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Second Sunday after the Epiphany Year B

  • I Samuel 3: 1-10 (11-20)

Samuel plays a pivotal role in a time of transition of epochal change from old systems of authority– prophets and judges– to something totally new for God’s people– monarchy.  As a young boy he is called not through the traditional channels of authority, nor even by his mentor, Eli, but directly by God.  In that calling he is given a message for Eli: the lineage of your family as minsters of God will cease.  His call sets that pattern for his life as God’s servant.  He will make and break many traditional centers of authority, even kings.  The venerable ways God related to God’s people in the past are changing.

  • Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17

The psalmist discovers that God’s knowledge of him goes deeper than he ever imagined.   God has known him from the womb.  “From behind and in front, you shaped me.”

  • I Corinthians 6: 12-20

In one of his occasional outbursts, Paul displays discomfort with the human body and its functions, including sex, except between a husband and wife.

  • John 1: 43-51

The gospel writer varies significantly from his predecessors, Mark, Luke and Matthew, in his narrative of Jesus’ call of his disciples.  He alone introduces a “Nathaniel,” who appears only one other time, as a witness to the resurrection of Christ (21:2).  John depicts Nathaniel as a sincere Jew who recognizes Jesus immediately as the Messiah.  In an intricate play with well-known symbols– the fig tree and Jacob’s ladder– John establishes a theme that will pervade his gospel: a distinction between the good Jews who accept Jesus as Messiah and the condemned Jews who do not.  (This contrast between “good” and “bad” Jews runs throughout John’s gospel and became through history a rationale for violence against Jews.)

Texts settle nothing.  They are more like provocateurs.  Because they are human constructs made for human understanding, they are never free of human motives, prejudices and power plays.  Furthermore, the author cannot control all future interpretations her text inaugurates.  “Since the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud [and we could add Barthes, Foucault and Derrida among others] we have become aware that ‘texts’ are seldom what they seem to be,” Anthony Thistelton reminds us in Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise, (p. 68)  His observation includes biblical texts and their interpretations.  “It is one task of theology, among others, to attempt to disentangle manipulative  power-bids from non-manipulative truth claims, and to distinguish evidence, argument, or valid testimony from modes of rhetoric, which rely on seduction, disguised force, or illegitimate appeals to privilege.”  (p. 27)  So texts that are regarded by believers as sacred, because they are written by individual human beings in specific times and contexts for endless human reading and interpretation, require vigilance.  To use Michel Foucault’s observation about all human language, “a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth.”  (“Discourse and Truth: the Problemization of Parishesia,” Joseph Pearson, ed. Foucault archive, unpublished, p. 8)  

These insights about the nature of human texts and their interpretations, and sacred texts in particular, are relevant for today’s readings and gospel.  Paul’s discomfort with the human body and John’s distinction between ‘good’ Jews and ‘bad’ Jews are lazy prejudices with serious, even fatal consequences for human [Western] history.  But biblical texts include their own corrective.  The story of Samuel is the story of one, called directly by God not through any human channels, who from his youth and throughout his entire life will create and undermine human authorities, even religious authorities, for God’s greater truth. Thistelton identifies a new task for those who read and interpret biblical texts:  to distinguish between “manipulative power-bids from non-manipulative truth claims….” 

From his call as a child and throughout his entire life, Samuel sometimes declares God’s role in making a king but will later challenge that king’s authority, also in God’s name.  Even at the anointing of God’s chosen, Saul, as the first king of Israel, Samuel tells the people, “You have rejected God today.” (I Samuel 10: 19)  Human authority may have contingent necessity and utility, but it is never permanent and is never to be confused with God’s ways, which are not our ways. 

Paul’s discomforts and prejudices are quite understandable for the time and influences that shaped him.  John’s need to distance the early church from the emerging Jewish synagogue may have had a contingent, tactical motive.  But the pain and suffering and even death that those texts and their interpreters have justified over the past two millennia are incalculable and horrific.  They are “manipulative power-bids”  and certainly not “non-manipulative truth claims,” which always declare God’s greater truth and always undermine human prejudices, no matter how venerable. 

What are the biblical “truth claims” that endure and undermine human prejudice?  God’s faithfulness, God’s persistence, God’s reliability, God’s love which will not give up on us even though God knows us better than we know ourselves; “from “behind” and “in front” of us, as the psalmist knows.  God’s relentless, uncompromising quest for justice, pure honesty and fairness for all.  God’s willingness to do whatever it takes to communicate these “truth claims” to us, even sending One who will endure the complete range of human behavior, from warmth and affection to cruelty and violence, among those who were closest to him and his enemies. 

Biblical texts contain contemporary values that have been used to justify cruelty in God’s name.  But, biblical texts also contain a built-in corrective.  There is an iconoclastic tradition throughout biblical texts that challenges and even overthrows past patterns, no matter how venerable.  There is always a growing edge to God;’s work in the world.  Samuel is a classic example in the Hebrew scriptures and the gospels are built around that same role for Jesus who was always insisting that God was not finished in a project of love for all creation.

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