Heaven Forbid

1 Samuel 1:1-20

20In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, "I have asked him of the LORD."

Acts 1:1-14

7He replied, 'It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…’

Luke 20:9-19

"This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours." 15So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.' When they heard this, they said, 'Heaven forbid!' 17But he looked at them and said, 'What then does this text mean: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"? 

From yesterday’s reading (Genesis); Sunday 6/18

But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”….

[The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”] 

I’ve started a new pattern in my Lectio Divina, that of trying to find a theme that links the readings for a given day. I started with the topic of barren women, since that was in yesterday’s reading (Sunday) and also in the story of Hannah from today. I got a bit sidetracked online trying to find references to archetypes and mythological themes involving barren-ness and, oddly, didn’t really find much. The feminine archetypes all seemed to have titles like “The Good Mother,” “The Bad Mother,” “The Seductress,” and so on. I found scholarly feminist articles that talked about subjugation of women, and the source of women’s power being limited to their ability to produce offspring. None of it struck a chord with me. So I stopped thinking anthropomorphically, and started considering the stories from a more liminal viewpoint. Metaphorical stuff started to happen, and the theme that started to emerge had something to do with “things we don’t expect.”

In the OT passages Sarah had established the expectation that she would never have a child, and Hannah was so obsessed and over-the-top in her frantic craving for a child that Levi thought that she was drunk.

In the NT passage, the disciples have gotten so cozy with the risen Lord, that they go back to their habitual harping on their same old question of “When will this-or-that happen?” It seems to me that they are begging the question in their assumption that it’s all about something that hasn’t happened yet. “Yet,” what a scary word!  Jesus patiently tells them again, for the umpteenth time, that it isn’t about that, it’s about the power of the Holy Spirit. In the realm of the Holy Spirit, there isn’t any “yet,” there is only Now.

In the Gospel passage, the liminal hint again is about expectations. The usurping tenants kill the heir, because they want the inheritance for themselves. They are counting on the ancient principle of “possession is nine tenths of the law.” It’s really obvious here that the tenants aren’t thinking straight. Even the most indifferent observer is capable of noticing that the tenants have acted on the assumption that things that haven’t happened “yet” can influence the present moment. Hence their dreadful mistake of killing the heir, as if he had already inherited the property, and was the only one they needed to worry about. Even the Pharisees said, “Heaven forbid!” I’m pretty sure that the Pharisees weren’t saying Heaven should forbid that the landlord should come and throw the tenants out. No, I think they were saying, “Heaven forbid that anyone should be so stupid as those tenants.” That interpretation certainly accounts for their outrage when Jesus compares them to those same dim-witted tenants. Here again, the Pharisees are operating on their mistaken assumption that Jesus isn’t the real deal, and their expectation is that getting rid of him will leave them comfortably back in control of the world-as-it-should-be. They absolutely refuse to consider that they might be wrong. In fact, I don’t think they are even able to examine their own assumptions. They just get all pissed off.

It comes down to expectations again, and the fact that we can count on God to overturn those expectations.

Sarah expected she would never know pleasure again, and had given up on God’s promise that she would be the mother of nations. It certainly explains why she was embarrassed that God heard her laugh. But in the end she names her son “Laughter,” for the one thing that demonstrated her mistaken assumption.

Hannah does the same thing, naming her son “I-have-asked-him-of-the-Lord” after her embarrassment at the priest Levi’s mistaken assumption that she was drunk.

Acts shows Jesus being much more direct. He just gives the disciples a dope-slap and tells them, “that’s not something you could ever know, because your assumptions about power are totally bogus. Cut it out. Drop your expectations.”

Luke has Jesus essentially doing the same thing to the Pharisee in all of us, turning the tables, pulling the rug out from under our expectations, and leaving us blinking right in the place where we were before, just without the greasy filter of our notions about the past, the future, and how we suppose things are supposed to work.

So, we can get all mad about it the way the Pharisees did; we can blink bemusedly and say, “Huh?” the way the disciples did; we can laugh about it the way Sarah did; we can turn our embarrassment into a ‘Gotcha!’ the way Hannah did, or we can make a thousand other responses to God’s dope-slaps.

The point is, even if it’s just for an instant, we wake up and we “get it.”

That’s all there is to it.