Help us, O Lord, to trust you in all things and
above all things. Amen.
The story of David and Goliath might just be the most well-known story in the Bible. There are plenty of Biblical narratives that people know: Noah and the Flood, the Christmas story, the Good Samaritan, but the battle between David and Goliath might be the most culturally ubiquitous. It has entered our cultural lexicon as a way of speaking about the underdog winning against the odds. When App State beat #5 ranked Michigan in 2007 or when the 1980 US Olympic team defeated the presumptive Gold-medal Soviets, these victories were described as David conquering Goliath. You don’t have to have read the Bible or ever been to church to know that David, the little guy, ends up being the giant slayer against the big and ferocious Goliath.
As
people of faith though, we know there is more to the story than this. Yes, God
is often on the side of the downtrodden, the rejected, and the lowly. As Mary
proclaims in her song known as the Magnificat, “the Lord casts down the mighty from their
thrones and lifts up the lowly.” There is nothing wrong with reading this passage
from First Samuel through that lens. Indeed, God is in the business of
subverting the order of the world and being a champion for the humble and meek.
But the way this passage is often understood is at a transactional or moral
level. The common reading of this passage is this: God is always with us, even
when we fight our enemies, but if we can just have faith like David, we, too,
will slay the giants that we face.
An
that sounds good. It makes us puff out our chests a little bit and gives us
confidence. You can even imagine a commercial for Nike or Gatorade about
trusting in ourselves and being able to pull the upset and conquer our bigger
and stronger competition. But surely this passage isn’t just a religious story that
essentially says “sometimes the blind squirrel gets lucky and finds the nut.”
Yes, the unexpected happens. But take those odds to Vegas and you’ll lose. As
they say, the house always wins. The law of averages will eventually hold true;
we will all regress to the mean. For every one David who pulls the upset, I can
show you 99 Goliaths who do what Goliaths do – crush their opponents.
If
we read this as a story about just trusting that tide will change or that the odds
don’t matter, we will often be disappointed. Because when the oncologist tells
you that there’s a 10% survival rate, usually the Goliath of cancer wins. And
that’s not because we don’t pray hard enough, or because the person has their
doubts about being cured, or because God doesn’t like that person. Not at all.
Goliath often wins because that’s what Goliaths do. Sure, I could run against
Usain Bolt or swim against Michael Phelps, and just maybe, eventually I’d be
able to win because in a million tries, they’d sprain a muscle and I might be
faster. But if we confuse divine intervention with dumb luck, we might also
confuse natural consequences with divine neglect or punishment.
In
the Gospel passage from Mark, the disciples are in a boat in the midst of a
fierce storm and are fearing for their lives. They cry out to Jesus, “Do you
not care that we are perishing?” Of course, Jesus cares. And, in this instance,
Jesus calmed the storm. But just because the storm rages on it does not mean
that Jesus no longer cares about us. When Titanics hit icebergs, when Russias
invade Ukraines, when stock markets crash, when depression overwhelms us, when
the test results aren’t good, God still absolutely cares.
It’s
a question that has plagued theologians, pastors, and all people since Job
first asked the question – why do bad things happen to good people? What passes
for Christianity in our culture is too often reductionistic and moralistic. They
say that if God likes you, you will receive good things. If your behavior
displeases God, you will receive bad things. If you watch preachers on television
or see a book on the bestseller list about religion, it’s likely a heresy known
as the Prosperity “Gospel,” which essentially is a David and Goliath theology
that says you can accomplish whatever you want, if you just abandon reason and
expect that God will always make you a winner. But I’m not ready to say that God
rejected those Christians who were mauled by lions in the Colosseum, or that
Martin Luther King wasn’t a divinely appointed prophet when a sniper took aim
at him, or that a young child with cancer is receiving God’s anger. No, the
hard truth is that not only sometimes, but often, Goliath wins. And so, if we read
this passage as being about trusting that God will always grant us victory, we
won’t know what to do with our failures and we will misread the text and turn
God into someone who serves our purposes instead of us being servants of the
Almighty.
Another
issue with the colloquial reading of David and Goliath is that, somehow, we
always see ourselves as David. I’ve heard a lot of people describe themselves
as overcoming the odds, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard someone facing adversity
say “Well, I guess I’m Goliath.” Are we always the champions, or maybe the
victims, of our stories? Or can we allow ourselves to recognize that sometimes
we are the enemy?
The
fact of the matter is that a lot of us have a lot of privileges. We might not
have the armor of Goliath, but we have wealth, degrees, and networks all
designed to protect us and make sure we come out on top. We are citizens of the
strongest military superpower this world has ever known. The US has more
household wealth than any other country in the world, and by a wide margin. I’m
not telling you what concludes to draw from that data, but when given this
story as a framework, others might see us as more of a Goliath than a David.
This,
I realize, is an uncomfortable truth. I try my best to be humble and hospitable
and though I don’t like it, I can at least understand why people in different circumstances
might see me as a Goliath, as an oppressor, as someone who takes the relative
ease of life for granted. Now, sure, we might be fine with confessing that we
are our own worst enemies. We can admit that we sabotage our self-improvement projects
by overcommitting our time, or eating that doughnut, or buying that thing that
we really don’t need. But seeing ourselves as the enemy of someone else takes a
lot of brutal honesty.
I
can share an encounter that helped me to see this. You know that I’ve attended
a lot of racial equity workshops. As a member of Racial Equity Rowan, I think I’ve
attended a dozen two-day seminars – nearly a month’s worth. In a conversation
with an African-American male at one of these workshops, somehow we got to
talking about air travel and how his experience is different than mine. He
mentioned that he wanted to buy some chewing gum to help with the pressure in
his ears during takeoff, but he had to make sure that he got a receipt for a transaction
that was barely a dollar because someone might accuse him of shoplifting the gum,
and that would likely mean he’d miss his flight. In my entire life, I’ve never
even once considered a receipt as a defense against being accused of shoplifting.
But this man can’t buy a pack of gum without thinking about it.
Likewise,
as a man, I’ve never had to worry about walking alone to my parked car in the
evening, but I know many women who tell me they don’t have that privilege. As a
straight person, I’ve never had to wonder if I didn’t get a job because of my
gender expression or orientation. Because of the collar around my neck, I’ve
never had to prove myself or do anything to receive legitimacy or respect. All
I have to do is walk into a room and my ordination status speaks louder than
words.
Now,
does any of this make me a bad person or worthy of being called an “enemy”? Of
course not. But then again, I doubt the Philistines or Goliath thought of themselves
as bad people. In their minds, they were the good guys; the Israelites were the
enemies, not them. Again, if we read this story through the moralistic lens of “be
like David,” we might overlook our abuses of power; we might confuse our privilege
for deserving; we might forget that we are capable of being Goliath; we might
condone the ways in which we live as enemies of the kingdom as it is coming on
earth as it is in heaven.
In
general, a good way of reading Scripture is to not immediately insert ourselves
into the story. The Bible is not a recipe book that tells us what to do. Yes,
of course, there is much wisdom and guidance in Scripture, but we aren’t the
main character. God is. So many of our misreadings of Scripture come when we
push God off to the side and make it all about us. If we read this story about
David and Goliath as instructions about how we are supposed to slay giants, we’ll
miss the true power and beauty of this story.
We
aren’t David, nor are we Goliath. Sure, sometimes we might play those roles,
but that’s not who we are in this story. We are Israel. We’re standing on the
sidelines looking out against an enemy that we know we have no chance of
defeating. That enemy takes on a lot of forms. Our human limitations, our brokenness,
our propensity to mess things up, our imperfect nature – or Sin, as the Church
often refers to it, is not something that we can contend against and overcome. Death
is an enemy that we have no hope against on our own. Meaningless threatens us
all – as we live on a speck of space dust in a universe that is bigger, older,
and more mysterious than we can even begin to imagine.
Like
the people of Israel, we stand on the sidelines wondering where our help will
come from. The passage from First Samuel refers to Goliath as the “champion” of
the Philistines. “Champion” doesn’t quite get at it. A more literal translation
is “the man in the middle.” The way battles worked at the time was that each
side would choose one “champion,” one warrior who would go into the space
between the two sides to do battle against the other side’s champion. These
were the men in the middle. And whoever won would win the victory for their
entire side.
Our
ultimate hope is not in David, but rather in a descendant of David’s line. This
story trains us to anticipate and yearn for an even greater champion than David
could ever be. Our salvation is found in a Son of David who was born in the
City of David. Our champion went into the fray on our behalf and did battle
against empire, Sin, and Death itself. Unlike David though, our man in the middle
didn’t pull out a sling and knock out our enemies. Instead, he became the enemy
and was rejected by his own people. He was insulted, beaten, and stripped naked
only to be lynched on a cross. And in doing so, he did for us what we could
never do for ourselves – he showed us the depth, beauty, and grace of love. But
because this love is the grain of the universe, even Death was no match for our
champion. So on the third day, our champion rose from the grave and made the
whole Creation new.
And it wasn’t just his victory, but because Jesus Christ is our champion, his victory is given to us. His victory means that our sins are forgiven, that our deaths are not final, and that our lives matter because we get to participate in the love that gave him the victory. We don’t have to win the fight, rather we get to enjoy being on the winning side of love. So, you see, this isn’t a story about us slaying giants, or trying to have the confidence of David; it’s about our champion, Jesus Christ, who goes into the middle of our messy lives, who is with us in the chaos of our storms, whose love is making all things well.
