David reaches out to do kindness to Saul’s family and Saul’s
servant Ziba is brought to David that the king may inquire if there are any
living relatives of Saul. Ziba tells
David that Jonathan has a son named Mephibosheth who is lame in both feet who
remains alive and David sends for the man.
David is incredibly generous to this man, giving him all that had
belonged to his grandfather, Saul, his lands and his servants. Additionally,
Mephibosheth will eat at David’s table as if he were a son of the king
himself. In doing this, David is
honoring the covenant he had made with Jonathan, that they were
indistinguishable from one another, so Jonathan’s son is as though he were
David’s own son.
Jesus says that the way to eternal life is the way of
self-denial. Does that mean that this
existence has no meaning and purpose and that we are to simply grit our teeth,
put our heads down and plow on to the end of this life? Absolutely not, the incarnation tells us that
this life has great significance in and of itself. Jesus’ life was important on its own because
it tells us what the contours of our lives are to be, the basic shape is love,
self-sacrificial love. Self-denial
becomes affirmation of something more and greater than the self. The autonomous self is an illusion, there is
a time when we were not, we did not self-generate. When we recognize that there is no true
autonomy we have three basic choices to make, to deny that truth, to find
ourselves in something else of earth, or to find ourselves in our creator and
to find that He loves us. Taking up our
cross is an act of love and it is also an act of the will. We choose to take up the cross, it isn’t laid
across our shoulders unless we are willing to bear it. David chose to treat Mephibosheth with
kindness and it was costly to him, he could have appropriated all the lands of
Saul and could have neglected this young man but he chose to sacrifice for
love.
Are there people today who have “never even heard of the
Holy Spirit”? When Paul went to Ephesus
he found some believers in whom he saw something missing and asked about their
baptism. It would certainly seem that
Apollos was their teacher prior to his own deepened understanding of what Jesus
came to do. The baptism of John was for
those who repented of their sins but it was a preparatory action. John proclaimed that one was coming who would
baptize in the Holy Spirit and fire, not just water. In our tradition, we recognize the water
baptism as preparatory for the later baptism of the Holy Spirit which we call
confirmation. The problem is that we
don’t teach the Holy Spirit very much or very well so we have believers who
have heard of the Holy Spirit but they don’t know enough to know what it means
to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. There
is more available to us, who, like Mephibosheth, are lame and infirm through
sin, we are invited to participate in the life of the Spirit.
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