Jul 09 | Crowned at Hebron: Summer 2018 Preaching Series, Part 5
Today’s Citations:
So far in our summer series on kings, we’ve explored what kind of ruler Jesus is: a ruler who is a refugee, a prisoner, a prophet, someone who shows us great power by sharing it with others.
And up until this week, for the most part, King David has proven to be not unlike King Jesus, in that he enjoys God’s favour and the love of the people. Today, we hear the story of him anointed king by the people. Now we actually heard about Samuel anointing David already – God clearly saw David as a king long before the people accepted him. But now the people are finally on board. They have accepted God’s chosen one, and unlike Saul, we know that David trusts God completely. The people say that David, who once kept sheep, will now keep the nation as sheep. This was a popular metaphor for kingship at that time, but it’s also an approval of David’s whole person, because even though folks saw kings as shepherds, being a shepherd not a glamorous job.
Quick sidebar: I had some fun thinking of metaphors we could substitute for this today. Our king is like the fast food worker who feeds us quickly and affordably when we are hungry and poor. Our queen is like the jewelry store worker who guards us, her jewels, from thieves. Our emperor is like the care aide who provides for our most basic needs no matter how tired she is. Our ruler is like the janitor that makes sure we stay healthy by keeping things clean and working properly.
These are all jobs that many people take for granted but that none of us could do without – just like being a shepherd was then. And we are hearing the people tell David that they welcome that part of who he is, and celebrate it.
And then we have the story of Jesus rejected in his own hometown. Here, his being a carpenter is not celebrated but mocked. “Who does he think he is?†they say. They also call him “the son of Mary.†Back then, almost no-one referred to men as sons of their mothers; they would call them the sons of their fathers. To call him “the son of Mary†was another way of mocking Jesus.
It isn’t just the Gospel reading that shows us the differences between the triumph of David and the shame of Jesus. For me, there was an unexpected moment of discomfort in the naming of the place of David’s anointing.
David is crowned at Hebron, which is in the West Bank in the Holy Land.
I have been to Hebron. I was there as part of a course a year and a half ago. It’s the kind of place that you lie about going to. When you are coming home from the Holy Land, you are asked many questions about why you came, what you did there, what and who you saw, and even who you are and what you do back home.
All of us were coached on how to handle that interrogation. We were given a list of places to tell security we had been to, places which were acceptable for Christians to visit, like Bethlehem. Hebron, we were told, was not a safe place to admit to having been to. We were told to only say we had been there if we were asked directly.
Hebron’s a dangerous place. The tomb of Machpelah is the jewel of Hebron, the oldest continuously used prayer space in the world, which houses the tombs of the fathers and mothers of the Jewish faith. It is also so holy to Muslims that it’s an acceptable place to complete the hajj pilgrimage if they cannot go to Mecca. It’s also been the site of many massacres, most notably in 1994 by a Jewish-American extremist and his followers, who opened fire on worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 125. Not long after that event, armed guards and metal detectors were installed outside and inside. The building was split into a Jewish prayer space and a mosque with two separate entrances, and the tombs of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Leah within are guarded by Israeli Defense soldiers with assault rifles. You have to be very careful when taking photos of the tombs not to include the soldiers in them.
In the mosque, where many pilgrims greeted us with smiles, we met the imam, who told us that Muslims were regularly subjected to searches, and sometimes even barred from sections by the Israeli authorities.
Before we went into the mosque (it took about twenty minutes to get clearance to enter), we hung about one street which had a shop that offered gifts and free sage tea. Children called to us to invite us over. Men tried to sell wallets and woven accessories on their own. Other than that one street, though, the portion of the city we saw was eerily silent – very unusual considering how close it was to such a holy site. A few kids sat on steps and watched us warily. Stray cats searched through garbage. I took photographs of protest graffiti on walls, including a beautiful white dove with an olive branch in its beak. When the Muslim noon prayer time arrived, the songs of the muezzin, who call Muslims to prayer over crackly loudspeakers, erupted all over town simultaneously, louder than we’d ever heard in the other places we visited. The dean of the college offering the course told us this was a sign of resistance against the Israelis, many of whom make noise complaints to the police against them.
Hebron is not a glamourous place, the kind of place that feels utterly alien to a Western city kid like me.
And while today a king like David would never be crowned there, Jesus could be. I believe Hebron, atmospherically, would have felt familiar to Jesus and his disciples. Imagine going into a creaky old house in the heat of summer after many weeks with no rain, and the first thing you smell is gunpowder – not just a little but a lot, a thick heavy cloud. That smell’s going to change how you move around in there, right? That’s kind of how it felt to me, and that gave me a lot of sympathy for those who reject Jesus at Nazareth. In the text we hear that some “took offense†at Jesus. Why? What’s so offensive about healing? Well, in a powder keg town, you want to keep your head down. Here in Vancouver we can go out to protests and make a fuss about things that are worth fussing about – and even some that aren’t!
But in a powder keg town, if you don’t keep your head down…boom.
All it takes is one match, one rock, one healer to light an empire’s fuse.
Nazareth was a small town. People would have grown up with Jesus and his family. They cared about him, and here he came, preaching and teaching and healing right out in the open. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he started teaching his followers how to do that stuff too. This was now an organized effort – even more dangerous.
This week’s story is here to remind us that following this king has consequences. Throughout most of history people could only get in trouble for not following kings. This is completely upside-down! And yet that is in keeping with our upside-down king, who chooses children and outsiders to make up his royal court. That’s good news for some, bad news for others, because for some of us it takes a conscious effort to become outsiders, while others have always been and always will be outsiders.
If this sounds frightening, don’t worry. We don’t do it alone. Every justice movement that has brought good to the world only accomplished its holy work because people did it together. And we do our work together. And we are cared for better than any other servants, because God our ruler not only sends us out to harvest what She herself has planted, but invites us to come inside Her house and be fed – and not even in some dingy servants’ quarters but here, together, at Her table.
Like family.