Year B, Proper 8: More Than Watchmen for the Morning

Year B, Proper 8
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Preaching with St. Mary's House
Greensboro, NC

Note: This is, to date, from the height of my love affair with the extended sentence. My paper manuscript, prepared as it is for oration, is marked with breathing notations rather than attention to appropriate punctuation. I don't know if I could preach with this language in many parishes, (your thoughts on this are welcome). But that is why it is specifically written for the people at St. Mary's House, as savy with their use of language as they are with their theology. It will be bittersweet to leave St. Mary's for seminary. Where else do I get to preach for my favorite contemporary theologian and my favorite contemporary poet in the same place?

Also note: The quotations from 1 Samuel are not taken from the linked NRSV version above, but from the JPS Tanakh translation, especially the block quote used- which is from Ch. 20.


“For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

-From the writings of St. Paul to the Corinthians

In the name of God who made us, saves us, and will not leave us alone, AMEN.


Scripture describes for us the precise moment
When Saul first fully realized
That the heart of his son Jonathan
Was given entirely
To the rival
Of their family’s claim
To the kingship of Israel.
It happened over supper.

Saul and his court were preparing for a festival of the new moon,
And David’s presence would be expected at the King’s table.
David had served in the King’s company
Ever since the Spirit of the Lord had left Saul
To crumble in fits of anxiety and madness
And his courtiers to suggest that the young David
Be called in to soothe the King with his music.
And ever since David’s victory over the great Philistine,
He had soldiered out for the King too
At the head of Israel’s armies.
But his victories there were too great,
The love of the people for David too strong,
And Saul was threatened by him.
And so Saul was determined to kill him.
So David had no intention to be present at the King’s table
For the festival of the new moon.

He had already narrowly escaped one attempt on his life
In his own home:
Aided out his bedroom window by his wife;
Saul’s own daughter, Michal,
Herself given by Saul to David in marriage
That she too might be the end of him.
By her great love for David she was not,
And by her great love David was left free
To wonder whether and how he should defend himself
Against a second attempt on his life
From the King he had pledged his loyalty to
As a servant of God’s anointed, chosen leader
And father in law.
Whether and how he should come to the King’s table
For the festival of the new moon
Where his life was surely in danger.

David, fled to the North from these threats,
Is painted in this part of the narrative as puzzled.
In the midst of this great epic of political posturing,
Self-serving religion and the tribal warfare of land and gods
David is, for a time at least, something of an innocent.
His piety is still wholly undisturbed at this point.
As far as he is concerned, Saul has been anointed by God
To be King of Israel,
he does not question the King’s ordained authority
Even in his madness.
David does not perceive his threat to Saul.
He is troubled and confused by Saul's actions against him.

And in this confusion and flight, he comes to Jonathan.
He is, perhaps, still wearing Jonathan’s clothes when they meet:
The cloak and tunic Jonathan dressed him with
From his own back
On the day he saw David speaking to his father,
The severed head of the Philistine giant
Still gripped clumsily at its mane by David’s hand
Still dripping on the sand:
At the sight of which, scripture tells us,
The soul of Jonathan became bound up with
The soul of David, when he loved him as his own self.
David is, perhaps, still clutching the sword and bow and belt
That Jonathan gave him then
The very outfit of his authority before the armies of Israel
The very dressings of the victories
Which have made Saul insecure.
And dressed thus,
Dressed up like the Prince of Israel should be
A kind of living mirror to Jonathan
Who sees in him beyond the gift of armor
The love of his own soul,
David weeps, bewildered, distressed:

“What is my crime and my guilt against your father,
That he seeks my life?” David asks his princely counterpart.
Jonathan, who had once already defended his beloved’s life
Against the outrage of his father is as confused.
“Heaven forbid! You shall not die.
My father does not do anything, great or small,
Without disclosing it to me;
It cannot be!”
But it is clear that Saul,
Suspecting Jonathan’s love for David,
Has hidden his intent
From his son.
And so to bring Saul’s intentions to the light,
The two devise a plan whereby David will leave his seat vacant
At the King’s table for the festival of the new moon
And Jonathan will gauge the King’s reaction.
On the first evening of the festival
King Saul did notice David’s absence, but thought little of it.
However, when the second evening came
And David was still missing from the King’s table
Saul inquired of his absence,
And when he did, Jonathan lied for him
And said he had been called away to his home.

At this, [Scripture tells us]
“Saul flew into a rage against Jonathan.
‘You son of a perverse, rebellious woman!’ he shouted.
‘I know that you side with the son of Jesse-
To your shame, and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness!
For as long as the son of Jesse lives on earth,
Neither you nor your kingship will be secure.
Now then, have him brought to me,
For he is marked for death.’
But Jonathan spoke up and said to his father,
‘Why should he be put to death?
What has he done?’
At that, Saul threw his spear at him to strike him down;
And Jonathan realized that his father
Was determined to do away with David.
Jonathan rose from the table in a rage.”
Scripture tells us that,
“He ate no food on the second day of the new moon,
Because he was grieved about David,
And because his father had humiliated him.”
While experience tells us that
These familial motions wore so well into our common life
That somewhere
Some two thousand nine hundred ninety five years later
Some young boy likely slammed his bedroom door shut
Against a replica of their rage:
Not dispatched by spears, perhaps,
But every bit as crippling as if it
Had been.

This, then,
is the love that David sings of
As he laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan
In the lection from this morning.
It is strange that we read this part of the story in Church.
Among all the stories from First and Second Samuel
That relate David’s ascent to the throne of Israel
And subsequent rule
This particular episode reveals little of the narrative complexity
That precedes or follows it.
In the fragmented reduction that the Lectionary offers us,
One week David is slaying a giant
And the next he is mourning two characters we have heard
Very little of.
There isn’t even a recognizable theology to this passage:
God is not mentioned in David’s lament,
Death in David’s time,
Meant a complete separation from the world of the living
And thus a complete separation from the living God.
What David does in this dirge
Is honor the love that gave him life.
Jonathan’s love for David saved him in the most literal way
At a cost to Jonathan that was ultimately complete.
Saul was not out of bounds when he warned his son
That his love for David
Would put his own claim to kingship and power in jeopardy.
Jonathan acknowledged this too
When he came to David later at Horesh
And encouraged him in God:
“Do not be afraid:
The hand of my father Saul will never touch you.
You are going to be king over Israel
And I shall be second to you;
And even my father Saul knows this is so.”

I shall be second to you.

Jonathan, because his soul is bound up
In the soul of David,
Because he loves David as his own life
Divests himself easily of the power of his birthright.
Physically,
In the cloak and tunic from his own back
In the weapons of power from his side,
Actively,
In his vulnerable defense of David before his raving father
In his willingness to bear shame from their association
At the family table;
Totally,
As his death in a battle
That David deliberately avoided
Makes the only way forward for David’s monarchy
That this story will allow.
Jonathan
Because he loved David as his own self
Naturally found himself behaving selflessly.

And yet, not simply selfless.
There is a unique quality to the love David sings of
And it has something to do with the longing
Expressed in the psalm which this reading is paired with.
The psalmist, in his longing for God, sings:
I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him;
in his word is my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord,
More than watchmen for the morning
more than the watchmen for the morning.
The longing of the psalmist finds character
With a watchman, weary for the end of his shift
Keeping vigil against the night with dry eyes
That see shapes in the darkness:
Pricking up at its dry rustles
And each snapping twig.
The image of a watchman is employed
Because the psalmist waits expectantly
For God’s deliverance
Which elsewhere comes in the morning.
But more than this,
The morning renders the watchman’s work obsolete.
There is no longer any need for the watchman’s labor
When the town he holds vigil for
Is filled with the light of morning,
All its dark corners illuminated
All its haunting sounds covered by the bustle
Of its awakened people.
The morning fulfills the watchman’s labor
With a largesse that is preternatural to his human limits
And perfectly sensible to expect from the sun itself.
At morning, the lonely watchman changes guard
With the very light of day
And rests soundly for a time because of it.
The love and longing of the watchman for the morning
Is not selfless, it is a self fulfilled
More thoroughly
That he ever could have managed on his own.
And this is the kind of longing which the psalmist has for God
And this is the kind of love which Jonathan showed for David.

A love that envisioned its self, its power, and its future
Fulfilled in the object of its devotion.
Confessed in the midst of therapy
It would be enough to make any psychoanalyst wince,
But in his Biblical context
Jonathan is manifesting with his life
The will of God for a new ruler
An other “him”

(i) And because of this
Jonathan’s character stands in remarkable contrast
Against the rest of the epic work that contains him,
Otherwise populated wholly
By power-hungry egomaniacs:
Priests who irreverently cheat the laity of their earnest sacrifices
Kings who dispense with divine mandate lightly
When it conflicts with their own ease,
Prophets who foam at the mouth when their leaders
And people contradict the callings they profess.

(ii) And because of this
Jonathan’s character
Is placed directly
In that transfer of power
That Hebrew mothers in the Bible like Hannah and Mary
Always seem to be singing of:
The one where the haughty
Are brought down from their high places
And the lowly lifted up.
Not, in this case, through battles or through flight
Not by occupation or miraculous birth
But in relationship that gives wholly of its only resource.

(iii) And because of this
Paul, as he adjures the Corinthians to implicate themselves
In their own effort of selfless giving to their fellows
in Jerusalem,
Can invoke the same quality of love
In the Christ whom he seeks to reveal among them:
“For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
That though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor,
so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

And the Corinthians when they read this
Knowing characters like Jonathan
From scripture
Or from their own lives
Of whom this same self-giving was also apparent
Might have understood for a moment
What Paul meant
About a God who would strip himself of power
For no reason other than the fact
That he was in love:
Bound up in the world
As if in God’s own self.

If there is something sacramental to be witnessed
In our relationships,
Something between these men,
In the covenant that joined them,
Which speaks beyond itself of the covenant
That God would forge with us as well
It is here:
It is David singing for the love of Jonathan
Who gave himself for him.
It is us,
Dressed up in the cloak and tunic
Of our God who came among us
Before emptying himself completely,
Leaving us to be a kind of mirror
Of the Prince we thought he should have been,
And will still someday be.

Your glory, O Israel,
Lies slain on your heights;
Your glory, O World
Is poured out.
Let us come then to the King’s table without fear
And feast on the gifts which we are given there
By those who love us as their selves.