Repent for the Kingdom IV: Trusting the Promise (4th Sunday in Lent)

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

The metaphor of baptism as acceptance into the community of Christ continues to flow through the stories from the Gospel of John, chosen for these readings in Year A. In the ancient world, anyone born with an infirmity was assumed to be paying the price for ancestral sin. Jesus sees a blind man along the road, and decides to use him to make a different point: “. . . [H]e was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” Jesus then proceeds to use earth and water to cover the man’s eyes, and tells him to go to the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem and wash away the mud. When the man does so, he comes back able to see. The song, Amazing Grace, comes to mind. But in the story of the man born blind, the question seems to be, who exactly is the sinner? The blind man’s parents? The blind man himself? Jesus? Or the Temple Authorities, who have promised to expel from membership anyone who “confesses Jesus to be the Messiah”? After 2,000 years, the answer is obvious: it’s those nasty “Jews,” the Temple authorities, whose spiritual blindness is inexcusable. “If you were born blind,” Jesus tells them, “you would not have sin” of your own. “But now that you say ‘we see,’ your sin remains.” Cherry-picked pseudo-Paul agrees. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly. . . .”

To interpret John’s story as literal dogma is disastrous on many levels. Certainly local and international, political and religious anti-semitism is one. Another is the idea that someone was born with a disability “so that God’s works might be revealed” through encounters with that person. This idea is pervasive, especially as a pious response meant to give comfort either to the disabled person or to the family; but it transforms the God of distributive justice and love into an interventionist monster that deliberately causes suffering in order to enhance “himself.” The person with the disability is cast into an equally horrible role either as hapless victim or pious example. The one is diminished and disempowered personally, socially, and politically; the other risks becoming a kind of interpersonal, passive-aggressive blackmailer. A third evil that can and does arise from such interpretations is to deny the means to rectify the disability, either through prohibiting birth control and therapeutic abortion, or by preventing access to liberating medical care because the condition is “God’s will.”

I have an idea that the writer of John’s Gospel would be appalled at such literal misinterpretations of what may be ecstatic mysticism, but is most likely meant to encourage a second-century community of believers in a fight for institutional survival. What is more powerful than metaphors of earth and water, light and darkness, sin and salvation?

Perhaps the power of those metaphors is what prompted the Elves to pair John’s story of Jesus healing the man born blind by anointing his eyes with mud and the story of the prophet Samuel anointing the shepherd boy who became the great King David, the direct ancestor of Jesus. Certainly the reading that connects the two in terms of metaphor is the beloved 23rd Psalm: “Even though I walk through a dark and dreary land, there is nothing that can shake me. She has said she won’t forsake me. I’m in Her hand” (version by Bobby McFerrin, 1990; Ancient Mother, Spring Hill Music, 1993).

Taken out of context, the revelation to Samuel of God’s new choice for king over the Israelites seems to foreshadow the gradual realization of John’s man born blind that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. Jesse presents seven of his sons to Samuel, but none of them is accepted until Jesse admits that his youngest son is still out tending the sheep. “Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome,” gushes the Hebrew teller of the tale, “The Lord said, . . . this is the one.” One wonders what the older brothers were like. . . .

Contrary to Christian custom, the Old Testament story is where the real power lies in this series of readings, but we have to pre-empt the Elves and insist upon including the entire story of Saul and Samuel, Saul’s beloved son Jonathan (who became David’s beloved companion), conquest, Covenant, blood sacrifice, imperial violence, and ego-driven failure to trust in God’s word. Despite the fact that we are supposed to wait until Year B, please read 1 Samuel 8-17. You might want to pop some corn first or throw another log on the fire. It’s a saga worthy of Shakespeare.

Briefly, the people of Israel want a King. All the other people in the neighborhood have Kings. Why not us? And besides, Samuel is old, and his sons – who were supposed to act as judges and continue Samuel’s work – have betrayed the work instead, have turned away from God, and generally screwed up. God does not want the people to have a King, because Kings are notorious for imperially ignoring God’s laws about distributive justice-compassion and for presiding over the inevitable march of the normalcy of civilization into oppressive Empire. The prophet Samuel agrees with God on this, but then God tells him to go ahead and listen to the people and give them their king. Only when they have one will they realize what a mistake it is. So Samuel finds and anoints Saul. Saul does a great job for about 2 years, then one day when Samuel doesn’t show up in time (maybe he couldn’t get the donkey started, or a boulder had rolled into the path), Saul takes it upon himself to take matters into his own hands and performs a sacrifice to God. This was bad enough, but then when Saul proceeds to eliminate the Amalekites – as directed by God – he decides to save for himself the best of the flocks and the cattle “and all that was valuable,” including – presumably – the King of the Amalekites, perhaps intending to exchange him for ransom later. God is so angry at Saul’s disobedience that he tells Samuel, “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not carried out my commands.” This is terrible. Saul has caused God himself to change his mind. Such a breach of Covenant can only be rectified with the ritual sacrifice by Samuel of the King of the Amalekites – who was supposed to have been killed by Saul in the first place. “Then Samuel went to Ramah,” his home – to which he had been trying to retire for 8 chapters and several years of disaster on the part of Saul. “Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.” 1 Samuel 15:34-35.

What a cautionary tale for an election year.

Time after time, Saul takes matters into his own hands instead of following God’s command (and the laws of the land). And what is God’s command – from Samuel to Isaiah to Jeremiah to the great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel to Paul’s letter to the Romans? Justice. Distributive, unconditional, free gift, grace-filled justice. But doesn’t the violence in this story fly in the face of all that? God wants Saul to destroy all traces of the Amalekites – women, children, old people, men, cattle, sheep – maybe even scorch their earth with fire and sow it with salt. Instead of pardoning or rescuing the captured king Agag – which would have been a serious enough personal and political rebuke to Saul – Samuel cuts him up into pieces as a human sacrifice “before God”; and Agag knows he has met his own judgment: “Surely this is the bitterness of death,” he says.

But it’s not about political execution in the service of Empire. Samuel’s act restores the Covenant the people of Israel had with God, which their king Saul had dishonored. Samuel’s act is an echo of the earlier challenge that Saul had righteously and graphically delivered to the people who had agreed to surrender to a pagan enemy, and refused to join Saul’s army against the Ammonites. In that case, the people had broken the Covenant with God. Saul chops up a yoke of oxen and carries the pieces around to all the camps, saying “Whoever does not come out [and support] Saul and Samuel, so shall it be done to his oxen!” So should it have been done to Saul.

Breaking Covenant with God brings war, famine, disease, death, economic, political, personal disaster. Instead of acting from radical abandonment of self-interest (love), which brings the restoration of God’s rule, where the lion and the lamb lie down in distributive, balanced, justice and peace, civilizations are normally built through victory, whether military, economic, political, or personal, and only after such victory are justice and peace discussed. Justice in normal civilization is retribution: an eye for an eye. In Samuel’s bloody, graphic demonstration, Saul’s imperialism, which he chose for himself, is ransomed life-for-life. God himself regrets ever choosing Saul as the people’s king, and Samuel’s personal grief is profound. The only recourse for God is to overturn convention and choose a lowly shepherd, the youngest of eight sons – David is not even the magical number seven.

Much later, as the writer of John’s gospel tells the story, God acts again to demonstrate to the blind people, who prefer the false brilliance of empire, how to restore God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. This time the “king” is a powerless peasant who trusted the promise, even though it meant losing his life. But the community that John’s Jesus was addressing did not go far enough. Then as now, joining the new Covenant means going beyond identity as “belief” to identity as purpose. Whether the 1st Century or the 21st, acceptance of the new Covenant means choosing to participate in the program. That can only be accomplished by abandoning self-interest and trusting the promise. “If you were born blind,” John’s Jesus says, “you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘we see, [and you do not participate]’ your sin remains.”

We have no excuse.

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