God knows what he's doing

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011518.cfm
1 Samuel 15:16-23
Mark 2:18-22

Obedience is better than sacrifice,
and submission than the fat of rams.
For a sin like divination is rebellion,
and presumption is the crime of idolatry.
(Samuel 15:22-23)

Just when we begin to get comfortable with Jesus, settled in our hearts that he loves us and wants the best for us, he surprises us with a new insight into our tendency toward sin. We’re always a bit confused by our weaknesses but thankful that God graces us by sharing his authority with us on earth. That shared authority, though, comes with dramatic warnings. He tells us that his plans will lead to a better direction for everyone, but we will rebel. He tells us that our self-satisfying presumptions about what God expects from us in fact replaces our love for him with idol worship. We will fail him.

Just because we can’t see around the corner, that we don’t know what God is doing, doesn’t mean that we know better the course he has laid out for us, he tells us. Doing so results in sins beyond what we thought possible — sins of rebellion and idolatry. Could we have imagined even simple deviations, course corrections that give us little advantages here and there, could have such terrible results?

Not many folks find the topic of sin comfortable, especially those of us steeped in its complexity. We’re all fairly well practiced in rebellion and idolatry, especially when the options placed before us by God require painful obedience and self incriminating submission. Which, of course, explains Jesus’ constancy and consistency in bringing the subject up. He was all in on obedience to the Father, and submitted to God’s plan with dire consequence. 

The ultimate direction of King Saul’s story asks us to engage in an intimate partnership with God that will include some wild turns. We can expect that our affiliation with God will have cosmic effects upon our families, friends, and the very globe full of humanity. 

That’s not really what we hear, though, in today’s set of scriptures. We hear about our God justifying cruelty toward the race of the Amalekites. How can this be from God? Why does God berate us with this story of Saul, warning us of rebellion and idolatry, especially for sins we think that God has gotten confused in communication and priority. God tells Saul to exterminate an entire people, and then tells Saul he failed because he spared their king and then used the people’s finest animals in sacrifice to God? 

This whole scenario leaves us worried that we’re going to be ostracized if we don’t grasp the intricacies of crazy sounding tasks that will make us look like ruthless Nazis, when we’ve assumed God’s followers should be martyrs, not executioners.

In Judges, the complex nature of sin in us gets rudely laid out, lit up, and basted with a ladle of savory horror. The rudeness and horror, at first, seems to be at God’s hand, not ours. God is the one who told Saul to “exterminate” the Amalekites. What is going on here, we exclaim? Has God gone off the rails?

Rather than get an answer to this, we stew in our indignation. We don’t hear that obedience and submission to a task God sends us on is preferred to divination (the foretelling of the future through omens or spirits or our own egos) and presumption. All we can hear is the awful slaughter charged by God.

Since when does genocide, the eradication of an entire race of people, make any sense? And why does God, through holy Samuel (identified as the ideal prophet, by the way, so Samuel is both complicit and in agreement with God’s call for slaughter of the Amalekites), why does God avoid discussion about the command to slaughter a particular segment of his creation citing instead the particulars of obedience and submission as more important than the cruelty of killing?

At what point does God get to distract us from our moral concern over the brutal killing of (and let’s assume they are the most heinous of people) his enemies? “Don’t concern yourself with the slaughter. Focus on your obedience and submission.” What?

This process of questioning on our part, in fact, is more egregious to God than his command to butcher a population. It’s a can’t win scenario, because the truth is that we’re in the same boat as King Saul. Our very interruption of God’s voice in scripture at this moment, with our stunned reactions and angry festering bother over God’s seeming rueful behavior, displays the same presumption and interpretation of divine intent that got King Saul fired from his job. 

No matter, though. Whether I say that once or ten times — divining God’s intentions on our part and presuming that another tack must be taken rather than do what God tells us to do — we’re still incredulous. We can’t let it go.

And that is the issue.

Do we trust that God knows what he’s doing? When God banned Adam and Eve from Paradise over their desire to be like God, which was what God had created them to be, was his banning them too harsh? When God destroyed the population of the earth, sparing only a single family gathered by Noah, was God too harsh?

Our initial reaction to these two stories perhaps is to consider them mythical. We can set them aside as biblical parables that poorly describe and inaccurately depict the creation and the evolution of earth’s crust and atmospheric canopy. That solves our incredulity. Those scriptures fit into the tall-tale syndrome of concocted history.

The Amalekites report, however, bears details and subsequent historical affirmations that cannot be set aside. So, God is consistent after all. Jesus’ crucification, the destruction of Jerusalem, and two thousand years of martyrdom, wars, and the continuation of death for everyone, is still part of the plan of God. Is God just and loving, or just a divine dictator? If a dictator, then better that there be no God at all. That’s the conclusion of a great part of our society. 

We secretly hope that Samuel heard from no divine communication, and Saul simply went all out, a full nut job conquerer. He was just the normal heinous form of every other annihilating world leader.

In matters of divine direction, obedience and submission is the same call given by Our Lord as that of the Father. The whispering of the same Holy Spirit that spoke to Samuel speaks to us. God’s point everywhere in scripture cannot be denied. We are God’s holy people. In the midst of suffering he will bless us, so despite the confusion of all that is taking place, and the inequality and unfairness that surrounds us, be obedient in order to know his will, and in our submission we will transform the world.

The plan for creation belongs to God the Father. The pecking order of authority always begins with him. Jesus bows to the Father, and so should we. The Holy Spirit urges us to listen to the Son, and so we should. We either trust that God knows what he’s doing, or we do not. In our intimate relationship to God, we either say OK, or we walk away and pursue another path. We submit, or we rebel and skulk off to idols.

Adam and Eve did not follow God’s commands to remain innocent through obedience and submission. Only in the nick of time did Noah’s reluctant obedience and submission result in the human race being saved. King Saul’s presumption that he could adapt God’s Amalekites ban, preserving the spoils of war as a means to curry favor from God, sent God’s plan off course for all time. What would have happened if Mary had not willingly accepted God’s plan?

By questioning God’s purposes we presume that God has made a mistake. We calculate our own expectations for God, imagining that we have divine insights not grasped by God. At what point in scripture’s reports on acting in this manner has this ever been a good idea? How different might the scriptures read if the men and women of history had done as God had told them.

• King David does not kill Uriah to steal his wife Bathsheba.
  
• Can does not kill Abel.
  
• King Saul faithfully executes the Amalekites ban.
  
• The Jewish nation recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. 
  

We seem constantly driven to rebellion, divining our own course for creation beginning with our place in it. We presume to know a better course for our lives, rather than take the one God sets before us, ending up slaves to the idols of what the fallen world views as important. 

On the face of our daily lives, and at the very root of who we are, obedience and submission sound way better than rebellion and idolatry, but the relationship to God will test this fine-sounding goal. 

Make us more like you, Jesus, with the tenacity and strength of Noah, and the obedience and submission of Mary. Don’t abandon us in our weakness to understand you.