[Note - the audio was from a sketched shorter version of the longer form notes below]
[1] “Wisdom” and the Old Testament
The passage raises some questions for me which are still questions. But to start with what I am certain of.
There is a God, who is engaged in our lives and in my life, and he is working out his Kingdom in the world, that grand climactic project of a peaceful flourishing humanity, I see it, I experience it, God, through Christ, drawing imperfect people as me, into counter-intuitive harmonies with such as you, and I long for more people to have more of it.
To this end, the Old Testament has so much to teach us about who God is and what the world is like. And, it's not so much that the text is difficult or opaque, which it sometimes is, but that there is particular challenge, even with exemplary characters, even with functional typologies of Christ who foreshadow him, in presuming to learn and apply precise wisdom principles from flawed characters cast within a narrative which ends badly.
In Abigail's case, in facing death to atone for Nabal's sin, and petitioning for mercy, she is a Type of Christ. But the story, which plays as one young lady's poly awakening - a journey out of a bad marriage and into a harem, seems a fairly moot out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire sort of transformation, where her 'wisdom' is a coping mechanism for surviving between the rock-and-a-hard-place of two toxic masculinities: David's graceless aggression and Nabal's negligent cowardice.
In between that, there are wisdom principles we could distil:
Bringing people food will make them more amenable – write that down, practice it this week, that's true, even to the point of bribery.
Or, less flippantly, if you trust in the axiomatic goodness of God, then good things will happen to you – and that's true in an ultimate sense, trust in Jesus, go to Heaven, and it's true in an everyday sense, even to the point of a prosperity gospel.
That to say, it's difficult to render her actions as instructable techniques.
This evening, I want to:
celebrate Abigail's wisdom without pietising the pragmatic way she manipulates a situation, and without undermining the principle of monogamy by justifying her wisdom through over-stating her survival as a romantic happily-ever-after.
juxtapose Abigail's wisdom with David's descent into tyrannical cliché without obscuring that he is largely doing a brave and difficult thing in a God-fearing way.
justapose Abigail's wisdom with Nabal's folly without glee that Nabal gets his comeuppance, and without reducing him to a caricature. As, in all, be under no illusion – I am Nabal.
[1.1] Text, Kingdom, Characters
So, I've been challenged about how I read the Old Testament generally. I'd love St Marks to more often be creating more contexts where more wrestling with the TEXT is more foreground: to encourage us to interrogate it, problematise it, reconcile it, apply it with a sense of the holistic purpose and so to be a church noted for its resilient realism, because we have faced fully and unflinchingly the tragedy of the Old Testament.
So, the text is tragic, which I have made peace with by reading it as the formation of a prototype KINGDOM. Christians participate in a Kingdom under Christ's constitution, but before that was plausible or even conceivable, God worked through the Old Testament, a prototypical society structured around a hierarchy that is subjected to stress testing to the point of failure so to illustrate the human problem rather than to be itself the solution.
So, a text marked by the realism of its tragedy, into which a Kingdom is being prototyped. Within this moment of its progression, we have three CHARACTERS. A meditation on all three, individually, and as they interact, is a source of wisdom. David, Nabal and Abigail are descriptive of the world as it is, they reflect us as we are:
🥷 David
The necessity of heroism
The trajectory towards disgust in the religious impulse
The problem of grief in this life
🤷♂️ Nabal
The monster of wealth
Our motives for inaction
The allure of alcohol
👩🍳 Abigail
We see general wisdom insofar as she behaves intelligently and honourably, and radical wisdom as she fears God in so doing. But she is of note where she exercises prophetic wisdom – she has the eyes to see, and risks something peculiar sacrificially – which I would distinguish from a more universal wisdom as conceived as technique.
Suggests effective prophetic ways to potentially confront authority
And a convicting portrait of the weaponised domestic ~ Hospitality as a political act.
[1.2] Reading the Old Testament
So, the text as reality and tragedy. I want for myself and for St Marks to live free with a sense of urgent wonder, with a Christ-centred sense of humble but purposive purpose, to be and do church courageously on the basis of this book
The Old Testament is not a prequel spinoff, it is not just backstory, an accessory appendix to your Gideons bible. It's not to be read wistfully as if David&Abigail were a pulp romance. It's not to be read superstitiously or awkwardly – neither that it contains secret codes, nor that it contains specially redactable embarrassment. And, mostly as a note to myself, the Old Testament is not intellectually recreational reading to be engaged with a detached morbid fascination.
Rather, read it like it is the guts of the universe, the interpretative key to my own pathologies and my precarious place in the cosmos and the patterns which recur. The New Testament is the answer to a question the Old Testament is asking, and without the Old Testament, you lack the vocabulary to fully ask it.
I read the OT as reality. It is not merely or incidentally realistic, it captures frankly and fundamentally how the moral universe functions. Reality, as opposed to an idealised mythology ~ and for being so real, it is a tragedy.
[1.3] Old Testament as REALITY
I read to learn about reality and what to expect, and how to engage:
🌍 The world as it actually is
🙋♂️ Myself as I actually am
🌬️ The God who is really there.
⛪ But also, we, as we, read the bible together, [get in a small group] we read the bible together to reveal who we as a we are. and allow it to shape our churching a model of being a multi-personal entity journeying a journey together, a journey that has happened to others before – a journey out of chaos into a Christ encounter, out of tribalism into a Kingdom, out of addiction into healing, out of antagonism into harmony.
The Old Testament as Reality is an accurate account of the world as we find it. Not an ideality, not merely a laboratory, nor merely an ideological hypothesis.
🌍 I find the world reflected in the Old Testament - rendered as consistent with our contemporary psychological and political realities – a familiarity with which patterns recur should keep us from naivety.
🙋♂️ I find myself reflected in the humans of the Old Testament, in their heroism and depravity, as victims and perpetrators of considerable malevolence.
🌬️ I find God not vaguely but purposively, actively and specifically at work drawing cathedrals out of chaos.
⛪ I find a diagram of a structure, the formation of a cosmic monarchy, a dress rehearsal for church.
The Old Testament describes a total worldview that is not self-evident, it needs to be said, it needs to be read, wholesale.
🌍 A World that is broken – not self evident.
🙋♂️ The value of the individual as harbingers of Jesus, distinct, definite, valuable, purposive – not self-evident.
🌬️ The God who is there – not self evident.
⛪ And God’s plan for a Kingdom, a prototype of the church, as a tribe that exists for the benefit of its non-members, as a device to unbreak the world – this is not self-evident, and even in the Old Testament it is a speculative conjecture, which only finds its plausibility in Jesus.
And in Samuel specifically, we have an account of Israel's history that is in some ways Davidistic – hinging on his personality and his agency; and in significant ways it is Yahwehistic, which Hannah's magnificat in 1Sm1 declares and elsewhere: God is sovereign, God will reverse human fortunes, God will establish Kingship. Yet in this and throughout in its account of the context, Samuel is Realistic in its account of Israel's progress in the context of political powers, social pressures, technological possibilities.
So, the ignobility of the text, with all of its power, seduction and brutality, is reassuring, invigorating, even healing, it relates to a world as it really is, and so anticipates the world as it really will be, as, like a well polished mirror, the accurate and proportional representation of the condition should imbue psychological health, spiritual effectiveness, and resilient social formation. Does it?
On its own, the Old Testament, I don't think it does.
[1.4] Old Testament as TRAGEDY
🏚️. The Old Testament is Tragedy. Not merely the therapeutic tragedy of literature rendered to purge those emotions of pity and fear. But actual tragedy, the tragedy we find ourselves in, that should culpably convict us of our predicament and urgently drive us to seek a saviour.
😶. The Old Testament concluding in Malachi, ends in silence. With a few flashes of heroic brilliance, the book is very well organised being towards death-only, a journey shared with other yearning bitter mortals vainly constructing elaborate architectures of ironic decay mitigation, working religiously only to retard life's long diminuendo.
🕳️. The main character is the nation of Israel, emerging from the creation narrative, they fall, then there is a flood, a new start, then they fall again, Noah drunk naked in a tent, fratricide, genocide, even with God on their side, with manifold testimonies of God's goodness, the OT is a freefall through unfaithfulness and corruption, they have a law that they can't keep, Kings who can't lead, prophets who promise a saviour who never comes, and the book ends in silence, unresolved, ichabod – the God who has left us alone.
🤴 The Old Testament is replete with characters who promised much but end badly. David being exemplary, Abigail being accessory to that. If we zoom in to David's season in this narrative, just before David we have Saul who promised much but ends a textbook of violence and resentment. Eli who precedes Samuel as priest and prophet dies blind fat and lazy as he and his feckless sons have the ark of the covenant plundered. David himself maybe reconciles the murder and adultery of his life, but overall he has too much blood guilt to build the temple. Following David, Absalom starts well but dies a traitor hanging from a tree. Solomon wise temple builder unifies the Kingdom, self-destructs the same Kingdom by his preoccupation with women, money and military power.
🤕 And this is life, it is properly hard, the suffering is thorough, and your complicity in it is mortifying. The Old Testament exists to temper your sense of the world, to invite me wrestle with my own darkness. I am more of a mess than I even know, and unless I really grasp that, I will spend a lifetime moving the pieces of pride and despair around as a displacement activity, a game of distraction, to obscure the pointlessness of it all.
The New Testament is the answer to that lament, but that's not what we're reading this evening.
[2] What happens in 1 Samuel 25
Just to restate what happened in this passage - it is easy to miss the key points. We've been following David's adventures and misadventures through Samuel. Samuel sits between Judges and Kings, in the Chronology of Israel developing from an amorphous unstable tribal group into a thung thing, a monarchy - and we're viewing some of the teething problems of any emerging community or organisation - exacerbated, in this context by external threats.
🗿 If you've seen the animated film Early Man, which pitches a stone age tribe against the coming bronze age, the Israelites face something of this peril. The Philistines are a sophisticated iron age enemy, with a sophisticated material culture with well-planned urban centres.
Into this we are presented with obscure shepherd boy David who has been anointed by Samuel the prophet, somewhat mysteriously, and then circumstances play out whereby his ability with a sling sees him the providential hero of a battle, and his musical ability positions him in a key role in the royal household, and then married to the King Saul's daughter. This series of good fortune happens concurrently of Saul's mental and political decline. David has the purity of an accidental hero but is framed by Saul obsessively as a threat to the current order. David flees Saul's various outbreaks of violence, and gathers around himself group of the dispossessed, they exist in this difficult and not very diplomatic impasse with the established rule.
During this hunt for David, he has the opportunity to kill Saul, as he goes into a cave to relieve himself. David doesn't and Saul acknowledges briefly that David will be his successor. Samuel dies, as if his work his done. David flees back to the wilderness, as the danger remains. At this time the territory they are in is the wild west, and David's armed band of men are able to serve shepherds in the wilderness by guarding against Philistine or other random raids who would steal livestock.
David has been doing this for a wealthy landowner named Nabal and it seems justifiable that some favour would be returned, and asking politely, out of a place of acute need. David has previously asked for help from the priests at Nob, who were then brutally slaughtered by Saul's thugs. Nabal chooses deniability, and will not be held to ransom, but he pushes David's men away is a culturally rude manner.
David is justifiably aggrieved by this slight and arms himself to go and exact justice with grossly disproportionate force. Abigail (Nabal's wife – a sort of Princess Leia to Jabba the Hutt analogy works at several levels) hears of this and gathers a load of fig rolls and wine and goes to plead for mercy. She is clearly sympathetic to David's rebel alliance and argues a case appealing to David's integrity as future King, and by so doing she assuages the violence.
Returning home she finds Nabal drunk, waiting til morning she explains what has happened, and he has a heart-attack and dies. David gets word of this and sends for Abigail to become one of his wives.
The story hangs on a fascinating triangle of relations David-Nabal-Abigail – and I think it is these behaviours in these roles which inform our application – as much as a look at the characters in the abstract which I'll go on to via the key relationship/contrasts.
[2.1] David vs Nabal
Haves vs have-nots. Most basically, Nabal is a have, and David is a have-not. Our sympathies lie with David in this sense – although the hungry state of David is countered with his military might.
Establishment vs reformer. Nabal embodies a corrupt economic establishment, and David is a reform movement, a new sort of leadership that is compassionate for its outcasts – a vision that seems to fail at the first hurdle, rendering a corrupt establishment challenged by a corruptible reformer.
Righteous vs unrighteous / Pharisee vs sinner / Older Brother vs younger. This is the lens I have found particularly interesting to read the passage through. David is God's elect, the chosen one – if he's going to err into a sin, it is more likely to be prissy self-rightouesness, pride and entitlement. Nabal is worldly, fleshly, associated with money and agriculture, the banker tax collector unclean types, the younger brother who enjoys a good time, whose sins are somehow more glamorous and sticky.
Active vs Passive pathologies. It is interesting to consider that gendered archetypes lend themselves to peculiar sins of commission vs sins of omission: David doing what he shouldn't do; whereas Nabal not doing what he should do. David's hyperactive, oppressive and overbearing action contrasts with Nabal's escapist and cowardly inaction.
[2.2] David vs Abigail
Hero vs Divine helper. David the heroic archetype is met on his quest, in his time of need, by this divine helper
Prophet vs Hubristic State ~ Critic vs Power Critiqued. Abigail is a voice from the outside, to David the emerging State, a nascent State that is just forming itself and establishing its character. Abigail sees with insight the danger for an emerging leader if he continues down a vengeful path.
Justice vs Mercy ~ Scarcity vs Abundance David is in the right. A worker should be paid his due, culturally to deny hospitality was doubly an affront but his is justice out of a presupposition of scarcity. Abigail is Mercy, insofar as David doesn't have the right to be so disproportionately angry, Abigail gives him what he doesn't deserve at a cost to herself on the basis of abundance.
[2.3] Abigail vs Nabal
Archetypal Fool vs Proverb's own Lady Wisdom. I'll try to explore in a moment why I don't find it terribly easy to paint it as don't-be-like-Nabal, do be-like-Abigail, but clearly Nabal makes some self-destructive decisions and Abigail makes some judicious decisions in the course of the passage.
The problem drinker vs surrendered wife. Ab & Nab are also illustrative of a complicated marriage dynamic which I haven't fully worked out. Nabal is entirely culpable for the damage he causes, but, if you were to meet this couple qua partnership, what would you counsel them in the distribution and mediation of blame? How does one intervene in the trajectory of one’s own, or another’s, marriage where it is not possible to simplistically prescribe correction to one member of the party?
And maybe that touches on what I'm saying in all this. How did they - any of them -become what they became? We're given relatively few keys in the text, as to the psychological and spiritual roots of their dysfunction, but that is the question to myself as I consider these three characters separately.
[3] I AM DAVID
David flawed heroism
💪 3.1 The necessity of heroism (Gift, Character, Flawed Kinging, How to King)
🤢 3.2 The trajectory towards disgust in the religiouse impulse
😢 3.3 The problem of grief
[3.1] HEROISM
[3.1.1] Heroism as Gift
💪 David is intended as a portrait of leadership - he is a hero in the story of God, and has a great many conspicuous gifts which make him hard one to compare myself to, a boy's own hero, from humble origins, he is a deft fighter, exuding the skills and experience for battle and for endurance in the wilderness, he yet also combines this with emotional depth, a familiarity with suffering, wit, musical creativity, romantic literacy and sexual prowess. So he is gifted. And this giftedness of mind and body is not nothing. I am interested (and unconcluded) about the role of the body in the embodiment of my faith.
“..And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. And the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom. And the favour of God was upon him..” Lk2v39-40
💪 Luke describes Jesus as growing not only in wisdom, and in favour with God and man, but growing strong. There is popular construction of an abridged Jesus in a body-optional mode of his embodiment which offers very little to provoke we the reedy, cybernetic and metrosexual towards a muscular Christianity. Jesus grew strong. Christian! Become strong, increase in vigour, contend with a physical world. Do Hard Things!
I would caveat, obviously, that bodies become frail in all manner of ways in a complex and fallen world. I'd caveat also, that what I'm driving towards is a focus on his character quite apart from his gifts, because gifts do not on their own qualify a King and quite precisely because gifts misapplied by warped character do untold damage. It is nevertheless a question that occurs to my mind in reading David: what do you do with the weaponised and exceptional bodies of biblical Heroes? Esther is another one, for another day. What is your body for? [See also here and here]
[3.1.2] Heroism as Character
In the application of those gifts, the what-you-do-with-what-you've-got, David's character is frequently revealed to be attractive: zeal, bravery, decisive leadership with archetypally benevolent masculine energy, contending with the world, vigorously, risking offence to do a something, being willing to be disagreeable with a righteous anger, contending for justice to provide for his people, David answers God's call, David takes responsibility.
The world with all of it's nihilism is crying out for more such charactered characters, society needs the emergence of the heroic personal person, the divine individual, in this way it is a Christian thing to be brave and to stand for something, vigorously, for others. Which David does. ~ We must be kings. We are heirs of God Rm8. We will judge angels 1Cor6
But. David goes awry. Now, I'm sympathetic to pacifism but not to anarchism, and not to any mode of being which blames and dissolves personhood. I believe non-violence is more deeply true and more enduringly effective, so, for this reason, it is so important to be precise about where David goes awry. It is not wrong to be ferociously strong, there is no shame in being gifted, it is appropriate to contend vigorously for the good and to structure a social world around a hierarchy of competence. But.
[3.1.3] Heroism Awry
At what point in this story does he go wrong? Was this the first failure of character – or maybe lying to the priests about his being on the run? David in his Bonnie Prince Charlie season of life, leader of rebel alliance, commander over a brotherhood of 400 distressed and bitter debtors ~ social outcasts (1Sm22)
The not-yet King. We witness David’s character arc at a moment of transition. Samuel has died, closing that chapter and Saul has conceded, albeit briefly that David will be King, but not yet. So we’re in a hiatus, awaiting the promised coming. Just as adolsecence is tumultuous, as we each go through various impetuous seasons of in-between, the waiting for the not-yet, the dating-and-engagement season, the delayed gratification - Abraham awaiting an heir, the prodigal son awaiting his inheritance. Heroism, like true love, waits.
The second King. A peculiar position, only one king previously ever in the history of Israel to compare himself to, and to learn from, and to disambiguate is brand against. Ultimately Saul and David have been drinking from the same streams, the same references, the same context. David’s kingship is the difficult second album, the compare and contrast individuation, what is a fluke, what is endemic, what is incidental, what is constitutive, what is kingship qua kingship?
Rogue Warrior Kingship. All these bumps along the way to monarchical governance offer hints at what sort of King David is becoming, which hints at the tragic arc of all human kingship, and my human efforts at leadership, that labours to rule without Christ's resource:
Vigilante justice. Final justice depends on David and this unaccountable governance structure is open to idiosyncratic bitter resentful deceitful arrogant vengeful vindictive extortion. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If unstuck from God the resulting self-authored justice makes arbitrary the distinction between guarding the sheep and eating the goats. Tribal justice rather than cosmic justice, the vigilante settles for miniaturism of a parochial potentate.
Impulsive disproportionate force. We see David as a quick-to-anger bully, Picking on a civilian vs ‘saving’ Saul. We see David as a child prodigy who believes his own hype. Untethered from God the nimble genius growling tyrannical as the elect entitled, brashly self-righteous impatiently callous, flexing in his own strength, drawing from scarcity, borrowing from the dark side of belligerent hyper-masculinity.
Taxation. A pattern of exacting money in a protection racket, God’s kingdom becomes a police state under a mafia don taking what he doesn't deserve. The tendency of fragile governance to tend toward centralised extortion and bureaucracy is here in its smallest form.
Insecure Identity. The thin-skinned precarity of David posturing in a dominance hierarchy. Noting that the devil tempts Jesus in the devil precisely on the point of identity because is the identity can be fractured even as a hairline crack, then the kingdom built on it will be vulnerable. Insecure leaders are a liability, and the only secure identity is in God, as revealed in the bible's promises, as enacted and guaranteed by Christ.
Illegitimate force. David breaks the rules of the game, using inauthentic means leads to inauthentic leadership. By using violence he is becoming the wrong sort of King, a tyrannical power who is only merely strong. David ends up with too much war and bloodshed to build the temple, too much blood guilt, too much violence-begets-violence debt against the moral universe. As an emerging leader, there is a temptation to use violence against those above you in a revolutionary undermining of the historic order, and there is a temptation to use violence against those beneath, stepping on the organic domain which would be the authentic base of support. David must decide what sort of King, from what sort of power, to what sort of end, he wants to become.
[3.1.4] Heroism how-to
We must be kings. A king must govern. What then is Kingship? So then Christianity – what is Kingdom? A short speculative foray here, not really The much-talked-of in charismatic evangelical circles “Kingdom” is not a foregone conclusion, we are a long way from being able to say in anything like shorthand – what a Servant King is. Kingship, when it is not tyrannical, is responsibility. Benevolent kings and princes could be deeply attractive. Heroism conforms to such a system of government.
Cosmic justice. A heroism that would sacrifice itself i the service of a balance of fairness and a longer arc of moral rebalancing is predicated on
Proportionate and legitimate force. A heroism that is sensitive to the vulnerabilities under its care, and the plausible use of given strength to create a context of secure containment that cultivates abundance that overflows from that pot to its non-members.
Household economy. Heroism of the household is a political act, rendered as a national scale would be an efficiency engine that would supplant both capitalism and socialism.
Secure Identity. Heroism is an identity that knows the sufficiency of its gift and call, the purpose of its opportunity in a context, and a wider for-others-ness of the heroic calling to which they are called to serve and die-for.
[3.2] DISGUST
“..God do so to the enemies of David and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him ... unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there had not been left to Nabal so much as one male..”
What David was minded to do was genocidal, scorched earth, ethnic cleansing. This is disproportionate, and it could be explained as the role of disgust in the formation of a man-made nation.
🤢 Disgust → Fire David vs Nabal, disciples vs villagers, religiouse vs irreligious, older brother vs younger brother, pharisees vs sinners.. Having previously thought of David vs Nabal in terms of revenge in a conflict of egos, I now read their scorched earth annihilation bids through the lens of Jonathan Haidt's Moral Disgust.
There is necessarily a trajectory towards genocide in the religiouse mind, and it stems from disgust. Disgust evolved to help our omnivorous species decide what to eat in a world full of parasites and microbes that spread by physical contact. Disgust stems from a fear of the animal properties of mortality and associated decay. When you find a worm in the apple, mould on the pizza, you throw the whole thing out, a purge is a proportional escalation.
Whereas you run or freeze in the face of Fear, in the case of Disgust you have to destroy or expel the infection, swat the cockroaches and, at a collective level, drown the witches. Disgust has been an evolutionary advantageous intuition to the herd/tribe against pathogens from the outside but it is a disposition which should be held-in-tension or counter-balanced by others in a tribe who have more of trait-openness. Death can come from two sides, and the primary peril to the tribe is felt differently by different dispositions:
the unboundaried leading to death - the liberal, loose, open wound unhygienically susceptible to infection, chaotic and accident prone, toddler on the cliff edge..
the overboundaried leading to death - the conservative stolid static status quo gagged immobile, rigid as rigor mortis, the stiff branch snapped by a gust of wind, the moribund and unadaptive, rusting and unalive, slow and zombie form..
“..But the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?”..” Lk9v53-4
🔥 Political Fire. If we can extend calling down fire beyond mere personal vendetta, into the realm of a socio-political disgust-motivated purification, does Jesus/Abigail help us live wisely in the context of disgust-motivated protectionism and polarisation from Left and Right in contemporary politics?
The Left's no-platforming, siloed safe-spacing, pronoun-coercing, witch-hunting such as James Damore?
The Right's Brexit and other exits, draining swamps, building walls, the witch-hunting of such as Hilary?
The King is tasked with nation-building, feeble he is responsible for this vast but imperilled thing, and as such pollution is not worth the risk, so he is not bothered by the collateral. The King is tasked with nation-building - of making a thing a thing. Creating that Kingdom, where everything is in its right place, there is peace and accord between all the parts ~ this is a task ultimately that only God can do. When we attempt justice, peace and purity creation on the basis of scarcity rather than abundance we have to carve out a manageable domain over which we can effect the image of perfection. David’s DIY justice in his own strength is a technique he learnt from Saul, so too we - what Kingdom are you responsible for, how are you achieving peace there, what techniques have you inherited?
🔥 Personal Fire. If we can extend calling down fire beyond mere personal vendetta, into our own disgusted lives, how does this exchange inform my own life and my attitude to others? Without Christ we are older brother or younger brother living respectively in in pride or despair. The evil that you do, it has to go somewhere: resentment and bitterness, simmer to malevolence and genocide. David was a younger brother, but in being the anointed one, he is prone to the foibles of both. So, as older brother, as pharisee, just as we are princes in the Kingdom, we are the smug elect, the Chosen-One tropes. I comport myself to Weinstein, as to Nabal, as to sinners Lk18v11: "Thank God I'm not like one of those.." It is not untrue, but it is a selective truth, because I deserve fire doubly for my prissy self-righteousness, for my embezzling the gospel, and neglecting the calling I had. Who do you judge? Who are you disgusted by? Who do you scapegoat? Who is the fly in the ointment of your Kingdom?
[3.3] GRIEF
Samuel dies. As Saul acknowledges that David will be King (1Sm24v21) Samuel’s prophetic work is done. Samuel fades into background but in dying leaves David no longer rooted and no longer accountable. It is interesting to think about the formation of leaders, the role of mentors, and the inevitability of death with the baton transfer of dynastic continuity.
The content and form of processing the death of a mentor.
Unmentored. What does it mean that we have such little content in the intergenerational exchange?
Ungrieved. What does it mean that we so few ritual forms useful for closure in dying?
Unmentored. It is not nothing that David is now Samuel-less. He is on his own now. He loses his connection to the past. He no longer has Obi-wan, no longer has Yoda, to guide him in the pathway between the dark and the light.
Star Wars: The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In his scholarly review of world mythology, Campbell outlines the role of the mentor figure, saying that the role of the archetypal teacher grew out of that of a “supernatural helper,” who guides the hero through dangerous territory (sometimes through the underworld.) Campbell divides these figures into several classifications, including “helpful crone/fairy godmother” and “supernatural helper.” [Ref lost - see more here]
Chat about discipleship seldom strays far from the individualistic script of culture. Abetted by anecdotes of heavy shepherding, cautious Christianity dabbles only in the shallow waters of iron-sharpens-iron formational relationships. We are not bound up in the lives of others in a properly consequential way, we are not mentored, we are not apprenticed, we are self-made pietistics recreationally involved in transactional spiritual partnerships.
Unmentoring is pulled towards the alluring magic of the pulled-up-by-own-bootstraps celebrity celebrating flash-in-the-pan piety of spot-lit leaders.
Unmentoring is pushed back from the rhetoric of toxic patriarchy, the shame associated with such a myth has raised the intergenerational drawbridge, couping boomers inside property-owning ghettoes of unstoried disinheritance.
More could be explored about the relative unheroism of contemporary Christianity and the aversion to risky immersive mentoring.
Ungrieved. As explored a bit in Spiritual Paralyses (Sermon here on Mark 2v1-12 "~ note: Heritable paralysis in a family) There is an inheritance. Man hands misery on to man OR the faithfulness of the forefathers blesses a thousand generations (Dt5v10). Effective leadership raises leaders who will lead effectively after you’re gone.
Unstages of grief. Grief would find vent for all of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. We find David in an instance, at a moment, in a process. But I am more interested to speculate that we, stiff upper-lipped evangelicals are Davidic in the ways we are stunted by ungrief, lacking in the tools, vocabulary and opportunity to grieve the Samuels we lost.
Evangelicalism’s shadow carries the ungrieved body trauma of under-attached formation courtesy of Iwerne-etc’s institutionally institutionalised theology of child psychological development. We can understand public schools as the equipment of empire in Davidic sense - raising Christian soldiers for an East Indian Trading Company form of leadership which is politically pliable for being unemotional. I’m all for summer camps and aristo-meritocratic centres of wholistic excellence and the unsentimental worlding of adolescents etc. But. I would see it burnt to the ground for the emotionally stunted soldier-forms who have not grieved and cannot grieve and are so raised as toxic Kings who will not build cathedrals.
[4] I AM NABAL
🤷♂️ Nabal is written as a pantomime baddie, a pustulant tawdry monster. However convenient it might be for my conscience to leave him there as a caricature in a fable, I must allow myself to be unsettled by the prospect that I am Nabal.
What do you do with these characters? Like Herod etc. How are you going to not become this? You're made of the same stuff, you're capable of this. I am Nabal, with the same capacity for selfish self-destructive malevolence. Nabal is illustrative, to me, of three predicaments:
The monster of wealth
The inclination for inaction
The allure of alcohol
[4.1] Wealth
💰 Are you wealthy? I mean, we are in a historic sense, we are in a global sense, but it is a peculiar identifier, slippery, relative and comparative. I would distinguish wealth from greed, but Nabal and I are both both. [See more on Wealth here]
🤑 Wealth is a severe predicament, wealth is making us obese, lonely, depressed and environmentally speaking, vulnerable. Psychologist Oliver James speaks of Affluenza a psychological malaise symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation.
🤑 Wealthy people I've known are correlated with unhappy people I've known. The rich young man went away from Jesus, sad. I am a rich young man, I wallow in the illgotten fullness of petrol-fed beef and slave-sewn brogues. Veins clogged with the banal detritus of bland entitlement, stodgy status quo status symbols, treacly tawdry normed wealth calibrated against tv's confected fantasy and the filtered flickering glitz of other people's newsfeeds. In a debate about the housing crisis, Grayson Perry observed that 'rich people on the whole don't create culture..', am I that rich?
🤑 Stuff leads to blindness. The bible speaks of the "deceitfulness of riches". Nothing is merely stuff, stuff speaks to you, and it speaks to others, it works on your conscience, it debates with your entitlement. Until the narrow Kingdom way feels often like a needle's eye for me, perhaps I am too enured to wealth's lies to imagine this other way, perhaps because I'm carrying too much stuff
“there was a man, the man had a business, the man was very rich, he had thousands of sheep and goats... the man's name was Nabal.”
🤑 Stuff becomes wealth as a mentality. Having stuff becomes wealth in the blink of a definition. By default, no one who has wealth does not trust it to save them, unless they have reclassified their wealth-ownership as gift-couriership. Nabal is a portrait of this some way down the road in that definition of wealth-as-identity, it has become his primary identifier - the text emphasises that Nabal's possessions precede his person, ~ being-wealthy is a mental state, an attitude or orientation, more than it is a quantity of cash in a bank account.
🤑 Wealth as identity and security is aggressively self-reinforcing. We know it can't buy me love, we know it doesn't make us happy. But it is addictive because with wealth comes the exponential increase in the availability of substitute saviours, premature happy endings, creature comforts. The wealthy are to be pitied.
🤑 Greed is different from wealth. Greed is anxiety leading to embezzlement of God's gifts which manifests itself in a lack of generosity. Nabal couldn't share, but he could feast himself. Wealth should move through veins of the Kingdom between organs. Individualism clogs the arteries, and a mindset of scarcity bloats bigger barn tumours stock piling inert wealth.
Greed is the willed exacerbation of that, a sort of madness
Individually, greed's acquisition of wealth at root substitutes for a Cross in the past and for regeneration in the future, and this leads to a shrivelled life.
Collectively, the greed in view in this passage is an assault to the gift economy which is the basis of a functioning society, which David will be responsible for.
💸 But, you don't have to, there is a solution, you can disarm wealth by giving it away. The church would serve its parishioners individually and society collectively by more often facilitating people to part with their wealth into a compassionate commons.
💸 We know it is more blessed to give, more fun, more meaningful, more rewarding, so, give your wealth away. At all costs to flee from wealth's trappings, be ware the tendrils of entitlement, the poppy field of mild-mannered privilege, the slippery slope of creature comfort. Those fallen parts of me are quick to debate for my exceptions rather than calibrating the principle of the matter, I'm quick to caricature ascetics, to bogeyman iconoclasts, to paint as irrational and unsustainable those who advocate abstemious Christianity. Mine own comeuppance is coming. Wealth is its own comeuppance. I am robbing myself of adventure in the now, the good life in the now, the buzz of the downhill slalom of faith, the nimbly unburdened and balletically uncluttered life. If I am not to become Nabal, slowly but surely, I must learn to give my wealth away, more often, more freely.
[4.2] Apathy & Doing Nothing
🙅 I'm struck that Nabal is condemned for what he doesn't do. Where as, by contrast, David is repremanded for doing what he shouldn't, Nabal is wrong for not doing what he should. As mentioned in the thought on David's disgust, Nabal, like the villagers responds by non-response.
"the people did not receive him.." Lk9v53
"Who is David? .. Shall I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have killed for my shearers and give it to men who come from I do not know where?"
🙅 Both candidates for the fire are guilty of a refusal to offer hospitality. Rudeness which vandalises the gift economy, it is an affront to the dignity of the person, but most interestingly, inhospitality is a passive sins of neglect or omission. Nabal didn't do anything, the villagers didn't do anything. So me and my absenteeism, my lack of adventure, sins of cowardice and silence, rightly deserve fire from heaven.
🙅 Negligence is its own sort of tyranny, I didn't honour the favours that were given to me, I didn't spend myself for those under your care, in these subtle ways I am a waster, a law abiding religious waster. Why do nothing?
The text says explicitly, "the people did not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem."
🙅 We know. We already know. We are without excuse. Life is suffering, the Christian life is suffering, it gladly pays the exorbitant cost of discipleship, which is suffering, which is Jerusalem - the nexus of personal and political utter suffering. Luke goes on in that chapter to lay out the costs of discipleship. For Nabal the cost was trivial, barely taxing his considerable wealth, and yet even then, he chose inhospitality, as I do, out of pride. And it's so silly. It is so healing to take responsibility, it is so much more blessed to give than receive, it is more fun. I forget sometimes.
[4.3] Addiction, Alcohol, Entitlement
🍺 Tragic Israel in the grip of a tyrant and a would-be tyrant vying for power. It's interesting that Nabal is drunk, drunk is a great state to be in when the world is collapsing, a comfortable and consistent nihilism, a chemically reinforced helplessness. I read his drunkenness more as consistent with and symptomatic of Nabal's compromised life, lived against God that has given up on itself and fallen in to itself.
😵 He is found drunk at the end, but that he is a problem drinker is suggested by the way it is affecting his relationships, and that it is sufficiently a pattern that Abigail would know how to manage it and him in that condition. By small extrapolation we could speculate that bad decisions he is making are intertwined with this and by further extrapolation, the impact of this on his health could be a contributory factor in his final demise.
⛓️ I have compassion for Nabal. I'm institutionally raised and under-attached, a live wire highly-addictable, escapist and frequently self-destructive myself, albeit in more sanitised ways, escaping to more socially acceptable augmented realities.
😍 Jesus found often at dinner with sinners that he was labelled a drunk, there's something there, in what Nabal's hedonism so narrowly misses, and the call to us to be sufficiently close to drinking cultures that we are able to help.
🫂 One rendering of the aim of working through AA's 12 steps intends to replace self-centeredness with a growing moral consciousness and a willingness for self-sacrifice and unselfish constructive action. It is in this way that quitting alcohol aligns with the project of benign Kingdom building which David is engaged in, and which we get to join God in doing.
[5] I AM ABIGAIL
[5.1] What is wisdom?
Is wisdom's y-axis merely a capacity to project a greater number of chess moves?
Wisdom is the very structural glue of truth itself, integrity's lively task force, the substance of sustainability, the blossom, leaf and root of flourishing. Wisdom, as the character of God, is the active personal weighty essence of holistic-being personified, an agile agent of the good, the true and the beautiful.
I think my struggle with defining the wisdom of Abigail is that we call wise both:
📜 Those principles which apply in all cases, maxims which are a universal guide to life. Which I would call Wisdom-Codified. This is natural revelation, common grace, but it is from God nevertheless, and it is exemplified in Abigail: It is always wise to speak to people respectfully, for example.
🧝♀️ I would contrast this with dynamically prudent navigation in complex contexts in the pursuit of God's excellence. Wisdom-Personified. Which I would emphasise or distinguish as the prophetic wisdom of special revelation. There is a wisdom which is active, which whispers words, as distinct from, but not in conflict with, the static proverbial truisms of codified wisdom.
[5.2] How is Abigail Wise?
She is wise insofar as she behaves intelligently, humbly and honourably. She is wise in that she has a plan. But I'm cautious to codify her actions beyond that as wisdom. She is of note where she is prophetic, and risks something sacrificially. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that fear is constituted in attending to his activity, his plan, his character that he is working out in a given context. What is wisdom? What is distillable as a praxis to pursue, so to know wisdom, live wisely and be wise?
The contrast between a wisdom of techniques, lifehacks, epithets, formulae and that state of being which ‘is’ wise and out of an abundance of that spirit then acts wise-ly, is captured in Octavia Hill’s aggressive disparagement of the inclination to imitate her model, in favour of commending a way of seeing. She said of her life's work in a late speech:
“When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. ... what we care for most to leave them is not any tangible thing, however great, not any memory, however good, but the quick eye to see, the true soul to measure, the large hope to grasp the mighty issues of the new and better days to come – greater ideals, hope and patience to realise them both.”
What would be for us to become those eyes to those hearts? How might we set our hearts on a sage gravitas, slowly earned, long fermented and hard tested. There is a practice of wisdoming for wisdom and towards wisdom which wars for true truth, against constructions of reality based on unrelational knowledge and disembodied being.
Wisdom has a contextual aspect and a big-picture aspect. It is relative, but also, we know it when we see it.
Effective ways to confront authority, to speak truth to power~ patriarchy, insofar as it exists, will eat itself.
Hospitality and the weaponised domestic ~ we cannot take this for granted
[5.2.1] She speaks truth to power in non-violent resistance of an individual
Abigail engages as a critic of the powerful, wise as serpent, innocent as dove – in her tone and content. And ingenious that she manages to combat two oppressors in one manoeuvre. However, this high-risk act of voluntary sacrifice is not a universal maxim, as if to say, always go looking for a hill to die on. But it is a far reaching pattern – David's Kingdom, as God's Kingdom, springs from an act of sin-atoning self-sacrifice.
Acknowledge the sin-guilt, offer to absorb the cost, pay-forward a token of the cost, sell a vision of the greater good, frame their choice as a free option to be heroic. And in all this, trust God, as the source of both parties and as the judge over both parties.
“..On me alone, my lord, be the guilt. Please let your servant speak in your ears, and hear the words of your servant. Let not my lord regard this worthless fellow, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I your servant did not see the young men of my lord, whom you sent. Now then, my lord, as the LORD lives, and as your soul lives, because the LORD has restrained you from bloodguilt and from saving with your own hand..”
Solving conflict by benediction: “God is on your side, this ends well, God will avenge..” We are not to resist an evil person, says Jesus, we are to lead a quiet life says Paul. Resistance, when the opportunity presents itself to go the second mile, to heap burning coals of kindness. Like Jessica Chastain gave two grand to a troll's crowdfunder this week.
[5.2.2] She displays God's pattern redemption for a kingdom as a whole
The bringing of abundance is symbolic of a form of leadership that comes from a place of overflow, grace and nurture. So the gift of food as gift is emblematic of the reform needed in the corrupt trajectory of David’s kingship which is bound towards vengance on the basis of scarcity.
She speaks truth to power in a person-to-person sense, in a turn-the-other-cheek sense of conflict management. But qua confronting David-as-future-King she is inserting a treatise of political reform. Over against a political regime that would become the hubristic state that would forget its duty to orphans and widows, Abigail brings reform, a returning to the abundance of the covenant with Yahweh.
Who is that prophet for St Marks?
What is St Marks organised around?
Where are we formed as a defensive nation state?
What does the bringing of abundance offer to the leadership of a community house?
[5.2.3] She restrains evil
Abigail as a prophet is restraining evil. This is a combative intervention. This prophetic act is costly and risky - a pointed insight, a timely and urgent imperative from the outside to prevent evil. Like a burnt offering for guilt, Abigail offers a propitiation for Nabal’s folly.
How far would you go to prevent a David from sinning?
How far would you go to cover the cost of deflecting the comeuppance of a Nabal’s folly?
What bravery and what humility would that need?
[5.2.4] She marshals a household as a political act.
Abigail's mastery of the domestic is precisely a contending for God deftly over-and-against a world characterised by conflict. Just as the Pr31 woman works, makes, trades goods, helps the poor, as an agent of formidable force from/through the weaponised domestic. Food is power, and in Abigail we see a virtuoso application domestic influencing a nation.
What is a Christian theology of the domestic sphere? What is it now ~ ambiguated as it is by unlimited technology, antagonised as it is now by feminist histories of injustice?
What is a home and pantry for?
This idea seems irrelevantly niche, and even cruel to encourage the homeless and private-renting precariat of the evening service to cast a vision for home economics and radical hospitality as a means of political action. But I will. There is an injustice upstream that dictates that we cannot afford the forms of dwelling that would make this sort of hospitality possible.
The PJs serve to facilitate a community house, because God has gifted it to us, and because I see the domestic sphere as the context for building the integrity of a locality, as the vicarage achieves by default, as homegroups achieve but briefly. The durable home and its hospitable equipment is the most effect and resilient base to effect holistic healing to the whole person. We are all called rebuild streets with houses to live in, we are called to plant trees and eat their fruit, we are called to do this in order to seek the good of the city.
More on the household as a political entity provocatively explored by C R Wiley in this quite American full-trad full-republican take that is tantilising while it feels also terrifying and unrealistic:
[5.3] In Conclusion
The Old Testament rewards reading by giving a revelation of your self and the world as it is, because it gives an unflinchingly realistic account of the complexity of life in a corrupt world.
I need to know that I am Nabal at his worst and David at his worst.
If I am to follow Abigail, it is peculiarly the prophetic wisdom, which is needed, that is, the eyes to see, and the resource to risk.
The Old Testament paints a picture of a Kingdom in prototype which is now actually possible in Christ.
[6] Post Script - Links & Questions
[6.1] Abigail’s self-interest as feminine wisdom
“..my lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for my lord taking vengeance himself. And when the Lord has dealt well with my lord, then remember your servant.”..” 1Sm25v31
“..And she rose and bowed with her face to the ground and said, “Behold, your handmaid is a servant to wash the feet of the servants of my lord.” And Abigail hurried and rose and mounted a donkey, and her five young women attended her. She followed the messengers of David and became his wife. David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel, and both of them became his wives..” 1Sm25v41-43
More could be said about Abigail's position.
How do we understand her-in-context and how do we understand ourselves-in-context? What can be applied in terms of achieving equivalent sustainable net-good prophetic outcomes today?
Nabal was not yet dead. How to do likewise interpret and apply her flirtatious wink of “remember your handmaid..” without sanitising and pietising this? Is this exemplary of inter-gender negotiation - Abigail holding her own with David? Is this paradigmatic jiujitsu femininity? Is this descriptive of prudence? Is this prescriptive of commendable marital behaviour?
What is the status of becoming but one of David’s wives? Surely this is not a commendation of polygamy generally, but is it license for polygamy exceptionally?
Surely God can redeem all things, and surely the OT actors had only partial revelation, but what are we responsible for in the light of our own partial revelation?
To what extent is self-interest a benign and practical regulating principle in making ethical decisions, such as that faced by Abigail?
[6.2] Abigail’s protest as feminine wisdom
The SNL parody of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad speaks to a common modality of flawed biblical exegesis. Previous modes of protest are appropriated as a lifestyle choice for a sanitised version of fair-weather consumer Christianity. How should we do otherwise?
It would be possible to caricature an application of Abigail’s actions as a #metoo protest against her abusive relationship. Borrowing from this, we could all leave bad marriages, and pass Pepsi’s from an entitled SJW frontline to create a appropriated synthetic harmony of cake&circuses spectacle?
[6.3] Abigail’s Submission as feminine wisdom
It would be possible to caricature an application of Abigail’s actions as a Surrendered Wife tactic to manipulate her future sugar daddy to ordain to include her in his trophy cabinet as a cynical win-win of mutual coercion and mutual parasitism wherein a shrew partners with toxic-masculinity in a dance of symbiotic codependence. A bleak but realistic theology of marriage in a fallen world. Is that it?
[6.4] Abigail’s economic agency as feminine wisdom
As with Joanna and Susanna and Priscilla etc - there is not a shortage of biblical precedent to offer Proverbs 31 boss babe women as wealthy sponsors of the early church etc. And these are rolled out as “forgotten” ~ outraged that Joanna was masculinised etc. And periodically in the church culture wars its seems necessary to combat a theology of gender that has degenerated to list of do-nots. Don't speak, don't lead, don't uncover your hair, do be different, don't do anything. Tedious gender roles in which men teach and women do something undefined. But. It’s pretty low resolution, and the data points of entrepreneurial women in the bible don’t generate much signal to the noise ratio, in a legitimate effort to discern the normal, and identify a plurality of femininities and their diverse excellences,
How do we talk about gender as a thung thing without quashing dispositional difference by monolithically simplistic archetypes and without the untennable blur of complete relativism?
How do we commend economic agency in a way that is critical also about the relegation of the household economy and realistic about what we can resist?
Righteous/Unrighteous Rich/Poor Stewards
Righteous rich stewards include Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Joseph of Arimathea, Lydia, and Dorcas
Righteous poor stewards include Ruth and Naomi, Jesus Christ, the widow who gave her mite, the Macedonian church, and Paul, who often knew want and hunger.
Unrighteous rich stewards include Laban, Esau, Nabal, Haman, the rich young ruler, and Judas Iscariot.
Unrighteous poor stewards – Biblical examples of unrighteous poor stewards include the sluggard and the fool, who are repeatedly renounced throughout the book of Proverbs.
http://theresurgencereport.com/resurgence/2010/03/23/the-theology-of-rich-and-poor
Two Hospitalities
“..Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table. She has sent out her young women to call from the highest places in the town, “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” To him who lacks sense she says, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Leave your simple ways, and live, and walk in the way of insight..” Pr9v1-5
“..The woman Folly is loud; she is seductive and knows nothing. She sits at the door of her house; she takes a seat on the highest places of the town, calling to those who pass by, who are going straight on their way, “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!” And to him who lacks sense she says, “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol..” Pr9v13-18
Both Wisdom and Folly offer hospitality. Hospitality, we learn, is by no means a guaranteed good. Looking for guidance here in becoming lifely not deathly, churchic not cultic, self-giving not self-related:
v17 Transparency or atleast non-secrecy?
(2) v5 The involved economics of the production of bread and wine? (vs stolen)
(3) v3 Going to them, and sending others Mt22v9? Acticly outward bound, rather than sitting v14, in doorways v14.
(4) v1 Preparing a 'good sized' (ESVSB) house?
(5) v6 Inviting people to change, loving them as they are, leading them out of simplistic ways, so to be a wayside wise way for wayward wayfarers.
http://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2012/02/texting-proverbs.html
Wisdom as Woman
The bible is full of men. Male authors, male kings, male God pronouns, male Jesus, male disciples, male apostles. Why is wisdom a woman? And not is not vague association with precious objectification. Why is wisdom characterised as a woman?
I find the parabolic limitlessly fascinating: God's metaphors, the Word’s words, the Maker’s sense-making. Why is salt salty, why is light light. God made these things to speak of him, and to guide the wise structuring of his Kingdom by his Kingdom's members. Become acquainted with salt, with light, with sheep, and with wisdom which is personified as a woman.
This is not to make the stark dichotonomy that women are wise and men are unwise – for surely men carry feminine traits and women carry masculine traits in extensive and significant ways. But. Why is the character of wisdom a woman?
Theology of the Domestic Sphere
“..And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.”..” Lk10v39-40
The PJs serve to facilitate a community house I see the domestic sphere as the context of the integrity of a locality, as the vicarage – wielding a household as the primary instrument for healing. What is a household?
What is a Christian theology of the domestic sphere, ambiguated as it is now by unlimited technology, antagonised as it is now by feminist histories of injustice?
In the old days Abigail's mastery of the domestic 1Sm25v18 was precisely a contending for God deftly over-and-against a world of male-male conflict, in the persons of David/Nabal. Just as the Pr31 woman works, makes, trades goods, helps the poor, as an agent of formidable force from/through the weaponised domestic.
Submission to archetypal asymmetry conjured distinctive realms for relevant contextual heroism, profound and unabstractable heroism. Men were to explorationally form the world, women were to invitationally fill a world. Encultured and apprenticed to a family-resemblance achieving excellence through codes of duty and instrumentalised domains.
But now, Mary's dissident discipleship is a lesson in a new liberation, a new Kingdom in which there is no male or female Gal3v28, where home and work are perfectly androgynised, and heroism is found in the singular task of sitting at Jesus feet? If so, how so? If not, how not?
http://phil-blogs.blogspot.com/2018/03/texting-luke-ten.html
🎙️ 1 Samuel 25 - Reality, Tragedy & Polygamy