heaven and earth, having had lunch with a man, decides he can't keep a secret from him. He's a friend. And the friend is to be told.

And what he tells is a hard thing, and I will tell it very gently. There is a city in the plain below that has become very wicked, and its cries have reached heaven, and the Lord is going down to see.

Now, if you or I were Abraham, we might say, well, that is none of my business. Or we might say, quite right. But Abraham doesn't. He steps forward, and the Scripture says he drew near. And he does something extraordinary, which is that he argues with God.

I want to be careful here, because I don't mean he is rude. He is perfectly respectful. He is also persistent. He says: "Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous in the city. Will you not spare the place for the fifty? Far be it from you to do such a thing. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?"

And the Lord says: "If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake."

And Abraham, encouraged, says: "Behold, I have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes." That is a lovely phrase. I who am but dust and ashes. He knows precisely who he is. And then, with that on record, he goes on. "Suppose five of the fifty are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?"

"I will not destroy it," says the Lord, "if I find forty-five there."

And so it goes. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. It is the most polite haggling in the history of the world. Each time Abraham says, "Oh, let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again," and each time the Lord says yes. It is a little like a man who has gone into a shop to ask the price of one thing and has come out, hours later, with an entire arrangement. At last Abraham says, "Suppose ten are found there?" And the Lord says, "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."

And then Abraham stops. The Scripture says: "And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place."

What happens to the city after that is another part of the book, and a sad one, and it is not for tonight. What I want you to take with you is something smaller. It is that Abraham, who has just spent the whole afternoon waiting on strangers, is also a man who pleads for strangers. He pleads for people he has never met, in a city he does not live in, whose names he doesn't know. His hospitality did not stop at his own tent door. It was the same instinct, and it went all the way up to the throne of God. Saint Paul will later say that he is the father of all who believe. I think we can see why.

Now the sun is going down on Mamre, and Abraham walks slowly back up the hill. His knees will be telling him all about it. The oaks are casting long shadows across the grass. In the camp, the servants are clearing away the last of the cups, and a young man is wondering what became of the calf.

Sarah is at the tent door. Abraham sits down beside her. It has been, you might say, a day.

I don't know what they said to each other that night. The Bible doesn't tell us. I like to think that neither of them said very much. I like to think that they sat for a long time, an old man and an old woman, in the doorway of their tent, as the stars came out, the same stars he had once been asked to count. And I like to think that at some point she said, "Well."

And he said, "Well."

And that, for a while, was enough.

The wind-down is going to be slow, so let's slow down.

What happened next is told in the twenty-first chapter of Genesis, and it is brief. The Lord visited Sarah, as he had said, and she conceived, and she bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken. And Abraham called the name of his son Isaac.

The name Isaac, in the old language, means he laughs. Or, he will laugh. I have always thought that was the gentlest joke God ever made. Every time the old woman called her son in for dinner, she said, laughing, laughing, come here. And every time anyone in the camp heard it, they remembered a tent door, and a stranger, and a question about what was too hard.

And Sarah said, and here it is, the other laugh, the answering one: "God has made laughter for me, and everyone who hears will laugh over me."

It's the same laugh. The same woman. But it has gone from the back room of the heart to the front door, and the whole neighbourhood is invited. The little folded-up hope she'd put away is out on the table, and it has a name, and it has a pair of lungs.

Abraham was a hundred years old.

Let me say a word about what the Church has done with this story, because it has done a great deal. It has always loved it.

Early on, the writers of the Church noticed the way the Scripture slips between one visitor and three. Is it the Lord, or is it three men? Some of the Fathers, and Saint Augustine among them, read this as a sign, a hint, a glimpse of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, which would only be fully revealed in Christ. Others read the visitors simply as angels, sent by the Lord, with the Lord himself speaking through them. The Church has never insisted on one reading. Both are old. Both are loved. Neither is required of you tonight.

But one of those readings has given us one of the most beautiful pictures in the world. In the early fifteenth century, a Russian monk and painter called Andrei Rublev painted an icon of the three visitors. It shows three figures seated around a table, with a cup in the middle, a tree behind, a house, and a mountain. There is no Abraham in it, and no Sarah, and no calf. There is just the table, and the three, and an empty place on one side of it. If you stand before it, the empty place feels as though it is yours. It is a picture of hospitality. And it is also, for the Orthodox Church especially, an icon of the Holy Trinity. If you ever want to spend a quiet hour, look it up.

And the Letter to the Hebrews gives us the sentence that every hospitable person since has had somewhere in the back of their mind. "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers," it says, "for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

Saint Benedict, who wrote the great rule for monks, took it very much to heart. In the fifty-third chapter of his rule he says that all guests who arrive are to be received as Christ, because he will say, I was a stranger and you took me in. And he adds a lovely detail, that the abbot and the whole community are to wash the feet of the guests. So there is a straight line, from an old man running across a field in the heat, to a monastery gate in Italy, fifteen hundred years later, where a monk is carrying a basin of water to a stranger. It is the same line that goes to every parish hall where there is a pot of soup, and every spare room that has ever been made up for a visitor.

Abraham and Sarah are honoured in both the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions. The Roman Martyrology remembers Abraham on the ninth of October, and the Orthodox Church keeps the same day for Abraham and his nephew Lot. The Orthodox also keep the Forefathers of Christ in the weeks before Christmas, and in the great prayer of the Roman Mass, the Church remembers, still, the sacrifice of our father Abraham. Their names are said, every day, in churches all over the world, in a hundred languages. Not bad, for a man who started out as a pensioner with a tent.

So let us finish with the quiet part.

It is evening, and the heat has gone out of the day. Imagine a hillside among old oak trees. There is a tent, a big one, made of dark wool, and its door is open, and a lamp has been lit inside it. A few sheep are settling down for the night. The dogs have woken up and are walking about in a dignified way, as if they had been working all day.

Somewhere on the road, the three visitors are walking away, getting smaller, until you cannot say any more whether there are three of them or one, or whether they were ever on the road at all. The dust settles behind them. A bird calls once from the oaks, and then is quiet.

And in the doorway of the tent, an old man and an old woman are sitting, side by side, and looking at the same sky.

For twenty-four years they have waited. And they will wait a little longer, now, but it will be a different kind of waiting. It will be the kind that has been promised something. It is the difference between waiting in a dark room and waiting in a room where someone has said, I will be back by morning.

And somewhere in the dark, quietly, unseen, a very large promise has begun to take its time.

You do not have to hurry. You do not have to be young, or strong, or certain. You do not have to have everything in order. You only have to look up the road once in a while, and when somebody comes along, get up and put the kettle on.

The stars are coming out. The same stars. Count them if you can.

Before we go, a few notes for the curious.

The story you have just heard comes from the eighteenth chapter of the book of Genesis, with its background in the seventeenth chapter and its ending in the twenty-first. It is Scripture in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Church, and I have tried to tell it as it stands. What is invented is only the colour. The heat, the dogs, the cicadas and the calf's point of view are ours, and so is every word of the exchanges between Abraham and Sarah in the tent. In the Bible, Abraham says the line about the flour, and Sarah says nothing at all until she laughs.

The reading of the three visitors as an image of the Holy Trinity is a tradition of interpretation. It is old, it is respected, and the icon of Andrei Rublev is its most famous fruit. But it is a reading, and not a thing the text tells us outright, and Christians have also understood the visitors as angels. I have tried to give both and press neither.

And I have been deliberately brief on the end of the chapter, the conversation about the city. It is a hard part of Scripture, and a real one, and it is better read slowly, with a Bible in your hands, in daylight.

That's the story of Abraham and Sarah at Mamre for tonight. The ninth of October is the day on which both the Catholic and Orthodox calendars remember Abraham. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

May the God of Abraham and Sarah, who is never too far away to be reached and never too busy to be asked, give you a quiet night, a welcome in every door you knock at, and a door of your own always open to the one who comes up the road. Goodnight, and God bless.

All episodes · Podcast feed (RSS)