A Holy Land: Tell Me No Lies (1 Kings 3:5-12)
Ordinary Time
At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a
dream by night, and God said, “Ask what I should give you.” 6 And
Solomon said, “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant my father David because he walked before you in
faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you, and
you have kept for him this great and steadfast love and have given him a son to
sit on his throne today. 7 And now,
O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father
David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come
in. 8 And your servant is
in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people so numerous
they cannot be numbered or counted. 9 Give your
servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to
discern between good and evil, for who can govern this great people of yours?”
10 It pleased the Lord
that Solomon had asked this. 11 God said to him,
“Because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself long life or
riches or for the life of your enemies but have asked for yourself
understanding to discern what is right, 12 I now do
according to your word. Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one
like you has been before you, and no one like you shall arise after you.” (NRSVUE)
One of my
favorite things about the Bible is that, like any really good book, it doesn’t
change but my understanding of it does as I grow older and gain different
experiences, different lenses through which to see this library of history, poetry,
and storytelling. This scene of God and
Solomon is a common addition to stories we think suitable to tell children; ask
for wisdom, seems to be the moral of the story as neatly packaged as any of
Aesop’s fables, and don’t ask for finite and selfish things like wealth or
power. God will reward those who ask for
the right thing.
But
Scripture is always more than what we tell children; yes, Solomon asked for
wisdom, but there is so much going on in how he asked, in the lies that
are true and the truth that becomes a lie, in the bizarreness of God’s offer in
the first place. This dream tale teaches
us so much more than how to get the right answer when chatting with God.
A
bit of context as we finish up this miniseries on the trip I was able to take
to Israel and Jordan this past February: we have switched from the adventures
of the obvious scoundrel Jacob to the far less obvious scoundrel Solomon, son
of the decided scoundrel who is rarely called such, David. The books of the kings in what we call the
Old Testament are part history and part theological warning; Solomon is the
third generation of an office that was never supposed to exist. Israel, after having carved out a place for
themselves in the Promised Land to which they were led after escaping Egypt,
was meant to follow God; the Lord was their King, and all the books that people
usually skip reading like Numbers and Deuteronomy are full of the
infrastructure of how God-as-King-and-people-as-administrators would work. But the people wanted a human king, a person
like them whom they could see and understand, and God said it was a terrible
idea but it was their choice.
God,
as usual, was correct; it was a terrible idea.
Saul went first and utterly forgot God as he got trapped in his own
search for power and prestige—the things Solomon is here lauded for not seeking—and
then David took over and brought leadership alongside warfare, adultery, a
family as messed up as Jacob’s, and greed.
Solomon was supposed to be the one who might get it right this time, and
he didn’t. He, too, was human; he, too,
fails in his own way as king. He, too,
wasn’t God. And yet God reaches out,
anyway, because God refuses to sever the relationship with God’s people and
with their leader.
When
we come to this moment of God offering whatever Solomon wants, it is not simply
because God felt generous on a certain Thursday. The people of Israel, having not yet built a
permanent Temple, were making offerings at various “high places.” Solomon went to one of the most important
such places, Gibeon, to offer his own sacrifices after a successful marriage-based
alliance with the pharaoh of Egypt of all places, the nation’s old
oppressor. Both going to such a place
and marrying outside the nation were against the Deuteronomic codes.[1] God’s appearance in the dream is remarkable
not least because God comes to a man who is already on theocratic thin ice, but
also because God comes to the man; there’s no sense that Solomon was expecting
a one-on-one meeting at Gibeon at all.
And
then God offers a blank check, a stringless wish: “Ask what I should give you,”
says God, and I can only imagine Charlie being given the keys to the chocolate
factory in that moment. Whatever? Ask for anything? Because this is from God, there’s no concern
about this being a “gotcha” moment where the wrong choice will bring down
singing Oompa Loompas, but because this is from God, there are wrong
answers. Asking for something that did
not contribute to love, or life, or wholeness, shalom, would certainly
be a disappointment, and Solomon knows better than to be a disappointment on
purpose.
But he
doesn’t know how to be fully genuine about it; in the three verses between
God’s offer and Solomon’s actual answer, Solomon talks up his righteous and
faithful father—which wasn’t completely accurate—and talks himself down
as “a child” who “does not know how to go out or come in,” both of which are
blatantly untrue While certainly not
equal to God, Solomon is no child, and the language he uses of “going out” was
“typically used in a military context to denote the king’s participation in war,”[2] so
even his phrasing isn’t altogether innocent.
In his hedging, Solomon uses the word “servant” four times—once for his
dad and three times for himself—in as many sentences. The word written is עַבְדְּךָ֔, abdekha, which is incidentally the
same word Jacob uses when he meets his brother Esau again decades after taking blessing
and birthright from him and is unsure whether Esau is going to forgive and
forget or pummel him into the sand.[3]
When
I was a child, they told me this was about how good and pious it was of Solomon
to ask for wisdom. Now I am an adult, I
am cynical enough to wonder if Solomon was as crafty and self-effacing as he
sounds, whitewashing his family lineage and debasing himself just in case God
needs the extra groveling. The lies Solomon
tells grate, now, and I wonder how on earth God could respond that Solomon had
asked well and then give him not only the discerning mind but all the other
things as well. Surely, God understood
that Solomon had an angle.
And
the thing about the divine and the human finding each other is that yeah, quite
likely, God did. But the gift was given,
anyway.
On
one of the nights I stayed in Jerusalem, I went with a part of my group to a
show at King David’s Castle, a structure also known as the Tower of David or
the Citadel near the Jaffa Gate into Old Jerusalem. It’s a beautiful and impressive structure
looming over the street below, a conglomeration of Byzantine and Roman and
crusader and Ottoman architecture layered over and around each other. It’s a museum now, and in the evenings,
there’s a light show of projections on the walls of the castle itself that
tells the history of Jerusalem. There’s
a narration track and music as the images spill over the stone for the audience
gathered in the courtyard; as a theatrical experience, it’s breathtaking. It was also deeply cold in February, so that
shapes my memory of it.
The
show, though, is 112% propaganda. Of
course it is; it’s a museum in the heart of Jerusalem celebrating the city that
has been through so much, and the images and narration tell a tale of
perseverance and strength through wars and crusades and earthquakes and
fire. It was an amazing experience, and
it swept entirely over any of the times the city was a place of danger, or
exclusion, or internal battles; it ignored the way that Israel itself is a mess
and has been since it was carved out by the well-meaning Allied forces after
the devastation of World War II. There
was no naming of Jerusalem as the bloodied heart of three religions that rarely
get along, or of the soldiers patrolling the streets. It was beautiful, and it was true, and it was
deeply untrue at the same time.
“Your servant
my father David…walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in
uprightness of heart toward you”.
The
day after that light show, I went with a different group of people to Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust museum at the edge of the forests on the west side of the
city. It’s on top of a small hill with
greenery and life all around, but the building of the museum is a stark grey
concrete blade. The architect wanted it
to be ugly, wanted it to be a “saw blade” that permanently scarred the earth
itself.
The
museum’s layout is designed to force you forward; there are exhibits built in
the floor of the central hallway so that you can’t walk in a straight line but
instead are pushed to and fro and crowded together in each exhibit just as the
those sent to the camps were. The very
first thing you see in the museum is a video montage of Jewish life around
Europe in the 1920s—dancing, school pageants, families hanging out laundry, shabbat
dinners, old men and women talking through the stories of the day. It’s a video of life, and the rest of the museum
teaches you about how that life was methodically snuffed out over and over and
over again. The end of the museum is a
circular room with name plaques for the dead, and many of the plaques are blank,
because many of those who were killed will never be identified, never brought
home to their families, their lives.
“And
your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people
so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore,
an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and
evil, for who can govern this great people of yours?”
Yad
Vashem is also a mix of bent truths and deeply true things; the very specific
story it tells is an important and horrifying story that must be told, that
must be remembered in every generation lest we forget who we become when we
lose our souls of compassion, our connection to the love that has nothing to do
with romance and everything to do with our neighbor. At Yad Vashem where the garden does not cover
the desolate stone, there is the fierce hope that if we tell this truth,
perhaps we can discern between good and evil; perhaps God’s people can be so
numerous. It was an extra layer of
meaning to go to that museum in 2023 when fascism is taking root in leadership
around the world again and the reality of legal discrimination that leads to dehumanization
gains ground by the day.
Solomon’s
presentation of his answer is not completely true, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t
real. The light show at the castle was
telling a story that encourages children to be proud of the city that houses
them, and telling tourists that there is steel in the spine of this place. And Solomon is telling a story to God, one of
honor and faithfulness and humility, because sometimes a lie is not a lie if it
is told in service of a hopeful truth.
“Solomon
knows that a listening heart and an understanding mind are more valuable than
traditional signs of kingship,” writes Professor Roger Nam. “The Hebrew words help unpack the richness in
Solomon’s response. In Hebrew, the word ‘to listen’ is the same word for ‘to obey.’
“Also, the
concept of ‘understanding’ is not mere cognition, but integrates morality as
seen with the clarification ‘able to discern between good and evil.’”
God’s open
offer of everything in answered with Solomon’s Mad-Ave-slick politicking and
the very real request for a mind and heart with which to lead. I have no idea if Solomon believed himself, but
I know that God believed that it was a good enough response to merit granting
it. I know that the writers of the books
of kings needed their people to know that Solomon, broken and foolish and proud
as he was, had this one moment of being the leader they’d hoped he would be.
We weave
our own narratives all the time; even this morning, the public act of a baptism
is part of the story we are telling about ourselves. It is true, and real, and honest that now we
have this littlest sibling who joins us in the family of Christ and whom it is
our job to nurture. Will we adhere to
the vows we said, beautiful as they are?
Perhaps. Perhaps they were lies,
reshaped truths like Solomon’s presentation of a faithful father and he, the
dutiful son. Perhaps we, too, will fail
in our bringing her up as someone who knows not only that she has a whole
family of people to teach her about the surface and the sublevels of Solomon’s wisdom
but also that she is never any less than God’s beloved. Of course we will fail that—but we promise
it, anyway. Solomon asks for a discerning
mind, anyway. And God grants it in the
love of who Solomon could become, anyway.
Grace is ever hopeful, ever trusting, ever honest, after all.
May we seek
that grace earnestly and give it honorably as we listen to each other tell our
stories, hearing the things we mean to say even as we hear what is fully said,
and may we, too, ask for and live through wise and discerning minds. Amen.
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