Saul, Empire, and the Reign of God

The other night my wife read me 2 Samuel 21:1-14. Then she looked at me with a furrowed brow and said: "What was that all about?" Three years of famine diverted by the execution of seven male descendants of Saul. Rizpah sitting in sackcloth next to their exposed bodies, scattering the carrion birds until the rains came. David gathering up their bones with the bones of Saul and Jonathan, burying them at last in the tomb of Saul's father Kish. And it's only after all this dark business that God again answers prayer in behalf of the land.

My brow furrowed, too.

We talked through it a bit, and this is the only help I could offer: God withholds the rain specifically because Saul tried to annihilate the Gibeonites. Saul had broken an ancient oath that Israel swore with them under Joshua. Though God had forbidden all such treaties when Israel entered the land, he still holds them to their ill-sworn word, hundreds of years later. And the all-too-human events inevitably play themselves out: Gibeon asks for blood.

And so we witness the final ignoble end of Saul's dynasty. You can almost hear the stone grind shut against the tomb door. Israel had asked for a king "such as all the other nations have," and God gave them exactly what they asked for: a reign of bitter tribalism, broken oaths and violent self-assertion, like all the other nations have. And this is where that trajectory of human empire-building finally clatters still: in the heart-wrenching cries of a bereaved mother, chasing the ravens off the rotting corpse of her son. The utter anti-shalom of an anti-Messiah.

But the Word is whispering at the back of her ominous cries. Because we have tasted the true shalom of the true Messiah, and its trajectory is the exact inverse of Saul's: loving self-giving, perfectly fulfilled oaths, and people of every tribe and tongue sitting down together at the table of fellowship. And his is the only reign the people of God can confess.

I recently read a blogger comment that during the Bush administration, Christians published a remarkable number of books critiquing the evangelical church's acquiescence to American imperialistic ideology. His point was not that these critiques were wrong, but that they had such an easy target in President Bush. He wondered- and I wonder with him- if the same critics will be so vigilant against imperialism under a new presidential leadership, especially when the new seems such better candidate for hope than the old (or were they just disguising crass distaste for Bush in the high-sounding rhetoric of anti-imperialism all along?)

May the Word in 2 Samuel 21:1-14 remind us deeply of what human empire building looks like; and what the reign of God's Messiah most emphatically does not look like.

May he convict us of our own petty tribalisms, oath-breakings, and violent self-assertions.

And may he in turn teach us to name these in any human empire that tempts us to seek a king such as all the other nations have.