Readings for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Year B – Track 1 – Proper 6)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on Sunday June 16, 2024.
Today we read about the tragic downfall of King Saul and the anointing of a young shepherd boy named David, who becomes Israel’s most beloved king, known as “a man after God’s own heart.” We learn that the prophet Samuel grieved over Saul and that the LORD was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel. However, what the lectionary leaves out is the reason for King Saul’s downfall. It’s left out because it’s very disturbing and confusing to our modern sensibilities. On the surface, King Saul disobeys God and then blames others for his disobedience; however, what was God’s command to King Saul? God’s command to Saul was, “Go and attack the Amalekites and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3). God’s command to Saul was to commit genocide. Saul did indeed attack the Amalekites, but he deviated from the command in a couple ways. After soundly defeating the Amalekites, Saul decided to spare the king, Agag, as well as many of the animals. According to the plain reading of 1 Samuel 15, God rejected King Saul because, although he killed everybody else, he spared the king and some animals. This is why we have such difficulty with the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures. This is why some of the earliest Christian theologians, like Marcion, wanted to remove it from the biblical canon and insisted that the violent and vengeful God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. That would make things easier, wouldn’t it? Just remove the Old Testament. However, the early church leaders knew that a rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures would be a rejection of the Jewish tradition and heritage from which the Christian faith emerged and that such rejection would only fuel Christian anti-Judaism. So, we honor these Scriptures today in all their complexity and difficulty. And when we honor them, we begin to discover in them how to read them. We discover an invitation to look at them the way God looks at us, below the surface.
We see this invitation in our reading today as God speaks to the prophet Samuel whose vision of other people is limited by their outward appearance. As Samuel seeks the new king who will replace Saul, he assumes that the new king will be tall, dark, and handsome, as King Saul was. But God says to Samuel, “Do not look at his outward appearance. Do not look at the surface. Look at the heart.” Once we begin to see the beauty in someone’s heart we can see more clearly the beauty in their outward appearance. David is described as ruddy and handsome with beautiful eyes, but this is only after Samuel has seen the beauty in this young shepherd boy’s heart.
The heart of the Bible is the message of God’s self-giving love, the message that God is Love. This is revealed clearly in the great Jewish prophet and mystic Jesus Christ. Once we understand the beauty at the heart of the Bible, we can begin to see that same beauty shimmering in all its stories, even those that, on the surface, seem ugly. Do not look at the surface. Look at the heart. That’s the purpose of Jesus’s parables: to get us to look below the surface. Once we understand the heart of the Bible as God’s love, then we have the seed that will sprout and grow and work its tendrils into all the biblical stories we read so that we can nest and rest in their shade.
If the heart of the Bible is the message of God’s love and compassion, then how in the world do we make sense of and see the beauty in a divine command to commit genocide followed by God’s disappointment and rejection of the person who failed to follow through with that command? To answer this question, we need to read less superficially and more creatively, as the Jewish Mystics and Prophets have been doing for centuries. We need to look less at the surface of the text and more at the heart of the text.
God delights in his people when they intercede on behalf of others, even if that means talking back to God. The first person in the Bible to be called a “Friend of God” was Abraham who argued with God on behalf of the people of Sodom, after God told him about their impending destruction (Genesis 18:16-33). As a result, some of the people of Sodom were saved. Moses argued with God on behalf of the people of Israel when they worshipped the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:9-14) and thus they were spared punishment. Job also argued with God and God responded by saying, “Job has spoken the truth” and then God assured Job that his prayers for his friends would protect them from the consequences of their foolishness (Job 42:7-8). In the Jewish Mystical tradition, there is a passage in the Zohar (written around the 13th century) in which God chastises Noah for not arguing with Him when Noah first learned of the flood. Unlike Abraham and Moses who challenged God when other peoples’ lives were at stake, Noah remained disturbingly silent and submissive after learning that God’s judgment would result in the destruction of many human lives. According to the Zohar, God said to Noah, “I lingered with you and spoke to you at length so that you would ask for mercy for the world! But as soon as you heard that you would be safe in the ark, the evil of the world did not touch your heart. You built the ark and saved yourself.”[1] The Jewish Mystical authors of the Zohar knew how to read the Bible below the surface. They knew how to read the heart of the Bible.
So, when we read the downfall of King Saul less superficially, we can begin to see that perhaps King Saul’s heart was not in the right place after all. Perhaps God’s disappointment with him was not because he spared a few lives, but because he didn’t talk back to God and intercede on behalf of all their lives, the way Abraham did for the Sodomites, and Moses did for the Israelites, and Job did for his friends. King Saul failed not because he disobeyed God’s command but because he didn’t question the command in the first place; and by the way, sparing the Amalekite king and some of the livestock was not an expression of compassion. King Saul was simply plundering the spoils of war. The captured king was a status symbol and the livestock added to his wealth. He proved to be just as selfish and greedy as God said he would be when the Israelites first asked for a king.[2] And he didn’t have the compassion or chutzpah to intercede on behalf of the Amalekites. He didn’t have the courage to talk back to God as God wanted. Young David, on the other hand, knew how to do this; and we know he knew how to do this because we have access to his honest prayers of challenge and confusion and frustration, his poems of genuine covenant interaction known as the Psalms. David’s heart was in the right place because David knew that the heart of his tradition was God’s love, and it was that seed of love that sprouted and grew and worked its tendrils into everything he did so that, even when he failed, he was still known as a man after God’s own heart. So, may the seed of God’s love grow in us so that we may read our Bible less superficially and more creatively, looking at the heart rather than just the surface, so that we might rest and nest in its shade, and so that we might live no longer for ourselves but for him who died and was raised.
[1] Daniel Chanan Matt, trans. The Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment (Mahwah NJ:Paulist Press, 1988), 57-59. I’m thankful to the Rev. Suzanne Guthrie for bringing this passage to my attention.
[2] Dr. Ashley London Bacchi, Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Ancient Mediterranean Religions at Starr King School for the Ministry, pointed out to me that capturing King Agag would have been a status symbol for King Saul and the captured livestock would have added to his wealth.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 