KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 April
If I be shaved, I shall lose my strength
April showers come in dazzling white in Nova Scotia! “April is”, as T.S. Eliot observes, “the cruellest month” and he never even visited the Maritimes! But this too shall pass. There are more important things to think about than the vagaries of the weather. In Chapel we have embarked upon the lenten discipline of a study of The Book of Judges.
The story of Samson is a major part of The Book of Judges and contributes to its overarching themes in and through the folkloric character of many of its stories. Samson is the proverbial strong man, the “Rocky” of the Old Testament, as it were, and yet as a judge in Israel, he is not defined primarily or essentially by his strength or by any human quality but by “the Spirit of the Lord”. That is the tension in the story of Samson within the struggles of the conquest of the “promised land”. Yet what looks like tribal conflicts is really about something deeper, about what defines Israel over and against the Philistines. One of the most famous passages is the story of Samson and Delilah.
What is that story about? It is about what truly defines Samson. He is from his birth, as he tells Delilah, a Nazirite. He has been dedicated to God and that dedication is expressed in terms of a set of defining disciplines such as not cutting his hair, not drinking wine nor eating grapes, and avoiding carrion flesh. In other words, he is defined by his relation to God. It is “the Spirit of the Lord” that matters and not his physical strength. What happens if we deny the principle that defines us? What happens if we trust more in our own strength rather than in the Spirit of the Lord who is radically other than the ‘gods’ of the Philistines? The Book of Judges is about those questions which distinguish and define Israel.
And while that theme appears in the context of violence and conflict, the deeper point is that something greater is at work in Israel than just tribal identities. In other words, being defined by God ultimately transcends the tribal. That lesson is part of the long, long journey of Israel’s learning what it means to be the people of the Law. Judges shows us how hard the journey of learning is and yet how necessary. It especially provides a necessary critique of human pride and presumption. In that sense it complements other works from other traditions that also present a self-critique of reason and human presumption.