1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13 and Psalm 20  • Ezekiel 17:22-24 and Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15  • 2 Corinthians 5:6-10, (11-13), 14-17  • Mark 4:26-34

I like that this week’s 1 Samuel reading begins where it does, with Saul already, as far as YHWH is concerned, rejected as king of Israel. That starting point lets me as a reader ask an important question of my own reading: why has Saul lost the favor of YHWH?

1 Samuel, as Biblical books often do, offers us two episodes in which Saul loses his standing before YHWH. In one of them, 1 Samuel 13, Israel stands ready to battle against the Philistines, the mortal threat to God’s people since the time of Samson; and Samuel, who is supposed to offer animal sacrifice to bless the battle, is nowhere to be seen. Rather than allow the enemy to roll over Israel’s camp without a fight, Saul offers the sacrifice himself so that the army can form ranks. And of course, just as he does so, Samuel rolls up and curses him for seizing prerogative that does not belong to a king.

In the other episode, 1 Samuel 15, significantly darker for faithful people who sing praises for the mercy and the kindness and forgiveness of YHWH, Saul has captured the king of the Amalekites in battle but has spared his life. Samuel comes to the Israelite camp, curses Saul for his clemency, and murders the prisoner of war right there in the camp. In both episodes, Saul seems to enter the story with kingship intact. In both stories, the episode ends with a curse from YHWH stripping Saul of the crown.

And so 1 Samuel 16 begins, and in order to punish Saul for his tragic decisiveness to save Israel or for his tragic mercy for a vanquished foe, YHWH plots with Samuel (who had a big going-away ceremony all the way back in 1 Samuel 12 but, like King Lear in Shakespeare’s tragedy, just won’t go away) to usurp the king that YHWH elected.

I write about YHWH as the agent here on purpose: the same YHWH who regrets making Saul king deceives King Saul in order to anoint King Saul’s successor years before King Saul stops being King Saul. My own impulse, whether it comes from years of confessing God’s justice and goodness or whether it comes from cowardice before the scariest moments in the Bible, wants to moralize this, to render Saul a criminal who deserves the violent end that YHWH has in store for him. But neither of the episodes in which 1 Samuel says YHWH rejects Saul gives me that kind of satisfaction. This is another moment where the characters and the world and YHWH, who never stops being God in these stories, don’t match up in anything like a satisfying manner.

And precisely in the face of stories like this, enshrined in the most holy Scriptures, the Psalms of lament make the most sense. The most sensible response is not to explain them but to shout to the heavens that God isn’t being God right now, that we know it full well, and that we won’t pretend that the evil is good.

We know this isn’t right.

We know God is involved.

We know we can’t be quiet about either.

The life of faith, for folks who confess the God who is God in these stories and to whom we cry out with the Psalms of lament, don’t have the luxury of easy explanation.

That’s not quite right–I’ve heard easy explanations my whole life, from the pieties that uncomfortable and well-meaning folks repeat at funeral homes to the bravest attempts of theology Ph.Ds to engage with this God without having to speak contradictions out loud. I don’t begrudge that kind of consolation to folks who need it; I just don’t find much truth in the easy explanations.

So without the comfort of the smooth account, I come back to 1 Samuel, paying attention to the text and dwelling on the tiny episodes that we tend to roll past on our way to the election of that ruddy and handsome killer, young David. For each of David’s brothers before him, 1 Samuel makes us read the sentence “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.”

Stopping and contemplating this text, I have no idea what to do with that sentence. At first I think that must be terrible: doesn’t everyone want to be the one God chooses?

But then again, if I asked Saul how great it is to be YHWH’s chosen one, he might say it’s a clunker.

And if I think about the one that YHWH does choose, the one who murders two-thirds of Moab when they’re his prisoners of war (2 Samuel 8) and seduces his general’s wife (2 Samuel 11) and murders his general to cover up the affair (still 2 Samuel 11) and has his right-hand man and nephew Joab murdered as his last dying act (1 Kings 2), I wonder just what plans YHWH has in mind in this election process.

When I taught theology to Christian-college ministry majors, I told them more than once that the gospel of Mark compels me, and St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians inspires me, and the book of Job confronts me, and the New Testament Apocalypse comforts me, but the books of Samuel and Kings haunt me. Unlike some of my friends in the theology world I can’t simply dismiss them as sub-Scriptural, and whenever I try to derive some kind of edification from them, they elude me and horrify me and generally refuse to let me enlist them.

For now all I can do is grit my teeth and try to receive them as the gifts I never asked for but that make me confront truth that I’d rather not.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Featured Image: David, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=42428 [retrieved May 27, 2024]. Original source: image donated by Jim Womack and Anne Richardson.