The Feast of Purim and the Redemption of Saul

A few months ago I posted these thoughts on King Saul's infamous battle against the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15.  I argued then that, in seizing on the prophetic word and capitalizing on the Amalekite plunder, Saul shows us the ignoble failure of all our efforts at self-Messiahship; but also that YHWH's rejection of Saul (and us in Saul) as Messiah is really a redemptive act, inasmuch as it paves the way for the true Messiah--our reyah--to take up the mantle on our behalf. 

In light of these thoughts (and also of these much earlier thoughts on the tragic end of Saul's dynasty) I thought I might share these insights into Saul's story I recently got from the Book of Esther.

Yes, Esther.  The connection between these two stories are not immediately obvious, but profoundly significant.

Five times the Book of Esther points out that Haman is an Agagite (3:1, 3:10, 8:3: 8:10, 9:24), that is, a descendant of King Agag,the very Amalekite whose house Saul failed to destroy as per his prophetic mission back in 1 Samuel 15.  His failure to destroy Agag's line was why YHWH rejected Saul in the first place, and now we see the ominous result of his disobedience:  centuries after Saul, the People of God face utter annihilation at the hands of Agag's descendant. 

This might seem like a minor detail, that the "enemy of the Jews" in Esther is a descendant of Agag the Amalakite.  But then in Esther 2:5, we discover that Mordecai (Haman's arch nemesis) is a Benjaminite from the line of Kish. 

Anyone remember whose son King Saul was?

Kish, the Benjamite. It turns out that an ancestor of  Saul, the failed Messiah, has risen up to oppose the ancestor of Agag, the source of Saul's failure.

With this in mind, I doubt it's a coincidence that, even though King Xerxes clearly gave the Jews permission to pounce on the plunder of their enemies (8:11), the story stresses three times that under Mordecai's leadership they did not (9:10, 9:15, 9:16).  Mordecai and Esther have succeeded where Saul failed, and what we're witnessing in their success is actually the redemption of Saul's story through their faithfulness. 

This is more than an interesting intertextual connection, it is a profound word of hope to any whose story--in ministry or life or Christian discipleship--has brought them seemingly to the point Saul's story was at in 2 Samuel 21:1-14, with lament echoing in the air and carrion birds picking at the remains. 

There is no failure so final that God cannot redeem.

Jesus said that we'd discover eternal life in the Scriptures if and when we look for him there, so as the Jews of Susa celebrate the Feast of Purim at the end of the Book of Esther, I've got my eyes peeled.  And I can't help but notice that when God finally does redeem our failed efforts at self-Messiahship, this is what it looks like:  a faithful community of God's people, delivered from death and celebrating life together around a sacred meal.

Salvation belongs to our God.

The Five (Smooth) Rocks were also Christ

As regular visitors to terra incognita will probably have gathered, I've been spending a lot of time in 1 Samuel these days.  The other day it was Chapter 17, the most famous giant-bout in recorded history, immortalized in monumental marble masterpieces and children's coloring pages alike.  I lingered for a moment over the scene where David selects five smooth stones from the stream, and I was reminded of this post over at Richard Beck's very good blog called Experimental Theology.

The question here is quite simple: if David was indeed trusting YHWH in his square-off against Goliath, why did he take five stones.  Wouldn't one stone have been a far more dramatic gesture of faith?  Moralistic Sunday School lessons, of course have a ready, allegorical answer:  the stones are symbolic of the disciplines of the godly life (by turns, "courage, humility, prayer, effort, love of duty" (this is one I found online this morning), or "spiritual renewal, kingdom generosity, church revitalization, church planting, authentic evangelism" (this is a more elaborate (and grown up) one I found at a random on  a church website)).

But then, these "answers" just illustrate the problem. If we are indeed trusting YHWH to win the battle for us, why do we so quickly and easily point to our own efforts--our courage, our duty, our giving, our church planting-- as the deciding factor.

But here's the intriguing thing (and again, credit where credit's due: Richard Beck first put me on the scent of this trail).  In 2 Samuel 21:15-22, it describes the on-going skirmishes with the Philistines under David's rule.  Here we meet four imposingly large "descendants of Rapha in Gath":  Ishbi-Benob (Abishai, the son of Zeruiah took him out), Saph (Sibbekai, the Hushathite took him down), a "huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot"  (Jonathan son of Shimeah killed him), and "the brother of Goliath the Gittite" (Elhanan Son of Jair got him (see 1 Chron 20:5)).

Of course, if one of these four sons of Rapha was the brother of Goliath, then that would make Goliath himself the fifth son of Rapha.  There were, it turns out, five giants in Gath:  Goliath and his four goliathine brothers. 

After reading 2 Samuel 21:15-22, it doesn't take much speculation (Richard Beck points out) to figure out why David would have taken five stones; it just takes some simple math.  David took five stones because there were five giants in Gath, and he was gearing up to whip the whole lot of them.  So confident was David in YHWH's salvation, that he before the battle with Goliath even began he was already looking past it to God's victory over all the giants in Gath. 

Suddenly these five stones have become a profound reminder to us, whenever we stand in Goliath's shadow, that not only does the battle belong to the Lord; so too the entire war. 

And, at the risk of wringing hermenutical blood out of exegetical stone here, they have become a little cairn, marking out the ultimate battleground of God's victory: the cross of Christ.  Because whatever else it means, a pouch-full of pebbles in a battle against a crew of gigantic Philistine champions reminds us that when God does win the victory, it will be on his impossible terms, our best efforts be damned: a smooth stone, a small still voice, a pregnant virgin, a crucified Messiah.

In 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul reminds the Church how God saved Israel in the desert by bringing water from the Rock. "That Rock" he says, setting the precedent for all subsequent Christological readings of the Old Testament, "That Rock was Christ."  Without wanting to put words in his mouth, I would hasten to add:  "So too were the five smooth stones."

On the Naming of Kings

In a previous post, I mentioned the irony implicit in the name of Israel's first King-- Saul, the "one we asked for."  As a further thought on the naming of kings in 1 Samuel, I can't help but notice that later, when David arrives on the scene, how compelling and attractive his character is. 

In chapter 18, after his infamous melee with the giant from Gath, David comes to stay in Saul's house; and you don't have to look too closely to realize that everyone (and inparticular Saul's family) is falling in love with the guy.  First Jonathan becomes "one in spirit" with David and "loves him as himself." Then, as David's sphere of influence swells, we're told that "all Israel and Judah loved David because he led them in their campaigns."  And by the end of the chapter, Saul's daughter Michal has fallen in love wih this archtypal giant slayer.

Perhaps none of this should come as any surprise.  YHWH told Saul he would strip the kingdom from him and give it to his reyah (companion). And if we pause to remember what David's own name means, it would probably come as even less a surprise, that this charismatic and good-looking lad is literally stealing the hearts of the whole kingdom, right down to Saul's own children.

"David," of course, means "beloved."

On Being a Reject Messiah

In 1 Samuel 15:26-29, after a disastrous mission against the Amalekites in which Saul "pounces on the plunder" instead of completely destroying it, Samuel announces that God has rejected Saul.  In Samuel's words, "because you rejected the Word of the Lord, the Lord has rejected you as king."

There's a lot going on in this dark and confusing passage, but I was reading it the other day and something in particular struck me as odd.  In 1 Samuel 15:28, Samuel turns to leave Saul and Saul, afraid of the political ramifications of this public withdrawal of Samuel's support, attempts to detain him.  Now a-days we might say, "he was worried about the optics."  So he catches hold of Samuel's robe, which tears in the subsequent tussle, and in that moment he becomes his own prophetic object lesson:  just as Saul has torn the Prophet's robe in his efforts literally to seize the bearer of the Prophetic Word, so too YHWH will tear the Kingdom from him because he has metaphorically seized on the Prophetic Word and used it to his own ends (i.e. he seized on the prophetic commandment to attack the Amalekites, but used it as a license to loot and pillage for political gain). 

And here's where things get both convicting and freeing.  Samuel's precise words are:  "The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you today and has given it to ..."

To whom?

"One of your neighbours, who is better than you" is how we translate the verse in English, and this is accurate, but the actual word is reyah, which means "friend/close companion."  I don't want to make an exegetical mountain out of a linguistic molehill here: there is a Hebrew word for "intimate friend/confidant" (côwdh) and that's not the word that's being used here, but there's also a word for neighbor (shachen) and that word's not being used either.  The word is reyah; and the nuance, I think, points us to someone of more significance than simply "one of Saul's neighbors."  Because, the reyah in question, we'll find out later, is none other than King David himself, who will indeed become Saul's close companion before he becomes Saul's replacement.   But at this point, the Prophetic Word is just left echoing ominously.  God has rejected Saul and has chosen his reyah, his close companion who "is better than him," to replace him as the Lord's Annointed.

I read this verse the other evening and as the weight of the word-choice sunk in, it seemed to me that God was saying:  "Oh yeah; I've also rejected you as Messiah, too, Dale, and given that role to a close companion of yours, who is far better than you."  And as that prophetic word sunk in, God gently started to show me ways I've been "playing Messiah," or have done in the past.  I won't share those here, except to say that they're the same kind of ways we all, I think, play Messiah -- in our churches, in our families, in our marriages, in our relationships, in our spheres of influence -- by trying to "fix," or "reign-over" or "own" or "save" ourselves and those around us.

God showed me some of my own efforts at self-Messiahship for what they were, and assured me that it's just not my job anymore.  I'm a reject Messiah.

And there is something convicting about this, but also deeply liberating:  God has rejected us all, with Saul, as Messiah, and has turned that onerous responsibility over to a close companion of ours-- a true reyah who is infinitely better at this role than us.  And he, we will discover if we will chose a path different than Saul's, he is the true "Beloved" whom David only prefigured and who delights (like he said it John 15) he delights to call us friends, rejected Messiahs though we are.

When God Gives Us What We Ask For

In 1 Samuel 12, Samuel is about to "retire" as judge of Israel and turn the spiritual authority of the nation over to the newly anointed King Saul. In 1 Samuel 12:17 in particular, he addresses the people with his farewell speech, and tries to impress on them how wicked a thing they have done in seeking a king who will make them "like the other nations," and so rejecting the glorious theocracy God had intended for his people all along. To drive his point home, Samuel announces that he will call on the Lord to send thunder from heaven so that the people will know just how evil it was to have "asked for a king" in the first place.

In an effort to keep my Seminary Hebrew fresh, I've been reading 1 Samuel in the Hebrew these days, so something stood out to me here that I'd never noticed before. There are a variety of verbs Samuel could have used to describe Israel's sin in "asking" for a king. But the verb he did use, it so happens, was ša’l. "To ask for." If that verb looks familiar, I think it's supposed to. It's the same verb that gives us King Saul's name-- which, loosely translated, means something like "the asked-for one," or "the desired one."

Names, of course, are seldom accidental in the Hebrew Scriptures, and I doubt the writer wants the irony here to be lost on us (the pun, after all, gets repeated in 12:19). Israel "saul-ed" (so to speak) for a king like all the other nations, so God gave them, quite literally, the "Saul" they asked for. The disastrous results of their "saul-ing" of course, unfold almost immediately, as their "saul" begins his reign with one debacle after another: sacrificing to the Lord as king at Gilgal, amassing loot from the battle with Amalekites, setting up a monument to himself on Mt. Carmel. To be sure, none of this would have even raised the eyebrows of a typical Ancient Near Eastern king-- for whom things like personal aggrandizement, or personal gain, or personally assuming the role of mediator for the divine, that stuff just came along with the job description of king. Put bluntly: Saul proves quite quickly that he is a king like the kings of all the other nations and that Israel has received, quite literally, the king they had "saul-ed" for.

And I'm left wondering. If the story of Saul's inauspicious reign teaches the people of God anything, it seems, it's this: there are times, it turns out, that God's most terrifying judgment on our sin is simply and finally to give us what we've asked for.

The fifth calling of Samuel

The other day I was reading the story in 1 Samuel about God's calling of Samuel.  For those of you who, like me, grew up on the flannel-graph versions of this Sunday School gem, you'll remember that the Lord calls Samuel three times and each time Samuel mistakes him for Eli.  After the third time, Eli tells Samuel that if he hears the voice again, he should reply: "Speak Lord, your servant is listening."  He does, and the rest is Messianic history.

No wonder this mysterious episode has made it to so many a Sunday School coloring page.  It's vivid and compelling and charming; but as I say, I was re-reading it the other day and I realized that, though we often end the telling after the fourth call of Samuel (the "Speak Lord, your servant is listening" one), Samuel is actually called five times in the story, and the "fifth call" is essential to the boy's prophetic ministry.  Because when Samuel does recognize the Word of the Lord at last, it turns out to be a prophetic judgment against Eli and his house, one that will make "the ears of everyone who hears it tingle."  It's a message so heavy and heart-rending that Samuel, we're told, is afraid to tell the vision to Eli.

And then comes the fifth call:  the next morning Eli  himself "calls" to Samuel.  The narrative accentuates the irony here by using the same verb as before (karaw-- to call), and  by putting the same response into Samuel's mouth-- "Here I am."  Previously Samuel had mistaken God's voice for Eli's, but now, having responded to God's call, Samuel hears and recognizes Eli's call for what it is.  And what it is, in fact, is an invitation to share the terrifying word of the Lord with the very one against whom it has been uttered.  It's a call to do the very thing that young Samuel is loathe to do: to speak the prophetic Word to power.

So here's what I'm wondering as I meditate on this "fifth call" of Samuel.  If the "fifth call" is the call for ministers of the Word to share it faithfully with God's people, even when it may cause the ears of those who hear it to tingle (inasmuch as Samuel's "fifth call" was a call from Eli to share what God had spoken against him), if the "fifth call" is our invitation to speak the Word of God to "power" when we're most afraid to do so because we're most uncertain of the outcome and we have the most at stake-- if Samuel's story is in some way paradigmatic for the Ministry of the Word, then what would it take for us to speak a willing "Here I am" with Samuel when we receive this "fifth call" in our ministries?

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.