Thursday • 9/7/2023 •
Thursday of the Fourteenth Week After Pentecost (Proper 17)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 37; 1 Kings 11:1–13; James 3:13–4:12; Mark 15:12–21
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we consider some aspect of that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. On this Thursday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 17 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
Maybe I’ve been reading the Bible for too many years, but I don’t often find myself being stopped in my tracks and weeping over the foibles of one of the characters. But today it happened as I read about Solomon’s fall.
Deficit of love. Solomon bore the name of love. His parents’ special name for him was not Solomon (which, of course, means “Peace”). David and Bathsheba’s pet name for him, given by the prophet Nathan on behalf of Yahweh himself, was “Jedidiah” (which means “Beloved of Yah”; see 2 Samuel 12:25). The LORD’s deepest wish for him was that he know, regardless of the sinfulness of his parents’ early choices, he was himself an expression of God’s love.
If the Song of Songs is any indication, Solomon learned how to translate divine love into human love. But somewhere along the way, a deficit emerges. He longs for a kind of love that it takes 700 wives and 300 concubines to satisfy. No matter how many of these relationships may have been established for the sake of political alliances (and that was probably many, many of them), Solomon sought in them something more. He was looking for love. “King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh… Solomon clung to these in love” (1 Kings 11:1a,2b). There’s a certain desperation in a man who “clings” to 1,000 women in love.
Image: King Solomon, Simeon Solomon, 1872 or 1874.National Gallery of Art , CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
What was missing for Solomon? Did he, after all, not know what it was to be “beloved of Yah”? Of course, I don’t hold the Rosetta Stone to Solomon’s heart. However, I do have to ask myself: Is the Lord’s love enough for me?
Disobedience to God’s Word. Sometimes, as simplistic as it seems, the sheer willingness and determination to obey God’s Word can keep us from going off the rails. Even if we’re not sure why we’re told to do what we’re told to do, obedience can save our life. It goes for stopping at red lights, paying our taxes, not cheating on our spouse, following the training manual on an assembly line.
Most especially, it goes for paying attention to God’s “Thou shalt nots…” and his “Thou shalts.” The history of the human race would have taken a different course if Adam and Eve had simply shrugged off the serpent’s, “Hast God really said?” If they’d said, “He hast indeed, Slithering One. That is good enough for us. Now, slitherest thou off.”
If only Solomon had said, “All those marriages and concubinages make political sense. They might promise delights, and they might satisfy the deficit in my heart. But my Lord and Sovereign, who loves me more, who loves me better, and who therefore owns my heart—he says in his Word, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them … for they will surely incline your heart to follow their gods.’ So.I.just.won’t.do.it.”
If only. For us, there stands the perennial challenge: When our heart inclines in one direction, and God’s Word points definitively in another, to which inclination will we yield? Jesus, give us grace!
Drift over time. The especially chilling words in today’s portion of Solomon’s story are these: “For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods; and his heart was not true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of his father David” (1 Kings 11:4 emphasis added).
Like moisture that seeps into the walls of a house and, gradually and invisibly, creates deadly mold, Solomon’s faithlessness in marriage created faithlessness in his own Divine Marriage. As young poet, Solomon composes Song of Songs’s celebration of romance between husband and wife; his love song serves as a sacramental portrait of love between Yahweh-as-Lover and Israel-as-Beloved. But as Solomon follows a different trajectory over time, adding wife after wife and concubine after concubine, he opens his heart to false god after false god. Without even realizing it, his very identity gets buried in a flurry of promiscuous trysts with pagan divinities. The consequences for the people whom Solomon is called to love and serve are grave. In the next generation, the kingdom will be torn in two, just as he had allowed his own heart to be torn between Yahweh and the bevy of deities he had cultivated.
James and spiritual adultery. Solomon has become the kind of double-minded spiritual adulterer that James takes on in today’s epistle reading (James 4:4,8). James warns such a person, “Adulterers! Do you not know that whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God?” (James 4:4). I find myself wishing that James could have time-traveled back to Solomon’s day and urged him to repent of the drift of his heart and turn back wholeheartedly to God, or, as he urges us: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (James 4:8–10).
Mark: Jesus stands in our place. We are left with the hope of the Cross. Jesus bears abuse and false condemnation, ready to stand in judgment’s place for all the Solomon-likeness in us, crippled as we may be by a deficit of love, cavalierly (or neglectfully) disobeying God’s commands, or drifting into spiritual adultery. His pain, our gain. Praise be.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+