II Samuel 1:1, 17-27
James R. Gorman
July 2, 2000
It is hard to grieve in public. The line between honesty of expression and embarrassment is always and everywhere terribly fuzzy.
I am an inveterate listener to WGN radio in Chicago. There are just some things about Chicago that I can't let go of after all these 16 years in Milwaukee. So I listen, in the mornings and evenings especially.
Earlier in this year, WGN lost its morning drive-time radio host, Bob Collins, who used to be at a radio station here in Milwaukee. He was killed in an airplane accident at a small airport north of Chicago. The grief at the radio station was compelling, as it was public. The remembrances of Collins went on for three days until he was buried. The other radio talk show hosts and weather people and sports people seemed to compete with one another in their grief. I found it hard to listen to after a while.
Grief in public is hard. Most of us do not want to do it and most of us don't really want to listen to it for a long time. People who grieve know that. And sometimes it is a painful fact to acknowledge. There can be, among even our best friends and family, a kind of "when are you going to get over it" tone in the voice and look in the eye.
"You need to be getting out."
"Maybe you should travel some."
"Shouldn't you be getting rid of his things?"
Friends stop talking about the person who has died. And if your grief is too open, you are not invited to places anymore. Grief is a hard thing to watch. We don't know what to say. It seems, even in our day, an expression of weakness and helplessness. And those who have lost someone very close, like a spouse or a child, can tell you that that is exactly what grief is. Helplessness. Weakness.
Tthe griever has a kind of guilt laid on top of the deeply painful loss that he or she is going through. You seem to be encouraged to stop doing something you can't stop doing. To stop feeling something you can't stop feeling.
That is why David's grief over the death of Saul and Jonathan is so striking. Its honesty and openness is amazing when you consider the time and the place and the historical circumstances surrounding the events that led up to this great publicly expressed grief.
Israel's first king has been killed in battle along with his three sons. All possible familial lines of succession to the throne have been destroyed in one horrible moment. David, who was as close to this royal family as anyone possibly could be, is brokenhearted beyond words. But David is a poet, and he puts words to his inexpressible grief.
There are several ironies in this grief, however. Several overtones and subtexts. These two books of Samuel (named after Samuel, the last Judge of Israel, first prophet, and anointer of both Saul and David) are filled with intrigues and complexities that reflect not only life in those times, but life in our own. They tell the story of the creation of the institution of King for the people of Israel. Israel went from being a loose tribal confederation to a major power. Samuel warned the people who wanted a king like the other nations had. He warned them that what all kings do is to declare wars and conscript sons and levy taxes to pay for the army. But the people insisted and Samuel anointed Saul the first king.
But Saul was given to a tormenting mental illness we might call a kind of paranoid schizophrenia, which could only be soothed by the playing of beautiful music.
David was a shepherd boy, as our Sunday School children all know. He played the lyre (a sort of harp) hauntingly well. Saul, having heard of this young man's great skills, called him to Saul's court. David became a court favorite, rising in the ranks from harpist to armor bearer, but still living at home, the youngest son of Jesse, a farmer in Bethlehem.
True to Samuel's warning about what kings would do, one of the first things Saul did as king was to declare war on the Philistines, whose greatest soldier was a rather large and bad-tempered fellow by the name of Goliath. Goliath was 6 cubits high, about 10 feet tall. All his classmates wanted him to be the center on their basketball team.
All the nations feared the Philistines because of their great warrior. David, who was still living with his father and tending his father's sheep, was asked by his dad to take some cheese and crackers out to his brothers, who were off at battle with the Philistines. David did this and ended up in the middle of things, with Goliath standing in his full height daring Israel to send him their mightiest soldier to go one on one.
No one would go. But David, reckless in his youth, volunteered. Saul reluctantly agreed to send this brash young man against this 10 foot tall giant. So Saul clothed David for battle; put on him his own armor, put a helmet on his head; put on him a coat of mail and strapped Saul's own sword on his back.
David couldn't walk. So he tore off all of that and took with him his shepherd's pouch with five smooth stones from the dried river bed. He put the stone in a sling, as he had done so many times while out protecting his sheep. The giant approached and the earth shook. And the boy David put a stone in his sling and wound it over his head and nailed that giant squarely in the forehead.
This act of heroism did two things. First, Saul was impressed and had David move into the palace. There David became the closest of friends with Saul's son Jonathan.
Second, all was fine until the women started singing songs about David's triumph over the giant. That made Saul insanely jealous and angry. Immediately in his paranoia, Saul began plotting to set David up in a battle he couldn't win so that he would be killed.
The complex intrigue here is marvelously true to what goes on in most royal households.
But David survived all of Saul's attempts to have him killed and even one attempt where Saul himself tried to run David through with a spear. Meanwhile, David's friendship with Saul's son grew to where Jonathan warned David about his father's attempts at having David killed, and David went into exile.
Soon Saul was fighting on two fronts. On one front he was still fighting with the Philistines and on the other he was trying to find David to have him killed. In desperation, David finally runs to the Philistines to seek their protection and even joins their army fighting on foreign fronts, but not fighting his own people. In fact, the Philistine king would not let David lead a fight against his own people for fear that he might defect.
So, it is while fighting with the Amalekites in the south that David learns of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan at a city called Beth Sean near the Jordan River. It was as if JFK and JFK Jr. were killed on the same day. Which brings us to today's story.
David's grief is profound but like all grief, it is mixed with a hundred other emotions as well. He did sincerely love Saul and perhaps understood more than Saul himself the nature of Saul's mental illness. Even more did David love Jonathan. But in back of all this grief is the fact that he would now become king, for all other lines of succession had been wiped out. It could have been a time for rejoicing. But it was not. It was a time to lift up the great gifts of Saul. It was a time for a eulogy which means literally, a good word, for a man who was, as David put it, the "Glory of Israel."
"How the mighty have fallen" David says three times.
"Let the very mountain upon which he was killed be cursed."
Let the daughters of Israel who have benefitted from Saul's reign now weep bitterly over his loss.
Grieve bitterly and publicly O Israel!
And here is a small irony, this text falls on our own national birthday. For ours is a country that does not grieve well in public. Abraham Lincoln once advocated for a national day of mourning and confession of sins, but the idea was not well received and the day was never enshrined in our list of federal holidays. We don't know how to grieve.
Which means that we have left unresolved guilts and troubles that grief, when done well, is meant to resolve.
We still have not adequately grieved over the civil war and because of that we have a continuing racial bitterness as the ghost of our unresolved grief.
We have still not adequately grieved over our own national hesitancies to end a holocaust in Germany or take in the Jewish refugees. So we are left with an anti-Semitism that haunts and troubles us.
We have still not completely or adequately grieved over Viet Nam and every day and everywhere that unresolved grief complicates our foreign policy.
"How like David we could be. And how like David we are.... We go on in our lives imagining that the mighty do not fall, that the glory is not slain. We imagine that if we do not say it, the Philistines will not notice. David knew better, sang better and acted better. And so could we."(1)
Even on this national birthday, we could pause for a moment or two to grieve, to confess, to reflect. It would be good for us to do so. It would be meet, right, and our bounden duty to do so. Public grieving is not an altogether bad thing. It means dealing with the ghosts that haunt us. It means confronting the darkness and moving on.
1. Walter Brueggemann, First and Second Samuel, p. 219.