“Everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt,
and everyone who was bitter in soul, gathered to him.” Does that sound like the raw material most
church planters are looking for when they start their church? Does it sound like a group of people who
anyone would want hanging around them? Saul is surrounded by his men too. He asks them a question, “will the son of
Jesse give every one of you fields and vineyards, will he make you all
commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds, that all of you have
conspired against me?” Saul sees that he
has something to offer that David doesn’t, wealth and power. David’s folks were desperate, they weren’t
comfortable, fat and happy, they wanted change, and Saul’s words point to why,
he had enriched the men who followed him, bought their loyalty, at the expense
of others. Sound familiar to our
situation in America today? We have become
a nation of cronyism. Doeg the Edomite,
an outsider to the nation, a descendant not of Jacob/Israel but of Esau, has no
compunctions about killing these priests. He is willing to slaughter them all while the
men of Israel are unwilling. They aren’t
his priests. David recognizes the guilt
he incurs from having lied to these men, our sins always have some
repercussion.
On Trinity Sunday I preached on the relationships in the
Trinity and this passage was the one I used to illustrate something about the
Holy Spirit as included in that loving circle.
Jesus allows people to say whatever they like about Him but when they
speak against the Spirit He will not hear it, just as I will dismiss whatever
someone says about me but if they speak against someone I love it is an
entirely different matter. In our first
lesson, were the men who watched Doeg kill the priests guilty of murder? Under Jewish law, they were indeed, they may
not have been willing to slay these men but they were, it seems, perfectly
willing to allow someone else to do so and in that they were showing they had
no particular value other than a superstitious value, for the priests. Here, Jesus speaks of eternal sin as
blasphemy against the Holy Spirit through whom the healings and exorcisms are
and were accomplished. We must be
careful what we say and how we think about these things in our day. We must test the spirits. At the end of the reading we come back to
what we were told at the first of the reading, of the concern of Jesus’ family
about Him. He redefines family here and I long for a community that embraces
that re-definition fully.
Paul is preaching the Gospel to “brothers, sons of the
family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God…” He blames those who were in Jerusalem at the
time who crucified Jesus for his death, not these folks in Pisidian
Antioch. His preaching is geared to a
Jewish audience, citing their texts and their expectations, seeing in Jesus the
fulfillment of the messianic promise of one from David’s line. The reaction here is unlike what we will see
later in Paul’s ministry, they are hearing it afresh, while in the future when
Paul preaches there will already be those among the brethren who are prepared
to oppose him. These receive it with
gladness and encourage Paul to come and tell more the next week. Ultimately, it will again be brothers, sons
of the family of Abraham who will turn on Paul and insist that he be
stopped.
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