How is rebellion a sin of sorcery?

Meditation for 4^th Sunday of Easter

23 April 2018

“…How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul,

now that I myself have rejected him?” –1 Samuel 16:1

“What we shall be has not yet been revealed…

when it is revealed we shall be like Him…”

--1 John 3:1-2

Recently my daughter brought me some old college literary magazines she’d come across.  She thought I might like to see them because they included some of my old poems and stories.  She was of the opinion that I might like to see them again.  I was grateful to her for thinking of me, but fearful of what I would find. Afraid of what I would see not only in the words, but behind them –in the young man who wrote them.

So, I let them sit for several days untouched.  Then, a sense of curiosity mingled with obligation and I figured I should at least take a look, so I could give them back to her. At first, I was struck by names of people I had not remembered, but suddenly recalled. It was a pleasantly bittersweet sensation; a nostalgia mingled with regret. I recalled those names; faces came to mind, but also the regret that I had not been kinder or braver. I know I was just a young kid –barely out of my teens—but I wish I had been less self-conscious, more generous toward them.

When I began to read my own works, it only got worse.  I suspect some truths should remain only memory.  By that I mean, being faced with a poem I had long remembered as being pretty good and finding some 37 years later that it just wasn’t… aah, ‘tis a stinging feeling. Like the old adage says of ignorance --it was bliss.  Being suddenly face to face with my own failure was very uncomfortable.  And I would say what was most uncomfortable about it was not that my writing was so mediocre, but that I had remembered it and imagined it so much better.  That feeling of shame at having –it seemed-- lied to myself was very disheartening and humbling.

And this brings me to two things I have read in scripture recently.  My slow walk through the Old Testament has just crossed into the books of Samuel, and I am reading of Saul and his failure at being Israel’s king.  He loses his way by seeking to please the people, instead of God. He is trying to be the kind of king the people want, instead of being the king God has planned for him to be.  And yet after Samuel delivers God’s message of failure, Saul is still concerned with how the people will perceive him.  That is a fascinating little bit of psychological insight on the part of the author, but what is even more interesting to me is the beginning of chapter 16 when God calls out Samuel with that beautifully odd chastisement:

“How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul…”

God is calling Samuel to account. Why is he mourning over something that God has rejected?  What does he hope to gain? What is the point? In a sense, Samuel is rebelling against God’s judgment.  Instead of accepting God’s will, he is mourning over what might have been.  He is refusing to trust that God’s will is always good—even when we don’t understand it.

In the next sentence we learn there is another reason for God’s chastisement.  Samuel has a job to do. God tells him, “fill your horn with oil and go,” because there is another king (David)  to be anointed.  In other words: Why are you sitting here moaning about something you can’t change? Get up and fill your horn and go. I have work for you (cf. 16:1b). 

In a way that’s what I was doing as I looked through those old Laurels magazines. I was mourning over Saul. I was regretting choices I had made, but also promise that had not been fulfilled, dreams that had not been realized and all that might have been.

Of course, there are times when we should look over our lives with remorse and regret and that’s why some of us go to “Confession” and why other might go see a therapist.  We see that things haven’t always been right or good and maybe even that there are patterns of behavior that we want to change.  That’s healthy and good. 

But sitting and bemoaning what cannot be changed is a form of rebellion.  It is not just a refusal to accept the truth, but a kind of challenge to God.  Lurking beneath that moaning is the unhealthy suspicion that if God had left things up to us, we would have done a better job.

“Rebellion is a sin of sorcery,

presumption a crime of idolatry.”

–1 Samuel 15:23

Sitting there, ruminating over old hurts or even old failings, we become like a sorcerer stirring our pot, adding a pinch of spite to a dollop of indignities and then stirring in dash of unfairness and suddenly… voila! A bubbling cauldron of heart hardening stewed egotism ready for a bowl full of Saltines.  

And we can sit there stirring it all up and ladling it over and over until it is boils over, or we can hear that distant voice calling us from somewhere so close it seems to be whispering in our ear:

Why are you still moaning over that? Get up. Fill your horn with oil. There is work to be done.

And that is what I heard at mass this past Sunday. In the second reading from the first letter of John, I heard God calling:

Why are you dwelling in the past? Why are you moaning about what might have been?  That is not who you were made to be.  Who you were made to be has not yet been revealed.  But when it is…

The message of Easter is a message of new life. Yes, we all have made mistakes and yes we all have regrets, but to live in those regrets and to cling to the hurt of those mistakes or hard feelings is to live in a tomb. It is to rebel against the glorified Christ who destroyed death, who opened the tomb that it might be empty.  Why on earth would we want to go back in? To pull the stone back over us and hide in the cold and the dark?

It's not about who you were, or what you did or even who you wanted to be.  You are not the sum of all your mistakes, all your hurts, not even of all your successes; thanks to Christ, we are something new. Something more.  Something made in His image.  We can’t really know what it is, but we know it is something glorious –because it is like Him. So, Mr. Sutter… it is time to put away childish things. Fill your horn (get out your pen), there is anointing to be done.

Deuteronomy 28: Would a loving God fasten a plague upon us?

“The Lord will fasten the plague on you,

until it has exterminated you from the country

which you are about to enter and make your own.”

--Deuteronomy 28: 21

There is a tendency to think of the Old Testament God as a God of judgment, harsh and demanding.  But, if the Bible is the Word of God and if Jesus came "not to abolish the law, but fulfill it" (cf. Mt 5: 17), then (for me) that puts the Old Testament God (Yahweh) in a different light.  If Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, then there is much more to the "law" than blind obedience and harsh judgment. So... what are we to do with a reading like this? Even a whole book like Deuteronomy?  A book that seems obsessed with laws and obedience and punishment. For me, my first step is to consider (when reading scripture) what part of it troubles me.  And in this particular passage, it is that phrase "fasten the plague on you..."That word “fasten” troubles me. And that means it also interests me. I want to think about it; mull it over; see where it takes me.

            Reading through Deuteronomy there is a lot of talk about laws and commandments that God requires His people to fulfill and uphold.  But here in chapters 27 and 28 we start getting some clear and almost nightmarish statements about what happens if they don’t.  In this chapter we have one of the most horrifying visions in the Bible; a vision of parents eating the flesh of their own children (cf. 28:53ff):

“…you will eat the offspring of your own body… the gentlest and tenderest of your men will scowl at his brother and at his wife… not willing to give any of them any of his own children’s flesh, which he is eating…”

The vision of this terrible hunger comes in a warning.  It is part of a curse that is threatened to befall God’s people if they don’t keep and observe His commandments and laws.  The brutality of it, the immensity of it, overwhelms me. This image of a father, even a gentle or tender one,  eating his own children and eating them so selfishly that he will eye his brother and beloved wife suspiciously --like an animal guarding his kill.  What could have prompted the author to have written this? What could have prompted God to have threatened it? How can such a fate be just? How can it be deserved?  How can it be the judgment of a loving and merciful God? Why would God threaten to "fasten" it upon His people if they do not follow and obey Him.

            Scholars may speculate that this prophecy of a curse was possibly written after the fact and reflects some actual catastrophe that befell the Jews (or that they witnessed) –a siege and horrible time of starvation.  But, taken on its own terms, how does this prophecy reflect the God (and the laws) fulfilled in Christ?  Are we to believe that a loving God fastens such punishments on His beloved people?  Is that how Love acted when it came to earth and took flesh and dwelt among us?

            So then, I ask myself (and the text) regardless of what the original scribe intended, what do you reveal about the God who became man and died on a cross for my sins? How is this “curse” a sign of God's love.  And to me, it seems that it can only be a sign of love if we look at it not as something God imposes or threatens, but as dire consequences God is warning us against. What if, instead of reading this as a threat of something God will do to us, we read it is a warning about the "natural" consequences of sin?  When we turn from God we risk becoming beasts capable of eating our own children.  What if God is telling us, fasten yourself to Me, follow My laws, obey My commands and you will become more fully the creatures you were made to be?  But turn away and you will become fastened instead to exploitation, plunder, selfishness, war, famine, blindness and cruelty --even cruelty toward those you should love (even your own children). If we turn away from God, we risk becoming blind beasts who devour our progeny and beg to be enslaved by our captors, our tormentors (our sin). Turn away from God and we will find ourselves begging to become the slaves of prosperity, technology, pleasure and comfort, selfishness and sin. Sound familiar?

           As the commercial used to say:  Calgon –take me away. 

Struggling with strange passages: Reading with four-fold eyes

“But the Lord made Pharaoh stubborn,

And he refused to let them [Israel] go.”

–Exodus 10:27

When dealing with difficult scripture passages, one of the approaches that has been used since almost the beginning of Christianity is to read it in what is sometimes called the four-fold method.  This method seeks meaning in scripture on more than one level. It looks at a passage and seeks one (or more) of four different meanings in the passage: literal, allegorical, moral & anagogical.  Here is a clear demonstration of this method offered by Dante (in a letter describing how his Divine Comedy should be read).

“A first sense derives from the letters themselves, and a second from the things signified by the letters. We call the first sense "literal" sense, the second the "allegorical", or "moral" or "anagogical". To clarify this method of treatment, consider this verse: When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people: Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion (Psalm 113). Now if we examine the letters alone, the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is signified; in the allegory, our redemption accomplished through Christ; in the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace; in the anagogical sense, the exodus of the holy soul from slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. they can all be called allegorical.”

With this in mind, I was wondering: how would this method help me in my reading of Exodus? Especially those troubling passages about God and Pharaoh; i.e. how does Pharaoh’s hardened heart look when read through this lens?

“But the Lord made Pharaoh stubborn,

And he refused to let them [Israel] go.”

–Exodus 10:27

How would one apply the four-fold method to reading this passage?  Literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical? 

So –let’s put it to the test:

                Literally, the Pharaoh was obstinate and would not let the Israelites leave –but what is the lesson we are to learn from this literal reading?  Is it that God bestows his mercy and love as He will and thus Pharaoh –in his sinfulness and ignorance—became even more obstinate simply because God’s grace did not or was not opened to him? Possibly because Pharaoh wasn’t open to it, or possibly because God chose not to open Pharaoh’s heart. However, a lesson we might learn from this literal reading is this: we cannot know God’s will or God’s plan and so perhaps we shouldn’t be judging anyone; not even the Pharaoh or his hardened heart.

Allegorically, Pharaoh is sin and sin often becomes even more obstinate when confronted. Thus we might read into this scene a vision of the Israelites lost in sin (Egypt) and under the control of sin (Pharaoh)— and when God sends help and sin is confronted by God’s message the sinful heart hardens; it grows more obstinate and the sinner appears to fall even more powerfully under sin’s control.

Morally, we see perhaps this: when we confront our sin (or confront sinners), sin may become more emboldened and obstinate; temptations and sinful behaviors may become more present and feel more powerfully in control –refusing to let us go.  And we, slaves to sin, may feel more helpless and unable to escape. But, we must not lose hope. This too may be part of God’s plan.

Anagogical: We are completely in God’s hands –at His mercy—and must put our hope in Him –in His mercy –even when our sin refuses to leave us, even when we feel unable to escape its hold—we must put our hope, our faith, our trust in the mercy of God.  That is our only way –that is the only road out of Egypt, and it  passes right through Calvary.

Yes—for me this is a troubling passage. But troubling isn’t bad. Most of the time, I’m learning, troubling means God is asking me to slow down and pay a little more attention.