Wednesday, January 10, 2024
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Samuel’s story continues
One day Eli was asleep in his usual place. His eyes had grown weak and he could not see. But the lamp of God was not yet extinguished, and Samuel was sleeping near the Ark. And the Lord called to Samuel.
Eli as asleep as usual. Samuel doesn’t know what to do, so he wakes him. “Did you call me?” No, I did not.
And then again the same thing.
The third time Eli, blind and mostly asleep, at last hears God himself.
Then Eli understood the Lord was calling Samuel. He told Samuel, “Next time say, ‘Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.’”
Yahweh told Samuel He would truly destroy Eli and his sons, as he had said. Samuel reluctantly told Eli this prediction. Eli bowed to God’s will. And during the next battle between Israel and the Philistines, his sons are killed and Eli falls over backward out of his chair and dies.
So much suffering.
Samuel grew up, and the Lord was with him, not permitting any word of his to be without effect.
Scott Peck begins his seminal study of The Road Less Traveled with the words, “Life is difficult.” Since the fall we are all fallen, right? Our bodies will all be carted away. We make our own trouble. But even when we don’t, trouble finds us. Often we die in ways that make no sense to us.
Jesus grasped the hand of Simon’s mother-in-law, who was very sick. Immediately the fever left her. Later that night he cured many who were sick and drove out many demons. In the morning, rising before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.
What did Jesus pray? Well, he got his marching orders for the next day, perhaps. But I also think he asked his Abba why people had to suffer. Even his healing was momentary. Simon’s mother-in-law would eventually die. That was the way natural life worked, of course. New life simply rose from the old. But God had given men and women eternal souls, and separating soul from body meant great pain, inside and out.
Jesus remembered the beginning.
God said to himself, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” This would mean poor choices and selfish behavior, as everyone sought to blame others for the evil and claim the good for themselves. “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
Rev. Moon was convinced that God’s ultimate intention was for Jesus the Christ to bring both physical and spiritual eternal life to his children. With Jesus’ coming, the gates of Eden would be opened, and the tree of life would end all death. But Jesus could not accomplish this dual salvation. Our souls would be saved, but not our bodies.
Was Jesus grieving this? Was he pleading with our Father for more than temporary healing power? Or perhaps understanding more deeply God’s ultimate plan and his place in it?
What happened in those pre-dawn prayers?
Two thousand years later, Richard Rohr thinks about our response to both Jesus’ healing and the suffering in our lives, before and after. After pointing out that only one out of 250,000 saguaro cactus seeds make it to early maturity, he says …
Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as simply the price of life.
We can do that too, and when we do the unexpected result is often “an unexpected deep gratitude for what is given.”
Father Rohr carries on with this vision, putting it in religious terms:
Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call “the First Body of Christ,” has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering. It lives the message without saying yes or no to it. It holds and resolves all the foundational forces, all the elementary principles and particles within itself—willingly, it seems. This is the universe in its wholeness, the “great nest of being,” including even the powerless, invisible, and weak parts that have so little freedom or possibility.
But unlike that “first body,” we ate from the tree of knowledge. Of good and evil. We think we know stuff. What happens when we, like Eli for example, ultimately say NO to the suffering coming at us. When we hurt others to avoid it? Because we want more, we deserve more, we are entitled to more. And so in every conceivable way, we say NO.
The Second Body of Christ, the formal church, always has the freedom to say yes or no. That very freedom allows it to say “no” much of the time, especially to any talk of dying, stumbling, admitting mistakes, or falling.
The amazing thing is that God does not just leave us there, dying physically and spiritually by our own hand. As the Lord stood with Samuel, he does not “permit any word of his to be without effect.” Rohr concludes with hope and joy:
Yet God seems ready and willing to wait for, and to empower, free will and a free “yes.”
(1 Samuel 3, Psalm 40, John 10, Mark 1)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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