Rev. Cn. Richard Hogue Jr.
What is God’s calling? The story from the book of the Prophet Samuel is one that has always inspired and terrified me. It strikes a deep chord of inspiration because of how I grew up. My sister and I went to a Biblically fundamentalist private school during the week and then on the weekends to the local Episcopal Church, with our Episcopalian parents present for everything in between. It was never a question to me about if we are called, it was about how we are called as Christians: we are all called to some form of ministry by God, lay, ordained, or otherwise, it’s up to us to discern how to carry out that call. How we follow Jesus is the defining thing.
The inspiration that the young Prophet Samuel gives me is his willingness to simply respond with enthusiasm when God does speak. My terror comes from everything that follows. As we will hear throughout this post-Pentecost season, Samuel’s life, the prophet’s life, is not easy, and he sees the highs and lows of humanity, of himself, and the uncertainty of discerning God’s will during times of rapid change.
I heard my own call through a lot of sources, some louder and clearer, others smaller and more bewildering. While I never separated from the church, I did run from my call as fast and as often as possible, though the Holy Spirit has a way of turning every move to get away into one drawing us closer. Whether it was trying to physically remove myself, like my time in South Africa, or in doing anything but respond to the call in my time in New Jersey, the Spirit used everything to clarify the call even as I rushed away.
Later, while finally addressing my call directly, I was asked by the Commission on Ministry—a committee each diocese has to help guide people discerning ordained ministry—where my call was clearest, was it as a pastor, liturgist, preacher, or prophet, among others. I said that while preaching would likely be my favorite responsibility as a priest, it was the role of the prophet that connected me most to God’s will as I understand it. Prophets are annoying, they force everyone to question their motivation and ultimately how we choose to live. They do it not simply to be annoying, but to point to a different way, hopefully a better one. That’s why they often end up alone, obscure, or outright rejected, because their challenges are real. Even Moses, the consummate prophet and leader, is perpetually lonely, straddling the space between wayward humanity and a God desperate to hold us all in beloved community. Jesus is also a prophet on earth and is rejected by so many, including his own friends and disciples in the moment of his deepest need.
At this point, my beloved community of St. Paul’s, you’ve experienced my attempts at propheticism, most obviously preaching, and particularly my approach to our Christian Scriptures. This is born from my lived experience that we as Christians—both in conservative and progressive circles—often ignore or condemn Hebrew Scriptures, or use it as a mere prelude to our faith’s supremacy. On one hand, the reasons why are obvious: the gospels give us a great deal to learn from their remembrance of Jesus’ life and ministry, centralizing our understanding of his mission. On the other hand, our typically reductive assessments of Hebrew Scripture ignore our own New Testament’s problems, and miss that Jesus’ entire life and ministry is a poetic and fulsome expression of Hebrew Scriptures’ covenant and many arguments with itself.
Well, today’s gospel is as good a place to make this point as any, as this story does not make sense in the context it’s presented in. Not only that, according to this gospel, Jesus manages to misremember an entire story from book of the Prophet Samuel. I want to show why this passage is disjointed and point us to something deeper.
The passage begins “One sabbath Jesus and his disciples were going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’” At least one problem is already present in the context of Mark’s gospel: if it was a Sabbath—a time of communal worship, feasting, and relaxing—why were the Pharisees out in the field to observe and question Jesus? One can take a step further back and wonder why Jesus—a practicing Jew himself—and all his disciples—also practicing Jews—were in the field on the Sabbath in the first place, as they would have been resting and feasting with the rest of the community. Those two pieces are problematic enough, but the next problem is far more confounding.
“And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’” Jesus gets the story wrong here, or to put a finer point on it, the writer of Mark’s gospel gets the story wrong. In book of the Prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 21.1-7), David is secretly fleeing from King Saul and stops at the Tabernacle, and lies to the Ahimelech, not his son Abiathar, saying he is on a secret mission for Saul which no one else should know about, but he left without food or his sword, and asks Ahimelech to supply him with both. Ahimelech tells David that all he has is the consecrated bread on the altar and asks if his companion soldiers are ritually clean. David lies again, says “they” all are ritually clean, and then Ahimelech gives him the consecrated bread and Goliath’s sword, and David skips town. David’s lie to Ahimelech is why he and eighty-four other priests are killed by Saul the following day. This leads to Abiathar, Ahimelech’s son, becoming high priest under David much later. The Sabbath plays no part in the matter.
I don’t believe Jesus would have misquoted Scripture so badly, either if we take Jesus’ divinity seriously as the one from whom all things come, the Alpha and the Omega, or as a devout Jewish teacher in his time and context. You know who very well could have gotten it wrong though? The third or fourth generation Christians who wrote this text, willfully separating themselves from their Jewish siblings either due to persecution or the Jewish war with Rome, a desire for distinctiveness, or a combination of these and other factors we may never fully understand. The end point of that passage, Jesus saying, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” is one that is also reflected in Judaism, and written in the Babylonian Talmud.[1] It is probably written this way in Mark to serve two purposes, first, to justify followers of Jesus working to feed the hungry on the Sabbath, and later in Christianity’s development to point to Jesus as David’s successor and his ability—meaning the church’s—to revoke rules around the Sabbath “so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
When we reduce all of this for the sake of purity—like our evangelical contemporaries—or warm and fuzzy feelings—a very mainline Christian habit—then we have led ourselves astray. God is more complex than we can grasp, and God’s love for us has more iterations than we can imagine. While Jesus would not wholesale abrogate the Sabbath, he probably would say that meeting basic human needs is the entire point of the Sabbath, whether as wholesome rest or by giving others what they need to rest, like food or healing. When we are ok challenging our own tradition from a place of humility and grace, it opens wider and deeper possibilities for us all to answer God’s call for us in a unique way. The answering “how” is as important as the “why.” May we all be like Samuel, eager to answer the call, and humble enough to find out how, and may our sabbath show us the way. Speak Lord, for your servants are listening.
[1] Adela Yarbro Collins, Hermeneia–Mark: A Commentary, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2008), 204.
