King David's Descent
It seems like a more appropriate reading from the Old Testament for today might have been the story of Noah and the flood, seeing as how we've apparently set a record for rainy days in June. And if the flood is upon us, I'm afraid that means none of us made it only the ark ... (and I bet they laughed, too).
At any rate, we’re now reading the stories about David’s life from the Old Testament books of 1 and 2 Samuel, and we’ll be with these stories all the way until the end of August. And it’s no wonder: David is one of those characters without whom we might not have a Bible at all - or a Jewish or even Christian tradition, for that matter. To Jews, he was the founder of Jerusalem and basically modern day Judaism, the first and only king to really unite the nation after years of operating as scattered, unstable tribes. To Christians, meanwhile, he’s the literal ancestor of Jesus, who was cast as a new David to Israel and the whole world. It’s hard to imagine Jesus existing (literally) or in the way we’ve come to understand him without David. So these are obviously important stories, and so far, we’ve read about his early years. Just prior to last week’s story, Samuel, who was the last judge of Israel (judges were sort of proto-kings of Israel, who ruled when called upon - it was sort of a federacy instead of a monarchy), was pressured by the people of Israel to put a king in place, so he anointed Saul, but soon regretted that decision and, at God’s request, went out looking for another king.
So he went to the old tribesman Jesse’s house. It’s a really remarkable scene, if you remember it from last week: Jesse had eight sons, and trotted them out one by one, starting oldest to youngest. One by one, Samuel rejected them, noting to Jesse that only seven of the eight sons were presented. So Jesse trundled back out to the fields and brought in his unassuming youngest son, David, whom Samuel anointed immediately. It was a while, though, before David became King. In the meantime, leading up to our passage for today, his older brothers went off to fight with Saul against the Philistines, Israel’s main threat in those days. David wasn’t sent to fight, but his father, Jesse, sent him to the battlefield to (charmingly) take his older brothers some cheeses and various foods. And that’s where David learned that the giant enemy Goliath had issued a challenge to the Israelite army: that if anyone can defeat him, that person will win the victory on behalf of all Israel.
David walked onto this scene after a nearly forty-day standoff, which brings us to the passage we read this morning: David approaches King Saul and asks to take him on, and after some hesitation, Saul agrees. So he puts his armor on David, but David isn’t used to it and takes it off, goes out w/ nothing but his shepherd’s tunic and slingshot, and instantly kills Goliath. (By the way, our text conveniently leaves off the last crucial verse, where he takes up Goliath’s own sword and cuts off his head with it. No space indeed, as it claims in the header! There’s plenty of room in that margin, and I’ve seen them use much smaller fonts to fit whole stories in.) But anyway, there’s so much to say about this story that it’s more than overwhelming. But a question that intrigued me, and one that comes up a lot both in written commentary and art of this scene, is whether or not this was the triumph for David we assume it was. On the one hand, it seems kind of obvious that it was. He broke the 40-day stalemate, allowing the Israelite army to defeat the entire Philistine army. He convinced the people that he was worthy to become their king, and, once king, he made Israel into a big, powerful united kingdom - the strongest it has probably ever been. On the other hand, David was never quite the same after this. The light, unencumbered boy that approached the battlefield with his delivery of cheeses, who casually removed his heavy adult armor, who sprang into action before weighing the consequences or risks, became after this moment a calculating, powerful, protective king. According to one version of this story (and there are different versions of David’s life in our Bible) he takes up Goliath’s sword and keeps it in his own tent from then on, which could be read as a symbol for the the way he becomes, in some ways, like the enemy he slew. The artist Caravaggio painted this scene several times - not the battle scene, but the scene that became most popular in artists’ portrayals of this episode during the Renaissance, where David is holding Goliath’s severed head. And it’s interesting to see the different ways he interpreted it through his paintings. In one, David looks flush and triumphant, and there’s no doubt this is seen as a wonderful moment in his life. In another painting, David is holding out Goliath’s head toward the viewer, and Goliath’s head is a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself! Thus it becomes a sad commentary on the old being vanquished by the young, and Caravaggio’s struggles with his own mortality.
But the third painting intrigued me most. In this case David is in the process of cutting off Goliath’s head, which is again facing the viewer (you notice I didn’t feature any of these on the programs for this week!), and you notice immediately that the two of them look alike. I think Caravaggio saw in this story the ambiguity of David’s triumph, and the warning it issues to the reader: be careful, lest in trying to kill the thing that you hate the most, you become it. While I’m sure we’ll never have to worry about this in a literal sense, figuratively we do this all the time: We put people down whom we don’t like and, in the process, become uglier than they ever were. We try to overcome something about ourselves that we hate, only to have it get the better of us because of our obsession with it. The list goes on, and such examples remind us that a life bitterly spent fighting enemies can only make us one, too. As we keep reading this story, we’ll learn of some positive examples from David’s life. But we’re also going to find that David’s life is as much a warning as it is an example, making for a secondary lesson here: that great people tend to leave mixed legacies. In fact, I’m not sure David would have made it on that ark! But thankfully for him and us, God had already promised never to send a flood again.