Aug 14th

1 Samuel 4     Jeremiah 42     Mark 4     (Click on the Reference to go to the passage)

The failure of leadership among God’s people has far-reaching consequences, as is made clear by the defeat of Israel’s armies, and the capture of the Ark of the Covenant by the Philistines. It is fascinating to see the difference between the response of Israel’s elders here and that of David, the later king of Israel. When he faced defeat, he would ask the Lord directly, and receive instruction from him. Here, the elders pose the question, but then immediately answer it from their own store of human wisdom. ‘Let’s bring the ark of the Lord’s covenant … so that it may … save us from the hand of our enemies.’ Note how subtly they have removed their trust from the Lord himself to a religious object. It matters not that the ark had indeed been given by God to represent his presence with his people. Now that Israel’s leaders’ faith was in it and not in him, it becomes worse than useless to them – their act of pride leading to 30,000 slaughtered on the battlefield. Are we in danger of placing the trust that belongs only to the Lord in any religious object or practice?

As so often, scripture brings that vast number down to a human scale – Eli’s sons are among the dead. And so the judgment foretold through Samuel is meted out as a direct consequence of the corrupt leadership his prophetic word had condemned. When we first met Eli in chapter 1, he is sitting in his chair. Our final sight of him, his bloated body symbolic of the self-serving and lazy life he has led, is again on his chair, or rather, falling dead from it as his heart fails him. God’s people – and especially their leaders – are not called to a life of leisure or selfish gain. We have no license to sit on our chairs. Lord, save us from passivity today.

We read Mark 3 yesterday, and saw Jesus’s ongoing battle to reintroduce the word and works of God into another generation which had grown up in their absence, as Pharisees and others focused on religious rule and ritual above reaching out to those in need. It is their hardness of heart which most distresses Jesus. How ironic that the evil spirits are more ready to acknowledge the truth about him (‘You are the son of God’) than Israel’s spiritual leaders! Indeed, these so-called leaders try to claim that Jesus is in league with the Devil himself, a charge which Jesus exposes for the nonsense it so patently is. Sadly, there are those today who try to explain away or even denounce God’s Kingdom work.

The soils in today’s parable of the sower stand for various heart responses to the word of God. May we be those who, by welcoming and following Jesus in all he seeks to do among us today, see a rich harvest for God’s kingdom, which, as his later parables in this chapter show, however small and insignificant it may at times appear, is here to stay and here to grow.

(member of the clergy)