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Rollins Chapel
Dartmouth College
November 1st, 2007
Timothy Baker '08
Some of the most famous and important heroes of the Bible are those whom we
might call covenantal heroes: the men who, due to an uncanny relationship with
God, were given the opportunity to unite with God in mutual promise.
Covenanting with someone, making a promise with someone, is a sublime
and holy act wherein you give a portion of yourself to the Other. Covenant,
from the Latin “convenire” literally means “to come together.” A
covenant, therefore, if it is a true covenant, binds two individuals in common
accord and provides the opportunity for an eternal investment since the portion
of yourself you freely give away lives on, immortally, in the Other.
Abraham and David covenanted with God, as one to an Other, and their promise
lives on through Jesus in the New Testament. Notice, for instance, the way the
author of Matthew, the Gospel’s great exegete, opens his book: “An account of
the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of
Abraham, (Matthew 1:1).” Jesus, David, Abraham. Abraham covenanted for
eternity, David for endless rule, and Jesus, as the Christian Messiah must, for
our author, represent both of those things. Yet there is more to the story.
“Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” We
have heard, in our reading from Psalm 89 that David, according to the prophet,
is the firstborn son of God. We must also remember, thinking back to the
covenantal scene in Genesis 17, that God, at the moment of the covenant,
changes Abram’s name to Abraham: an act of the father, whose action of naming
signifies acceptance of the child as his own.
But why a son? Why in these personal acts of covenanting does God accept the
role of Father so as to come together with a son? The love between father and
son, parent and child, is distinct from any other form of love that might be.
The child exemplifies the act of the covenant par excellence in two
distinct ways. First, the child is the natural and glorious outcome of the
covenant as Genesis teaches us in the verse: “Therefore a man leaves his father
and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh, (Genesis
2:24).” Second, the parent invests in the child and therefore becomes immortal.
The child is a promise to his or her parents, embodying the hopes and
aspirations of both the mother and the father and carrying their love, as a
living symbol of their covenant, into the future. To call God the “Father” and
to designate those to whom he covenants with as “son” is to suggest that God
has truly “come together” with the child and invested his hopes, his
aspirations, and his divinity within his charge. A promise, literally a
“sending forth,” is the vector of eternal potential that comes from the act of
covenant.
That being said, you are probably wondering how this relates to the topic of
“wisdom,” as wisdom is the focus of our meditations here today. Allow me now to
turn to Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba. After all, Solomon is called
the wisest of all men, so he has to be relevant! Solomon, the wise king, ruled,
as it were, wisely in various different ways. For instance, his first act of
king, as recorded in the Deuteronomistic history, is to ally himself with the
powerful country of Egypt by marrying pharaoh’s daughter. Moreover, the Queen
of Sheba is so impressed by the wisdom and magnificence of King Solomon that
she makes grand presents to him, and he, in return, “gave her everything that
she wanted and asked for, (1 Kings 10:13).” “King Solomon excelled all the
kings on earth in wealth and in wisdom, (1 Kings 10:23).” In addition, to
defend the city of Jerusalem he “assembled chariots and horses, (1 Kings
10:25)” creating a substantial cavalry. Also, we must not forget the building
projects which marked Solomon’s reign and the infrastructure improvements he
was able to accomplish due to his wisdom and his power. All in all it would
seem that God’s promise made to David for eternal kingship was well played by
David’s son Solomon. Well, except for one small detail. Allow me to read to you
something from Deuteronomy:
When you have come into the land that the Lord your
God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you
say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you
may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose. One of your
own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a
foreigner over you, who is not of your own community. Even so, he must not
acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to
acquire more horses, since the Lord has said to you, “You must never return
that way again.” And he must not acquire many wives for himself, or else his
heart will turn away; also silver and gold he must not acquire in great
quantity for himself.
Solomon, it would seem, has sacrificed his moral duties, the ‘Torah of the
King,’ in order to be politically wise and humanly successful. While I am not
suggesting, and I see no reason to argue that the Bible is suggesting, that
wisdom and Godliness are incompatible, I am asserting that Solomon is
wise but not moral in the Biblical sense: the two are distinct.
In light of our knowledge of Abraham, David, and Jesus, listen to the
poignancy of God’s chastisement of Solomon in 1 Kings 11 (v.9, 11-12):
Then the Lord was angry with Solomon, because his
heart had turned away from the Lord… Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, “Since
this has been your mind and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that
I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and give it to
your servant. Yet for the sake of your father David I will not do it in your
lifetime; I will tear it out of the hand of your son.
God tells our wise old king that his wisdom is ultimately meaningless when
it comes to his relationship to God. Sure, wisdom carried Solomon well through
most of his mortal life and in his duties as a king. Yes, wisdom brought him
fame and fortune because he always knew just what to say and how to act. Yet,
wisdom alone means nothing to God. God is angry with Solomon because he failed
to relate to God the way David, his father did. In the relationship between God
and David, David was both the pursuer and the pursued by God. That is the
nature of covenant: two come together because both want to, and therefore need
to, unite as one. David, though certainly not perfect, was beloved by God
because his heart was turned towards God and, as such, God was able to invest
in David.
Solomon turned his heart from God by neglecting the Davidic
covenant – a covenant passed down to Solomon within David’s investment in
Solomon as son and heir – and by breaking the laws for living that God had
commanded. God, in turn, speaks harrowing words: “Yet for the sake of your
father David I will not do it in your lifetime; I will tear it out of the hand
of your son, (1 Kings 11:12).” David’s covenant with God protects Solomon
because God’s love for his son David holds back the extent of his fury. Reading
through 1 Kings I think you will find that in all instances in which God
appears to Solomon he appears to “the son of David.” There is no Solomon to God
because Solomon never covenants with God allowing God to accept Solomon as son
by the power of the name. Since Solomon breaks the promise of God and the
promise of his father David, God’s punishment is to tear the kingdom from
Solomon’s own son. Imagine, for a moment, the implications of this. Solomon’s
son, like all sons of the father, holds the eternal promise of the parent. God,
in this final decree to Solomon, tells him that his love of wisdom
instead of the love of God will ultimately annihilate him: Solomon, in
murdering the gift of his father, condemns his own child.
What then, might the love song of David and the requiem of Solomon mean to
us, in our lives, as we strive for wisdom and for love? Solomon’s fatal flaw
was not that he was wise, it was that his wisdom blinded him to the importance
of a relationship with God. God, in the first vision of Solomon, initiates the
pursuit for the sake of His son David but Solomon, having received the gift
from God refused to return pursuit. We must be conscious of the fact, from what
we learn in Scripture, that the gift of God is a bequest meant to be given as
well as received. To bequeath is to enter into covenant, to give part of your
self to an Other and to attain immortality through the mutual act. I think that
we might better understand our Christian faith in this light. Jesus, as the Son
of God, makes God accessible to us through proxy. To enter into a relationship
with the Son is to enter into a relationship with the Father. The relationship
however, is not one of wisdom, or even one of worship: it is of covenanting,
coming together as one so that God may invest in us his promise for eternity as
a child of the father. That is the love of God, far surpassing any wisdom. That
is his bequest.
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