SPEAKER_00: Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
SPEAKER_00: In the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: The narrative of 1 Samuel chapter 16, which we have just heard, opens not in triumph, but in sorrow.
SPEAKER_00: For Samuel is still mourning, as it were, the failed kingship of Saul.
SPEAKER_00: When the Lord speaks to him, how long will you grieve over Saul, seeing I have rejected him from being king over Israel?
SPEAKER_00: The first word in this text then is a divine intrusion of pious lament.
SPEAKER_00: There's something profoundly human, yet also, as we shall see, profoundly actually ecclesial, about Samuel's grief.
SPEAKER_00: He has poured himself out for his king Saul, prayed for him, wept over him, and now stands confronted with what appears to be all too plainly a failed anointing, where the recipient did not open himself to receive the actualization of grace, which the anointing had opened the way to him.
SPEAKER_00: Thus was Samuel confronted with a rejected monarch and a shattered hope, and beyond that a constitutional crisis.
SPEAKER_00: In response, God does not respond as we might expect.
SPEAKER_00: God does not rebuke Samuel for caring too much for the man, Saul.
SPEAKER_00: He rebukes him for lingering too long in his affections.
SPEAKER_00: The God who once granted Israel's demand for a king, so that they might be like the nations, now decisively moves beyond that rejected choice to provide for myself a king.
SPEAKER_00: This has many implications.
SPEAKER_00: But foremost has to be the point that divine providence does not erase history and history's missteps, it continues rather to move on instead through them.
SPEAKER_00: And here it is of interest to note that centuries later, both Greek and Latin fathers received Saul's rejection as a sober warning of importance for the later times, and more specifically for the church, hence that ecclesial dimension.
SPEAKER_00: For the implication is clear that grace given can be squandered, and office received can be betrayed, and in consequence of the Spirit's empowering presence, that can not only be resisted, but ultimately rendered forfeit.
SPEAKER_00: And it is at the very point when Saul is definitively rejected by God that David is quietly chosen.
SPEAKER_00: This starts a pattern that will recur through salvation history, where the lesson is that God does not wait for ideal conditions before acting.
SPEAKER_00: He elects and anoints within, as we might say, the debris of human failure.
unknown: St.
SPEAKER_00: Augustine will later see in this a paradigm of the mixed body that is the church.
SPEAKER_00: Saul and David stand together within the one people of God, so to speak, confronted by a failed visible office holder.
SPEAKER_00: And in the face of that, there is at the time an invisible election, a warning, thus, and yet also a promise.
SPEAKER_00: Both coexist until God's judgment fully manifests what he has long seen behind the surface appearances in the hearts of those involved.
SPEAKER_00: At this moment of crisis, then God sends Samuel to Bethlehem and to Jesse with the promise, I have seen for myself a king among his sons.
SPEAKER_00: Thus was the sea moved from the royal court to a very humble village, very far from anywhere really, and certainly very far from the centre of power.
SPEAKER_00: Again, the later Greek patristic writers were highly attentive to this geographical switch.
SPEAKER_00: For them, Bethlehem, the house of bread, becomes in their preaching a trope, for God's habit of choosing smaller places, lesser people, whom whom to feed his flock.
SPEAKER_00: Samuel arrives in fear and in secrecy, and he is received by the village elders with trepidation, as they asked, Do you come peaceably?
SPEAKER_00: This clearly reflected fear, and that was hardly unreasonable, given that he was arriving, as it were, as a prophet, travelling under suspicion, essentially, of treason, and an anointing that had been concealed, or would be concealed, lest Paul, lest Saul, kill Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: This casts what would otherwise be seen as a vast privilege in a rather negative light, for in this instance divine election was not at once a spectacle of honor, capacity conferred, so much as instead a moment of danger.
SPEAKER_00: Chrysostom and other Greek homilists later stressed that this episode thus illustrates how God works, and how he can begin to do so in circumstances where prudence would counsel caution, and the context offers only danger.
SPEAKER_00: From this they do the lesson that the church's task can at times not be reduced to providing merely refuge and safety and the things needful in this world, but rather should rise to the challenge of obeying the divine word and the call that sends us to proclaim the gospel, even when that obedience can bring uncertainty and present danger.
SPEAKER_00: Bethlehem's obscurity is next matched by the curious response of Jesse, as it turns out, and his household.
SPEAKER_00: Jesse seems gladly to bring his sons before Samuel, but not all of them.
SPEAKER_00: For the youngest he meets with the tree.
SPEAKER_00: Again, many interpreters were quick to see the irony, for the one whom God has seen is precisely the one his own father does not think worthy of presenting.
SPEAKER_00: Thus once again was divine election, here not only indifferent to human rankings, but actually inverted them.
SPEAKER_00: So when Samuel sees Eliab, he says to himself, surely the Lord's anointed is before him.
SPEAKER_00: And in worldly terms, this would indeed seem obvious, for the firstborn son was tall and impressive.
SPEAKER_00: And Samuel the prophet, even, a man intimate with God, nonetheless mistakes the appearance of status for suitability.
SPEAKER_00: The Greek fathers again saw here a powerful lesson, showing that even the most holy can succumb potentially to misleading temptations to judge by appearance.
SPEAKER_00: But Yahweh's intervention is powerfully cautionary.
SPEAKER_00: Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him.
SPEAKER_00: For the Lord sees not as man sees.
SPEAKER_00: Samuel the Seer must thus in a sense himself be re-seen and re-examined.
SPEAKER_00: And for St.
SPEAKER_00: Augustine, there is a yet broader theological point here of interior grace to be dwelt upon.
SPEAKER_00: Dominus item intuita core, the Lord looks upon the heart, becomes for Augustine a key text in his anti-pelagian insistence that God's judgment concerns the inner person, renewed by grace, not merely external observance, or lineage, or even sacramental status.
SPEAKER_00: For Augustine, the contrast here is no longer even just psychological, appearance versus sincerity, but theological, outward belonging to the people of God versus inward participation in love.
SPEAKER_00: For the heart that God sees and welcomes is the heart he has begun to change.
SPEAKER_00: In both traditions, thus this verse exposes the perennial temptation to rely on what can be counted or displayed, gifts of a person, charism, pedigree, and all the rest.
SPEAKER_00: And thus do we, by and large, still prefer the Elias of this world.
SPEAKER_00: Thus, too, would we likely have preferred Saul as the king, for he still looked like one.
SPEAKER_00: The priest, even now, who looks the part, or even a theologian who comes with the grandest academic trappings, is likely to be the one we welcome most.
SPEAKER_00: But the lesson of the story here is that the Lord looks instead upon the inner reality, which is to say the heart within.
SPEAKER_00: He says what we cannot, and he sees what we cannot, the loves that govern, the loyalties that bind, and the fears that drive.
SPEAKER_00: And here there is a salutary question for all of us in the church, which is not what do we see, but rather what does God see when he looks at us?
SPEAKER_00: Nonetheless, when at last David is finally brought to the sea, he's still described, as we heard, as one with beautiful eyes and good it to look at.
SPEAKER_00: But the point remains not that God finally has found someone with the right attributes of appearance.
SPEAKER_00: It's rather that those very features, which we so easily prioritize, are here clearly made subordinate to God's prior choice.
SPEAKER_00: Rise and anoint him, for this is he.
SPEAKER_00: For David is chosen because God has already looked upon his heart, which is to say the inner realities.
SPEAKER_00: And for the Greek fathers, David here begins his role as a type of Christ, an anticipation, an image.
SPEAKER_00: The anointed one from Bethlehem, taken from among his family, upon whom the Spirit comes, one who will be opposed, hunted down, and finally exalted, albeit in the end, for Christ on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: Thus did David's path, from obscurity to anointing, to suffering and to kingship, seem to the fathers to prefigure, ultimately, the incarnate Son, who was yet to come as the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: Chrysostom listed David thus among the spirit-bearers of the old covenant, each receiving a measure of the spirit that anticipates the fullness given in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Indeed, in the text we learn next that the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
SPEAKER_00: And in the very next verse, in sharp contrast, we are told that the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the law tormented him.
SPEAKER_00: Again, the Father saw here a catechetical moment, illustrating the weak fragility of charismatic endowment.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit's coming is free, sovereign, oriented to a task, but it is not a possession.
SPEAKER_00: It is not the possession of the one receiving it.
SPEAKER_00: Gifts given for ministry, too, can be withdrawn if they are resisted or turned toward pride.
SPEAKER_00: Moreover, God's purposes are not exhausted by any single office holder.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit's withdrawal from Saul does not leave Israel without a future.
SPEAKER_00: That is simply redirected through David.
SPEAKER_00: All this thus invites us to live within the tensions that all this represents, between visible structures and invisible spiritual realities, which can be both intellectually and practically untidy.
SPEAKER_00: That is as much a present reality for us as it was at the time of Samuel.
SPEAKER_00: In Samuel's case, the world is rejected and yet continues to reign.
SPEAKER_00: David is anointed, yet he continues to wait.
SPEAKER_00: The church, too, continues to live between what God has already seen and what the world has not recognized.
SPEAKER_00: There are souls whom God has rejected, but whom history still enthrones.
SPEAKER_00: There are Davids whom God has anointed, but whom history still leaves with the sheep.
SPEAKER_00: The temptation in the face of such painful realities can be either to despair of the institutions or even the church, or to absolutize them.
SPEAKER_00: The early church fathers propose a different position, which is one of patient fidelity, humble but nonetheless real critique, while at all times retaining trust and confidence that God's election will in God's time become manifest.
SPEAKER_00: And that is the spirit we must preserve when we are faced with challenges in the life of the church.
SPEAKER_00: And finally, it calls each of us back to the question of the heart.
SPEAKER_00: What does God see when he looks at our hearts, our individual vocations and ministries?
SPEAKER_00: In what sense have we allowed the spirit to rush upon us for service of God, the church, and the world?
SPEAKER_00: The gospel answer anticipated in the story of David is embodied in the gospel narrative of the blind man, enabled to see through his trust the agency of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The act of truly seeing is central to the message of that gospel, that passage.
SPEAKER_00: Starting with the fact that many people looked at the man born blind, but only Jesus is said to have seen him.
SPEAKER_00: Others looked, he saw.
SPEAKER_00: The disciples treat the blind man as a theological problem.
SPEAKER_00: Who sinned?
SPEAKER_00: This man or his parents?
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus sees more truly.
SPEAKER_00: He explicitly rejects the assumption that this man's blindness is punishment for his or his parents' specific sins.
SPEAKER_00: As he says, neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
SPEAKER_00: This at the time was a major corrective to a retributive explanation of suffering, that blamed the sufferer and assumed their suffering was a consequence of fault.
SPEAKER_00: But the seeing in the story was two-way, for it is the blind man who sees most truly who Jesus was.
SPEAKER_00: Thus does the language move with his dawning recognition from the man called Jesus to a prophet, to Lord, I believe.
SPEAKER_00: Whereupon the man who had been blind sees that the only proper response is one of worship.
SPEAKER_00: And having attained that insight, he becomes emboldened even to argue as an advocate before the great and the good.
SPEAKER_00: Thus he argues from scripture and experience and exposes the Jewish leaders in consistency, with the result that he is cast out.
SPEAKER_00: In this way, the once blind man becomes the clearest witness to Christ in the story.
SPEAKER_00: A motif that echoes the story of Bethlehem and David in Sam, and his anointing of the least of Jesse's sons as king.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus' final word, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind, redefines judgment and reminds us that those who admit their blindness receive sight, while those who insist we see are apt to be blind to themselves.
SPEAKER_00: Thus it was the blind man who saw Jesus as the spiritual heir of the kingship modeled first by David, and far more.
SPEAKER_00: He saw that the true, ultimately anointed one is Christ, who has taken our place in providing the atonement needed for the wider cosmic drama of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Christ was thus also one whom the Father has truly seen from all eternity, the beloved Son in whom he is well pleased.
SPEAKER_00: And it is by the gift and our acceptance of the Spirit that we are incorporated into Him, made members of His body, given a share in His anointing.
SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament message is still true, namely that in all our sinfulness we could not look upon the face of God as His.
SPEAKER_00: So it is by God's grace that the Father's gaze upon the heart that saves us is first his gaze upon the heart of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Our confidence then is not that our hearts are pure, but that our hearts are being purified, as they are united to his.
SPEAKER_00: So the church continues to anoint, to send, to preach, continues to grieve over failed souls, and to wait, often in obscurity, with overlooked Davids.
SPEAKER_00: And over it all, the word of the Lord remains.
SPEAKER_00: Rise and anoint him, for this is he.
SPEAKER_00: It is upon the basis of rightful confidence that this should bring us, that we should have in that gift of Christ, that it is what enables us to rejoice today.
SPEAKER_00: On Lightare Sunday, it means the Sunday of rejoicing, that most positive Sunday in the midst of Lent.
SPEAKER_00: May we have grace also to recognize whom God is raising up in our own day, and to seek above all to be those whose hearts the Lord delights to see.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.