Bad News for the Next King

       I was about ten years old when I first experienced grief.   I had a baby sister who was born weak and only lived for three days.  I never met her.  But I cried when she died.  I don’t think I really understood what was going on but my dad and my older brother and sister all cried so I cried too.  In a way my grief was borrowed from the grief of others.

       Since then I’ve had grief of my own.  As we get older, we experience it more and more.  As we get truly old we face the loss of everyone of our age group – the people we’ve walked through life alongside.  We face the loss of our spouse.  Ultimately we face the loss of our own selves.

       Our English word “grief” comes from two roots.  One means to be burdened, the other means to be hurt. So grief is to be burdened with hurt.  We all know the feeling.  We have all lost people we love. We’ve all lost treasured relationships.  We have all grieved over lost dreams.

       Last Sunday we saw how Saul and Jonathan are killed fighting against the Philistines at Mt. Gilboa.  David is not at the battle.  He’s down south fighting against Amalekite raiders. 

       Suddenly a man whom we later learn is also an Amalekite shows up.  He’s exhausted.  He has torn his clothes and put dirt on his head as signs of great mourning.  He brings David the news of the defeat of the army and the death of Saul and three sons.  When he falls to the ground, however, it isn’t to mourn for the lost but to seek his own gain.  His grief is all for show.

       He tells David and his men that he’s just come from Mt. Gilboa.  The army of Israel is defeated.  Saul and Jonathan are dead. 

       So far he’s reported the facts.  But then he makes up a story that he believes will get him a fat reward from David – the story of how he personally killed David’s great enemy and persecutor, Saul.

       Now we know from the last chapter of 1 Samuel that Saul is badly wounded by a Philistine archer.  He kills himself on his own sword to escape being captured and tormented by the victorious Philistines.  But the Amalekite tells David that he is the one who gave Saul the final blow.  To prove it, he has stripped the body of the royal crown and amulet and brought them to lay at David’s feet.  “It’s just terrible what happened to Saul – but here you go.  Look at what I brought.”  He looks up waiting for the reward David will surely give the man who killed his enemy and made him king.

       The Amalekite has badly misjudged David.  “How is it that you were not afraid to put forth your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?” David doesn’t know that he’s just dealing with a scavenger.  David thinks that he dealing with the murderer of God’s anointed king. He thinks he is dealing a man who gladly did what David would not do when he had Saul at his mercy. 

       This Amalekite is an outsider.  He cannot know that the crown is given only by God, not a murdering stranger.  The man expects a handsome reward from David.  But the reward he gets is death.  David sees his death and speaks a cold benediction.  “Your blood be on your own head, for your own mouth has testified against you.”

       There’s a lesson for us all.  Don’t lie about killing kings.  Or, at least don’t lie to David about killing kings.

       The hard men around David, his warriors, look at David. The Amalekite is dead and good riddance.  But he has, after all, brought good news and good gifts.  Saul is dead.  David holds the crown.  David can now become king.

       Is David glad to have Saul gone?  Is it, “You shouldn’t have done that but…”?

       No, David is not glad.  He is heartbroken.  He is heartbroken for Saul and he is heartbroken for his dear friend Jonathan.  He is heartbroken because Saul’s death is a shoddy one – wounded by an archer, falling on his own sword, robbed by a passing Amalekite who happens to be in the neighborhood. 

        When Nabal dies David says, “Good riddance” and marries the widow.  But Saul wasn’t a death-deserving fool like Nabal.  Saul had once been very great.  David mourns because Saul had not always been filled with rage and bitterness.  He had once been filled with the purpose of God.

       One of the things that comes out strongly in this chapter is that David is very at home in his own grief.  It seems odd, even contradictory, that in order to live totally we must face death totally. But David, who lived exuberantly, also lamented fiercely. His exuberance and lamentation are two aspects of David’s most basic belief that that life matters. David honors human life—the sheer fact of human life—extravagantly.

       Out of 150 Psalms a full 105 or 70% are laments. Many of these laments originate in the praying life of David. David repeatedly faces loss, disappointment and death. And David doesn’t avoid, deny, or soft-pedal any of those difficulties. He faces everything and he prays everything.

        The contrast with our contemporary culture is obvious.  We have a style of print and television journalism that reports disaster endlessly and scrupulously: crime and war, famine and flood, political malfeasance and societal scandal.  I spent a month as a news reporter intern at a television station.  I learned right away that if it bleeds, it leads.” 

       The one virtually foolproof way for getting noticed in our culture is to do something bad. The worse the act, the higher the profile. In the wake of whatever has gone wrong or whatever wrong has been done, commentators gossip, reporters interview, editors pontificate, Pharisees moralize; then psychological analyses are conducted, political reforms initiated, and academic studies funded.

       But there's not one line of lament.  There's no true lament because truth isn't taken seriously, love isn't taken seriously. Human life doesn't matter as life—God-given, Christ-redeemed, Spirit-blessed life. It counts only as "news." There's no dignity to any of it. It's trivialized.

       David, however, laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. The two repeated names store up years and years of maniacal persecution from Saul and forced separation from his great friend Jonathan.  But both names receive equal billing in the lament. Both are mourned and both are dignified.

“Saul and Jonathan—beloved, beautiful!

Together in life, together in death!

Swifter than plummeting eagles,

    stronger than proud lions.”

        Saul hated David. Saul chased David. Saul defrauded David. All those wilderness years, David lived in a world filled with Saul’s hate. Danger, hardship, loneliness, loss—all because of Saul. But to David there was something else going on that was more significant than Saul's hatred.  That was Gods anointing of Saul. What God did for Saul far outweighed anything that Saul did to David. And that is what David chooses to deal with in his pain.

        Jonathan, of course, was David’s dear friend and brother.  With Jonathan there was nothing to sort out.  It was all good. 

        David’s lament is a series of beautiful word pictures. The New Revised Standard Translation starts out "Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places!" But the word "Glory" (hassebi) comes from the word for "gazelle.”  It carries the meaning of "beauty.”

        That’s why Eugene Petersen translates it this way,

        “O, O, Gazelle of Israel, struck down (on the high places,)

     the mighty warriors fallen, fallen!

Don't announce it in the city of Gath,

     Don’t post the news in the streets of Ashkelon;

Don’t give those coarse Philistine girls

     one more excuse for a drunken party!

No more dew or rain for you, hills of Gilboa,

      and not a drop from springs and wells;

For there the warrior’s weapons were dragged through the mud,

     Saul's shield left there to tarnish and rust.”

       The deaths of Saul and Jonathan are a blow to the entire nation.  “How the mighty have fallen!" is a cry from the heart.  It expresses personal grief and appeals to the hearts of others.  The high places are the places of sacrifice.  That’s where Saul and Jonathan have died.

       David insists that the news not be carried to the representative Philistine cities of Ashkelon and Gath.  That’s not David’s to control. Philistine runners have already reported the great victory.  The dances and debauchery have already started. 

       But David cannot bear the thought of Philistine women dancing in the streets to celebrate Saul's death. I remember my strong visceral reaction to the televised pictures of the Muslim masses in places like Bosnia and Palestine celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers.  That was appalling.  Celebration in the face of such unutterable loss is an obscenity.       

        David then turns to the place where Saul and Jonathan died.  He pronounces a curse upon the mountain and its surrounding fields. He calls for drought to leave them withered and sterile.  David laments the bloody defilement of Saul's heavy leather shield, now spoiled -- no longer in need of oiling against the cracking of the leather. Saul's shield is no longer anointed with oil because Saul, the anointed one is dead.

        David then turns from his outrage over the royals' deaths and pours out his praise for their great valor. Though he had not been present for the battle on Mount Gilboa, David had fought beside Saul and Jonathan in other fights. He is confident that they would have fought until the bitter end. The image of the heroes' weapons shedding the blood and slicing through the fat of the enemy is graphic, but it serves to bring the horrors of battle to life, the warriors' heroism in the midst of it. Since blood and fat are often paired in sacrificial terminology, David imagines the heroes' valiant feats as an offering to God.

       But to David, the quality that set Saul and Jonathan apart was their loyalty to each other. Jonathan loved David and swore his life in covenant to him, but he never defected from his father's camp. Despite the tension between them he remained faithful to his father, even to the point of death. 

       Now Jonathan his dear friend is gone and David is desolate. 

       Many of us are conditioned by our upbringing to "keep a stiff upper lip," to deny our feelings, and to shortchange the essential process of grieving when loss comes into our lives. "Big" boys and girls, we are taught, don't cry.        

       Some people, perhaps in their attempt to demonstrate their Christian hope, pretend that they don’t feel what they feel.  But even as Christians we must realize that our “yes” to hope for the future will not necessarily bring us immediate comfort or peace.  Grief must be allowed to be what it is, and God must be allowed to do what God will do through it.  Sometimes the letting go will open us to deeper levels of pain from which we have been shielding ourselves.  As Henri Nouwen writes to Christian caregivers: “Our task with people’s pain is not to fix it but to make it deeper so it can be healed.” 

        David hasn’t been shielding himself.  He expresses his grief in physical ways. He tears his clothes.  He fasts.  He weeps aloud—and in the company of "all the men who were with him." David also expresses his sorrow through poetry.

       And through giving vent to his grief, rather than bottling it up inside him, David is able to absorb the shock of the tragedy and move past it, rather than becoming emotionally stuck and incapable of functioning.  

      “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
           you were very dear to me.
       Your love for me was wonderful,
           more wonderful than that of women.

       How the mighty have fallen!
           The weapons of war have perished!"

       Some gay activists in the church have actually  suggested that David’s emotional openness and his statement that Jonathan’s love was “more wonderful than that of women” are signs that David and Jonathan were gay lovers.  They ask, “Who but a gay guy could cry like that and compose poetry at the same time?”

       Well straights can bond with each other and straights can sing – especially if the straight is a man after God’s own heart.  For God in human flesh also grieved and wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus “whom he loved.”    He wept over the City of Jerusalem as He saw its fate in rejecting Him.

       In the same way, David grieves for his own loss – the loss of his dear friend.   David grieves for lost greatness – the man Saul might have been.  

       David grieves for the impact on the people.  This isn’t just a private tragedy. It is a national tragedy -- like the assassination of President Kennedy or the attack on Pearl Harbor.  We cried for the World Trade Center even if we didn’t know anyone there.  For we are part of a people and when one part of a world is touched we are all touched.

       David also grieves that the world is the way it is – fallen and corrupt and gone terribly wrong.  His words about Mt. Gilboa echo God’s curse on the earth because of the sin of Adam – “cursed is the ground because of you.”  They also look forward to Paul’s words in Romans 8 that one day the created world, even Mt. Gilboa, will be made a participant in the glorious liberty of the children of God.  Mt. Gilboa didn’t want to be a battlefield. 

       It’s not in the text but I suspect that David also weeps because of his own heart.  If David’s heart is at all like my heart – and I think it is – there could not help but be the thought at least in the back of his mind that the death of Saul is actually a good thing. 

       Think about it. His enemy, the one who has been trying to kill him is dead.  The way is clear for David to become king.  And the great thing is that nobody could blame David.  He was miles away when it happened.  There must have been an emotional sense of release at some level.  I don’t think that’s David’s primary thought but I think the thought is lurking there and David knows it.  I think he weeps at his own heart and we must all weep about our own hearts at times if we are honest.

       David doesn’t kneel for a moment, shed his manly tear and pop up smiling and strong.   David experiences and communicates it all.  He fully lives the first part of Paul’s words about grief in 1 Thessalonians 4 where he says, “Go ahead and grieve.”  Paul says this because grief is an authentic expression of love and loss.  Good grief is healthy grief.  If you try to bury grief it will always come out.  One way or another it will come out.

       David doesn’t shield himself.  But even in his grief, David knows that he serves a God who can handle and honor and ennoble his pain.  David writes in Psalm 56:8 of how God will “record his lament and actually take all of his tears and place them in a bottle.” 

       We can grieve knowing that God will do the same for us.  God will forgive our sins.  But God will also save our tears.  And God will cry them with us.  God doesn’t call us to deny our pain but to embrace our pain in confidence that He will embrace us.

       But we know more than that.  We know something that David could only hope for.   We know about Easter.

       As Christians we know that because Jesus is alive, death does not have the final word.  So while we are to grieve, 1 Thessalonians 4 also says we are not to grieve as people without hope.  We are an Easter people.  We have hope in Jesus Christ.

      That hope in Christ is why Winston Churchill planned his own funeral the way he did.  Churchill kept the plans in a file labeled "Operation Hope Not." But it did happen and it took place in London's St. Paul's Cathedral.

       In his plans, Churchill included many of the great hymns of the church and used the eloquent Anglican liturgy.  But there was something different.

       At his direction, a bugler positioned high in the dome of St. Paul's intoned, after the benediction, the sound of "taps"-- the signal that says the day is over.

       But then came the most dramatic turn. As Churchill instructed, as soon as "taps" was finished, another bugler, placed on the other side of the great dome, played the notes of reveille -- "it's time to get up, it's time to get up, it's time to get up in the morning."

       This was Churchill’s testimony that at the end of history, the last note will not be "taps;" it will be "reveille."   In the words of 1 Corinthians 15, “the trumpet will sound and we shall be raised incorruptible.

       Mt. Gilboa doesn’t have the last word.  The Philistines – whatever the Philistines are for us -- don’t have the last word.  God has spoken the last word in Jesus Christ.  Jesus said, “Because I live, you will also live.” 

       We know Easter.  That is why we grieve, but not like people who have no hope.  Jesus is our hope and our hope for all whom we love.