David and Goliath

Church of the Incarnation

Sept. 25, 2010

I Samuel 17

We meet David three different ways in I Samuel.  First, we meet him as a young shepherd in Bethlehem.  Then we meet him as a talented musician who plays the lyre in King Saul’s court.  And in our reading today we meet him as a brave warrior engaged in combat with the Philistine Goliath.  David’s life is rich with meaning and it requires multiple angles to get him in view.  This is also true of Jesus.  The early church privileged not one but four stories of Jesus’ life -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.  In order for us to register his significance for our lives, we hear four distinct testimonies of his life, death, and resurrection.  Four times we hear: God has saved you from your enemies.

I don’t think I need to give you a spoiler alert for the David and Goliath movie.  You already know how this one ends.  It’s not that interesting to find out that Goliath loses.  Of course Goliath loses -- this is Israel’s story!   What’s interesting about the story is that he actual battle between David and Goliath takes three verses.  So why take 58 verses to tell the story?  Because we’re not being given information.  We’re being asked to listen in on a story, to pay attention to how it unfolds and develops.  

17:1-11 Goliath the Philistine

The story begins with a battle scene.  The Philistine army is encamped on one side of the valley of Elah and the Israelite army is encamped on the other.  But the focus immediately centers on one Philistine - the terrifying champion Goliath.  And great attention is given to his appearance.  To the Israelites he looked nine feet tall.  His was armored up like a tank - bronze helmet, a coat of mail so heavy it would have crushed a regular soldier.  His legs were shielded by bronze greaves.  And his preferred killing tools were an enormous bronze javelin he wore on his back, and a spear made of so much iron no other soldier could have even lifted it.

Now we as readers of the story recognize that height and physical prowess aren’t everything.  King Saul was a head taller than everyone else (10:23), but that didn’t do him much good.  And God chose young David to be the next King, not Eliab his oldest brother who was the tallest and strongest (16:7).  Yet in the imaginative storytelling of Israel, Goliath drips with power.  He is made for killing.  He is the embodiment of death - and there is little hope of getting out alive.

As if his sheer appearance weren’t chilling enough, next we hear him thunder verbal threats across the valley.  “Today I defy the ranks of Israel!  Give me a man that we may fight together” (v. 10).  Goliath wants a one on one death match, winner takes all.  “When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid” (v. 11).  That’s Hebrew for -- they wet themselves.  Here is a picture of a community living almost without hope - up against the dark powers of destruction.

Pause the story just a moment.  What we are going to get in I Samuel 17 is not a clashing battle scene of army against army, arms and swords flailing in chaos across the valley of Elah.  We are going to get a story that has been shaped literarily into a one on one fight - the champion Goliath versus the young David.  And Goliath is the enemy, richly and compellingly imagined.  How do you imagine your enemies?  

On the one hand, recognizing with honesty the power of your enemy is a good thing.  It’s clarifying.  Naming the enemy can focus your attention.  It’s also what enables you to recognize that you need help.  The Goliath story is for anyone who knows what it feels like to stand before something powerful and threatening.  When the enemy is Goliath, the only way out is if God delivers us.  On the other hand, imagining your enemy can be tricky.  If my enemy is the embodiment of evil, then violence will always be an option for me.  If all the evil is located in my enemy, then I can get rid of evil by destroying my enemy.  

Jesus recognized that we’re up against powers that can crush us.  He was tortured and crucified after all.  But he spent much of his time helping us reimagine our enemies.  Most Jews felt that Rome was evil.  What we need is to be delivered from the threat of Roman oppression.  Jesus said NO.  What we need to be delivered from is “the Satan,” that dark force that weaves in and out of all of our lives and harms us in countless ways.  And so violence ceases to be a strategy for dealing with evil powers.

There is Goliath, towering, belching threats.  And this happened, every morning and evening, for 40 days.

17:12-31 David Appears on the Front Lines

The narrative then abruptly shifts from the battle lines to David tending sheep back in Bethlehem.  His three oldest brothers are soldiers in King Saul’s army.  And David’s father Jesse loads him up with bread and cheese to take to his brothers.  When David reaches the Israelite camp, he himself witnesses Goliath’s threats and curses, and he notices that every Israelite has withered with fear.  One of the most obvious features of this story is often overlooked.  Saul was Israel’s tall and powerful warrior King.  Saul is the one who should have stepped up to meet Goliath’s challenge.  But this is the beginning of a story in which Saul is on decline and David is on the rise.  Before long, David will replace Saul as Israel’s King.  David says to the soldiers: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (v. 26).  David begins to ask questions about what the rewards are for killing Goliath, Saul hears about it, and calls for David.

17:32-40 David and King Saul

When David meets Saul, it is David who speaks first.  And his first words to Saul may be a hint on how to read the story: “Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine.”  David is the unlikely one who will step up and face what threatens and frightens Israel.  David is able to imagine defeating Goliath, Saul is not.  So Saul resists: “You are only a boy; and he has been a fighting man from his youth.”  He’ll hack you to pieces.  Are you crazy?

But David wants Saul to know that he has credentials.  He wants the job, and believes he can handle it.  Yes, I’m young.  But I’m a shepherd.  And you might not realize it, but shepherds do dangerous and difficult work that often calls for courage.  Once when a lion attacked and carried off one of my sheep, I ran after it, attacked it, and recovered the sheep.  But not only that - I then grabbed the lion by the hair, struck it and killed it.  The same thing happened with a bear.  You can imagine Saul glancing sideways at his attendants . . . “umhuhh”.  “Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.”  Then David shifts from what HE has done to how GOD has delivered him: “The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine” (v. 37).

Before you know it, Saul has David all dressed up in his own battle gear.  Saul doesn’t get it.  He still imagines fighting on Goliath’s terms.  Young David in the bronze helmet, the coat of mail, carrying the heavy sword - he couldn’t even walk.   So he takes it all off.  “Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch; his sling was in his hand” (vs. 40).

David is the anointed King for a people who are learning to trust God.  To follow David, and his royal heir Jesus, is to learn to trust God in a violent world.  To learn to live creatively, without a sword.

David Versus Goliath 17:41-51

After a long wait, suspense built, we finally get to the confrontation.  The towering Goliath, armed to the teeth, accompanied by a shield-bearer, sees young David - and “disdained him, for he was only a youth, ruddy and handsome in appearance” (v. 42).  We might wonder - how did the narrator know what was going on in Goliath’s head?  Don’t ask questions, just follow the story!!

First, they engage in verbal threats.  Goliath taunts and curses David, “I will give you flesh to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the field” (v. 44).  David returns the threat, but ratchets it up a notch, “I’ll feed the flesh of you AND all your army to the birds and wild animals” (v. 46).  This is the language that opens Homer’s classic, The Odyssey.  It is the language used by enemies. It conjures not just defeat of another, but the shame and oblivion of those whose bodies will be splayed on the field, defiled by animals, left to rot, decay, and be eaten by buzzards, despoiled by flies.  This is how you speak when you hate your enemies.

Then David draws attention to the difference in weaponry.  “You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts . . . The Lord will deliver you into my hand .. and all this will happen so that all may know that the Lord does not save by sword and spear” (vs. 45-47).  If you miss the language put into David’s mouth before the fight, you miss the whole story.  For David, the fight with Goliath is a sign that Israel has a God who saves, and not by the expected ways of warfare.

So 47 verses into the story, we finally arrive at the actual battle scene, which takes exactly three verses.  They run towards each other, David slings a stone, and Goliath “fell face down on the ground” (You might wonder why we need to know how Goliath fell.  Earlier in I Samuel, when the Philistines captured the ark of the covenant from Israel, they placed the ark in the temple of Dagon.  The next morning, the statue of Dagon had fallen on his face before the ark.  They set it back up.  The second morning, the statue of Dagon had fallen on his face and the head of the statue lay to the side, as if cut off)  “Then David ran and stood over the Philistine; he grasped his sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; then he cut off his head with it” (vs. 38-49, 51).  

The actual battle scene takes up only three verses, but tucked into them is v. 50, which is probably a song or poem, “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine and killing him; there was no sword in David’s hand.”  Here we have come to the center of the story: David killed Goliath without a sword.  God’s people live by God’s power to deliver us and not by swords, weapons, militaries, or violence of any kind.

For a story about trusting God instead of the way of violence, this is a pretty violent story.  Just after David shouts, “It is not by sword or spear that the lord saves,” he pulls Goliath’s sword from its scabbard, plunges it into his heart and then cuts of his head.  Now OK, it wasn’t David’s sword, but isn’t that kind of a technicality?  As the story continues, we see David long after the fight, still carrying Goliaths severed head around by the hair.  In the next chapter, David is asked to kill 100 Philistines if he wants Saul’s beautiful daughter Michal as his wife.  Oh, and Saul wants evidence - David is to bring him their foreskins.  David kills 200 for good measure, and dumps the bloody evidence at Saul’s feet.  

Jesus Christ as the King With No Sword

Jesus was a Jew who inherited these stories, filled with tension between a community called to embody God’s peace and their continued penchant for swords and violence.  In the founding stories of Genesis - the first family of God’s creatures involves a fratricide: Cain kills Abel.  When Jesus was asked about loving our neighbors, he begins this way: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead” (Luke 10:30).  Jesus knows full well that we do all our loving in a violent world.  

On the Thursday night when Jesus was arrested, one of his disciples drew his sword and slashed at one of the servants of the high priest.  Luckily, the guy ducked, loosing just his ear.  Jesus said, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt. 26:52).  In Luke’s account, Jesus says, “No more of this” (Luke 22:51).  Only in the gospel, only in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, do we come to a King with no sword.  

I think it was Marshall McLuhan who said: The medium is the message.  We can’t embody a God of love with violence.  We can’t honor and glorify the God of love with violent thoughts, violent words, or violent action.  Jesus calls us to live together as a sign of peacefulness in a violent world.  It is a crazy position to take, far from obvious that we will win.  Goliath is still as intimidating and invincible as ever.  Yet we’ve been invited into a full sharing in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.  We’re part of his community now, a groundswell of little acts of love that will grow into something beautiful.  And every little chance we get to enact peace -- with our words, with our hands, with our votes -- we are God’s partners in building a world of love.