"SHE CALLED HIM SAMUEL"

Homily for January 14^th, 2014: 1 Samuel 1:9-20.

          Our first reading tells the story of an unhappy woman to whom the Lord gives happiness and joy. The woman is Hannah, married to a man named Elkanah, who, according to the custom of those days, has another wife as well, Peninnah. At the beginning of the chapter from which today’s reading is taken we read that “Penninah had children, but Hannah was childless” (1:2). Penninah used to taunt Hannah for her inability to conceive.

Elkanah regularly took his family to the sanctuary at Shiloh, to offer sacrifice to the Lord, followed by a celebratory meal. Whenever he did this, the text tells us, “he used to give a portion each to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters, but a double portion to Hannah because he loved her, though the Lord had made her barren.” This went on “year after year,” the text says. Each time Penninah would taunt Hannah, who would weep bitterly and refuse to eat. Her husband Elkanah used to ask her, “Hannah, who do you weep, and why do you refuse to eat? Why do you grieve? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (vs. 8)

On one of these visits, our first reading tells us, Hannah left the table to pour out her grief to the Lord in the sanctuary. “O Lord of hosts,” she prays, “if you look with pity on the misery of your handmaid, if you remember me and do not forget me, if you give your handmaid a male child, I will give him to the Lord for as long as he lives.” Hannah must have received there in the sanctuary some assurance that the Lord had heard her prayer. For the reading tells us that afterward “she ate and drank with her husband, and no longer appeared downcast.”

In time the Lord gave Hannah the son she had asked for. “She called him Samuel,” the reading tells us, “since she had asked the Lord for him.” The name Samuel means “his name is God.” He was the last of Israel’s so-called “judges,” and the first of its prophets. Later he would anoint Israel’s first two kings: Saul, and his successor David.

This touching story invites us to pray, in this Mass especially, for all women today who long for a child, and cannot conceive.