Samuel

 

The story of Samuel in the Temple is an old friend, isn’t it?
I was amazed, when I came to have another look at it,
that it was actually a much darker story than I remembered.
We all know the bit about Samuel waking up in the night and thinking Eli has called him,
and Eli eventually clicking that God was trying to speak to Samuel....
but what is the context?
And what, actually, did God want to say?

It all started, of course, with Samuel’s mother, whose name was Hannah.
She was married to a man called Elkanah, and, in fact, she was his senior wife.
But her great sadness was that she had no children,
and her co-wife, called Penninah, did.
Elkanah actually loved Hannah more than he loved Penninah,
and although I don’t suppose he minded for his own sake that she had no children, he minded for her sake.

And, we are told, whenever Elkanah went to the Temple to make sacrifices, he gave Hannah a double portion.
And one day, Hannah, in the Temple, is just overcome by the misery of it all,
and pours out her heart to God –
I’m sure you’ve been there and done that;
I know I have.
And Eli, the priest, thought she was drunk, seeing her mumbling away like that.

It was rather a bad time in Israel’s history.
I don’t know if it ever occurred to you –
it hadn’t to me until quite recently –
but this is not the Temple in Jerusalem that Jesus would have known;
the first Temple in Jerusalem wouldn’t be built until the reign of King Solomon, about seventy or eighty years in the future.
This Temple was in Shiloh, and really, it was the place where the Ark of the Covenant resided.
And Eli is the priest in the Temple.
Now, back then, being a priest was something that only certain families could do;
and if your father was a priest, you usually were, too.
It’s actually only within quite recent history that what you do with your life isn’t determined by what your father did –
and isn't it the case that people are finding it increasingly hard to get a better education than their parents, and perhaps do different things?
Anyway, back then, you followed in your father’s profession,
and if your father was a priest, as Eli was, then you would expect to be one, too.

Unfortunately, Eli’s sons were not really priestly material.
They abused the office dreadfully –
taking parts of the sacrifices that were meant to be burnt for God alone,
sleeping with the women who served at the entrance to the temple.
I don’t think these women were prostitutes –
temple prostitution was definitely a part of some religions in the area,
but I don’t think it ever was part of Judaism.
These women would have been servants to Eli and his family, I expect,
and considered that service as part of their devotion to God.
And perhaps, too, they helped people who had come to make sacrifices and so on.
Whatever, Hophni and Phineas, Eli’s sons, shouldn’t have been sleeping with them,
and they shouldn’t have been disrespecting the sacrifices, either.

There had been a prophecy that the Lord would not honour Eli’s family any more, and that Hophni and Phineas would both die on the same day,
and a different family would take over the priesthood.
Eli had tried to tell his sons that their behaviour was unacceptable, but they hadn’t listened, and one rather gets the impression that he had given up on them.
He was not a young man, by any manner of means.

And now he had this child to bring up, Samuel, first-born of the Hannah whom he had accused of being drunk.
Hannah had lent her first-born child to the Lord “as long as he lives”,
since God had finally granted her request and sent her children –
unlike some of the other childless women in the Bible,
people like Sarah or Elisabeth,
God gave her more than one child in the end.
So Samuel, her first-born, was lent to God, and grew up in the Temple.

I had always somehow imagined the Temple as being very like
the Temple in Jerusalem, but, of course, it can’t have been.
It was probably just an ordinary house, but with the main room reserved for the altar of the Lord and the Ark of the Covenant.
Samuel sleeps in there, you notice, and Eli has his own room at the back somewhere.
And I imagine Hophni and Phineas have rooms of their own, too.

I do think that the first verse of our reading is one of the saddest there is;
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
“The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.”
It sounds like a very bleak time, doesn’t it?

Samuel, we are told, did not know the Lord.
He didn’t know the Lord.
This in spite of ministering in the Temple daily.
He wasn’t able to offer sacrifices, of course –
he was not, and couldn’t ever be, a priest, as he came from the wrong tribe.
But he would have helped Eli get things ready,
he would perhaps have made the responses.
He would certainly have known what it was all about.
But he did not know the Lord, in those days.
The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

So when God calls him in the night, he has no idea what is happening,
and thinks that Eli is in need of help.
And it isn’t until the second or third time that Eli realises what is happening, either.
But once he does, Eli explains that it might be that God is wanting to speak to Samuel, and he should say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening!”

And then what?
No message of hope or encouragement such as anybody would want to hear.
In fact, quite the reverse:

“See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.
On that day I will fulfil against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end.
For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever,
for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God,
and he did not restrain them.
Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”

There will be no escape for Eli;
he could, and should, have stopped his sons from being blasphemous,
from disrespecting the offerings of God’s people,
from sleeping with the temple servants.
I get the feeling Eli has rather given up, don’t you?
When Samuel tells him what the Lord has said, his reaction is simply,
“It is the Lord;
let him do what seems good to him.”
And in the end, just to round off the story, both sons were killed in a battle against the Philistines,
and Eli died of a heart attack or something very similar that same day.
And the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant.

All very nasty –
not one of the nicer stories in the Bible, I don’t think.
But what does it say to us?
What do we have in common with these people at the end of the Bronze Age, or early Iron Age, I’m not quite sure which they are?

The thing is, of course, we do have rather too much in common with them.
This is a time when the Word of God is not heard too much in our land.
It is a time when churches, and, indeed, synagogues and mosques, too, are disrespected;
synagogues and mosques even have to have security at the entrance, just for when people are coming to worship.
Thank goodness that isn’t yet the case with our churches, and pray God it will never be.
But even ministers and priests have been known to abuse their position – I have not heard of any rabbis or imams doing so, but I shouldn't be in the least surprised.

I suppose that there is nothing new;
every age has probably said the same of itself.
We know that we are, naturally, sinners, and unless God help us we shall continue to sin.

Samuel served in the Temple but he didn’t, then, know God.
Eli had given up;
Hophni and Phineas set him a poor example.
It must have been confusing for Samuel –
what was it all about?
And then when God did finally speak to him,
it wasn’t a comforting message of cheer and strength,
but a reminder that God’s judgement on the whole shrine and the priestly family who ran it was going to happen.

But good things came from it, too.
Samuel became known and respected as a prophet and as a judge in Israel.
He couldn’t be a priest, as he was from the wrong tribe,
but he could be, and was, a prophet who was widely respected and loved.
It was he who anointed Saul as king, and then David.

So there is hope, even in the cloudiest, stormiest days.
The temple of Shiloh was abandoned, and the Ark never returned there.
But the Ark did return, and eventually the Temple was built in Jerusalem.
Samuel became one of the most famous prophets of them all.

Samuel said “Yes” to God.
He was willing to hear God’s message,
no matter how unpleasant it had to be,
no matter how traumatic.
He was willing to hear, and he was willing to speak it out.
And so God used him to establish the Kings of Israel and then of Judah –
perhaps not the most successful monarchy ever,
but from King David’s line came, of course, Jesus.

It is never totally dark.
God ended Eli’s family’s service to him, yes;
but the Temple endured, and was eventually rebuilt in Jerusalem,
bigger and better than before.
The Ark of the Covenant was taken into captivity –
but it came back, and remained in the Temple until it was no longer needed, as God made a new covenant with us.

When we go through difficult times,
and I think we all do, whether as individuals,
as churches,
or as a society,
it’s good to think back on this story.
God may be bringing one thing to an end;
but a new thing will, invariably, follow, just as spring follows winter.

The difficult thing, of course, is going on trusting Him when all does seem dark, when we can’t see how things are going to work out.
It's been terribly dark just lately, hasn't it, with the wars in Ukraine and Israel threatening our own world.
But remember Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8;
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
I do think that we can ask to see how God is going to work a bad situation for good;
it’s amazing how that can and does happen.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Perhaps one day we will see the good that God has worked out of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

And we need, like Samuel, to listen to God, and to do what He asks of us, no matter how difficult.
Are you willing to do this for God?
Am I willing?
It isn’t easy, is it?

Thanks be to God that we need do none of this in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens us.
Amen!