Until the Day of His Death
7-11-2017 Tuesday (7-12 Wednesday)
35 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.
Acts 8:32-43
"Please come to
us without delay." 39 So Peter got up and went with them; and when he
arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him,
weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she
was with them.
Luke 23:56b-24:11
Now it was Mary
Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who
told this to the apostles. 11 But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and
they did not believe them.
It’s been awhile since I’ve done the Lectionary. I may
change the lectionary I use, switching to one that requires me to open a book
and use my hands to turn the pages. At any rate, I am torn today between
looking for a unifying theme, looking for a Jungian insight, or looking for the
Zen twist. I’m going to start writing down notions and see what happens.
OT: It looks to
me as if there are motivations and understandings hidden within the story of
Saul and Samuel. I couldn’t help but think that the really bad thing that Saul did was to profit from the destruction
of the Amalekites, by sparing the life of their king (not out of mercy, but out
of expediency), and taking all their valuable goods. In doing so, Saul was
revealing that he valued the lives of people less than the profit he could make,
or the political advantage he might gain. Sociopathic, much? Let’s just suppose
that the whole situation was an awful Catch-22, and it became evident that it
would be necessary to kill all the Amalekites for the people of Israel to
survive. So, in order to avoid turning Israel into a brutal nation that profits
from slaughter and doesn’t even grieve, God says to “utterly destroy” the
Amalekites. So this is why Samuel rips Saul’s robe and “tears Israel from him,”
because Samuel doesn’t get it. Then Samuel kills Agag “before the Lord,” in
order to preclude Israel doing political deal-making while standing over the
bodies of the dead. Samuel wasn’t being vengeful; he was horrified and
grieving, and this is demonstrated in that he deposed Saul before he went ahead
and did what Saul failed to do. It’s an epic tragedy.
NT: What struck
me in the passage was my mental image of the women showing Peter all the
clothing and tunics made by Dorcas. At first my image was of a sort of thrift
store or church bazaar with piles of stuff on tables and the women conducting
Peter along to see all the items on display. Today when I picked up the threads
of reflection, it occurred to me that the women were wearing them. That makes more sense, really. Peter was an important
guy, and they would have asked him to visit because Dorcas was a distinguished
member of the church. I don’t suppose that he thought much about plans to raise
her from the dead. So the women were mostly trying to bring home to Peter how exceptional
Dorcas was, and how much they wanted to show their regard for her. My scanty
research tells me that burial customs probably still insisted that a person be
buried on the same day that they died, so this would have been the interval
before burial in which friends and family gathered to do honor to the deceased.
Gospel: The
phrase that struck me was “an idle tale.” How patronizing and arrogant, for the
male disciples to never even consider how unlikely it would be for these
grieving and traumatized women to make up “an idle tale.” What reason could
they possibly have to do that? For the men to imagine that this story was
inconsequential gossip would have required a whole bunch of other unkind
assumptions, such as: the women’s grief
was not as significant as the men’s; the women were safe to go to the tomb
because they were unimportant, whereas the men were wanted by the authorities and
could use that to justify their cowardice and neglect of the proper customs for
attending to the dead; the men could indulge in their resentment of the women
because the women weren’t feeling properly sorry for the predicament that the
men were in. I could go on, but there’s really no point in it.
I’m starting to get a glimmer here. There is a flimsy thread
connecting these stories, and it’s not just that they all concern death. The
tenuous hint seems to have to do with the response to death.
Saul responded by showing a predatory indifference to the
dead by taking plunder in order to profit from those he killed, and Samuel considered
this an inexcusable sin, did his best to make it right, and grieved over Saul
until the end of his days.
The women responded by showing how profoundly Dorcas’s love
for them had spilled over into the tangible gifts that she had left them, and Paul
responded by showing how deeply he had been affected by the women’s heartache
over Dorcas’s death, so that he was moved to pray for her to be returned to
them.
The disciples responded by falling into a cognitive
dissonance in which they were grieving a terrible loss and, at the very same
time, being contemptuous and dismissive of that identical grief by calling the
women’s story “an idle tale.”
It’s beginning to seem as if the stories are about grief,
not death:
Samuel grieved over Saul, the women grieved over Dorcas, the
disciples (both men and women) grieved over Jesus.
Grief is important. All the ways we grieve are significant.
Mourning is essential. The world is filled with sorrow, suffering, misery,
discontent, and desolation. We must respond, we can’t help it. Pay attention to
how you respond.
I guess this reflection went down the Zen track after all.
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