The Giant's Side of the Story

This was last Sunday's sermon on the David and Goliath text from I Samuel. Hat tip to Dan Clendenin for his essay on the subject andthe Niemoller story.

At first sight, the two texts for this morning make it easy on the preacher. The passages are pretty straight forward and the sermon more or less writes itself. The story of David and Goliath tells us of God’s victory over the destructive forces of oppression in the world, that the Lord is the Lord over history and that God’s will is towards justice for God’s people. To emphasize the fact that the victory belongs to God, the young David is sent out with armor or heave weapons, but with the simple tools of a shepherd. David slays the giant and gives birth to one of the oldest clichés in the book. It also brings home the point that God works just as well through the small as through the mighty.

The story from Mark dovetails nicely with the story of David and Goliath. Jesus and the disciples are on a boat crossing the sea. Jesus tired from teaching and healing the crowds has fallen asleep. During the crossing, a storm arises. The disciples begin to panic, even though some of them were fishermen and should have been well able to cope with the storm. The terrified disciples wake Jesus, who promptly calms the storm around them. The message hardly needs to be spelled out. The winds, the waves, the storm itself symbolic of the powers of chaos and death in the world obey Christ’s words.

The stories compliment each other very well. Goliath is the representative of human evil while the storm stands for the chaos of the natural world. But God is bigger than the giants and the storms. Have faith, for God can defeat the giants and calm the storms, providing peace and assurance to God’s people. End of sermon, say a prayer, sing a hymn. We'll beat the Methodist to Father's Day lunch.

Certainly that is part of what we should take from each of these stories. The trouble is that this is not entirely the point that either story is trying to make, and it ignores the subtlety of each. In fact, with both stories, additional reflection yields some troubling ideas, either by what is contained in the text, or what is not. As I’ve wrestled with the texts this week, the problem of Goliath has stuck with me. The aspects of the story that are most troubling are the ones that are not in the text. The Philistines are seen as both evil and monolithic, the classic always evil that is so common in fantasy literature. Goliath is literally the Big Bad, the biggest and most dangerous of all the bad guys. Its this lack of nuance that troubles me. The whole story seems to be an example of the victors writing the history books.

It’s a story familiar to everyone who has gone through Sunday school as a child. It appeals to a certain childlike desire for fairytales. The big giant is defeated by the little man and everyone lives happily ever after. Everyone that is, except the giant, and his friends, but they are all bad anyway, so they don’t count.

In recent years, a new genre in publishing has grown up around turning fairytales on their heads. I first encountered it in John Gardner’s novel Grendel, in which the mythic antagonist from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beolwulf takes center stage in a retelling of the story. In recent years, Gregory Maguire has published several novels and short stories in this vain, most famously in the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which was famously turned into a musical of the same name. (Be honest, how many of you have ‘Defying Gravity’ running through your minds right now?) These stories exemplify the fact that there is always another side, that the villain is usually the hero in their understanding of the story, and that whomever we see as the hero and the villain is largely dependent upon our own point of view.

Goliath’s story, in many ways, is ripe for this kind of retelling. The Philistines were a people came from somewhere else in the Mediterranean who settled the coast of southern Canaan, just north of Egypt, establishing a group of five city-states which included, ironically, all of what is now known as the Gaza Strip. The Philistines were rising in power at the same time another power in the region was emerging, the nation of the Israelites under their judges and later their first king, Saul. All this in a land that had already been settled by previous nations going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Conflict between the Philistines and the Israelites is a constant feature of the Old Testament histories between the death of Moses and the conquest of the entire region by the Assyrians a few centuries later.

So imagine, if you will, that you are a Philistine. For those of us who spent most of the last week pretending to be Romans, this should not be too hard. Your people have come from across the sea to settle this coastland. You have prospered and grown strong. As is so often the case, your prosperity has brought conflict with your neighbors. War has been part of your life on and off for decades. Finally, a champion arises in your midst, a great warrior who literally stands head and shoulders above everyone else, particularly your enemies. He strikes fear into the hearts of his foes, but brings courage and pride to his own people. Goliath may be a giant, but he is our giant, who defends us and carries our banner forward.

Like most soldiers, Goliath is not a philosopher or even a king. He is there to do his job, defend his people and act in their best interest. Larger questions of politics, religion and morality are not really his concern. War and conquest were just the way the world worked. Goliath was the champion of the Philistines and excelled at one on one combat. He was greatly respected, in part because his victories in one on one combat as the two camps stood in opposition may have actually prevented battle and deaths on both sides of the conflict, at least temporarily.

Like with many such conflicts, the war between the Philistines and the Israelites is mostly about control of territory and the resources that go along with it. But also like many other conflicts, it gets tangled up with other issues, particularly religion. The Philistines, like most ancient cultures, were polytheists. When they arrived in Canaan, they quickly adopted the gods of their neighbors. The Israelites worshiped the one God, and the conflict between them was often cast in terms of this religious conflict, especially in the sacred history.

So when the fateful day arrives, Goliath, cheered by his fellow Philistines, goes out to the battlefield to await a champion from the Israelites. He challenged the people of Saul, whom he expected, like most days, to just sit in their tents. But on this day, something unexpected happens. The Israelites send out a young man. He is no warrior, without armor or heavy weapons. What is this, some kind of joke? It’s laughable, so Goliath laughs. He taunts not so much David, but Saul for sending out a small, defenseless young man. The young shepherd talks about the strength of his God and insists on the fight. So Goliath goes out to meet him. Strangely, the text never really mentions Goliath attacking David. Then a single stone, David slays the great champion.

For David, this is his crowning moment of awesome, which he would use as a PR tool for the rest of his life. To put an exclamation point on the victory, David goes on to decapitate Goliath, a moment which is usually left out of the story on Sundays, but would most definitely figure in were to story made into a film. For the Philistines, though, it is a disaster. With their champion defeated, the Philistine army flees and the Israelite army pursues, leaving a trail of wounded for miles.

The really troubling part of the story, to me, is the notion that God takes sides in the messiness of human conflict. God is on the side of the Israelites and David, and stands against the Philistines. This notion was the norm in ancient societies, where wars between nations were often depicted as wars between their gods. Even if the combatants ultimately shared a common understanding of the workings of the gods, it was still a battle between one patron god and another. See Homer’s Iliad for just one example. The Crusades were justified as a battle between the gods of Christianity and Islam for control of the Holy Land. In the American Civil War, preachers and theologians on both sides proclaimed messages about how their side would ultimately be vindicated by divine providence.

We live in a time where violence in the name of God has had a striking and perhaps surprising resurgence. The list of recent conflicts is long and includes most of the world’s religions. This week in Iran, as the conflict over their recent election grew, both the protesters and the regime appealed to divine favor to bolster their legitimace.

It has become all too common for atrocities to be justified by the righteousness of God. David’s decapitation of Goliath brings to mind the similar treatment of American businessman Nicholas Berg in Iraq by members of Al Qaeda. Is the line between a heroic victory that will be retold by school children thousands of years later and an act of unconscionable brutality simply a matter of our point of view?

David would return to his victory over Goliath later and write a Psalm in honor of the victory. In it, he would claim that the victory was a sign of divine favor, a sign of his righteousness (David’s, not God’s), and sign that David’s enemies were in fact God’s enemies. One of the real problems these texts pose for us is that they are in our sacred story. While it is easy to dismiss modern attempts to justify violence in the name of God, it is something else to read a text like this as “the Word of the Lord.” Whether ancient or modern, divinely sanctioned violence has few boundaries. The righteousness of the divine cause justifies any level of brutality, the divine favor showed to the combatant washes away even the most horrific of sins.

In an essay on this text, Dan Clendenin talks about David’s slaying of Goliath as an act of sacred terror. And like me, he struggles to make sense of it in our time, to find the divine in the midst of the story’s humanity. He also struggles with the legacy of sacred terror perpetrated by all religions. Ultimately, he finds solace in the New Testament:
“Whereas the Old Testament contains violence that is divinely sanctioned, at least according to its writers, in the New Testament I can think of only two examples when the followers of Jesus wanted to use violent means for his cause — when James and John wanted to call down fire upon the Samaritans because of their unbelief (Luke 9:51–55), and in the Garden of Gethsemane when his disciples tried to prevent His arrest (Mark 14:47). In both instances Jesus rebuked those who tried to show their allegiance to him through violent means. Instead, he insisted that God causes the sun to shine on both the wicked and the righteous. Jesus told us to love our enemies and to do good to those who persecute us, because in the end the ultimate measure of my love for God is my love for my neighbor."

This in no way excuses the history of violence perpetrated by Christians in the name of the prince of peace, but it does make clear that we cannot, under any circumstances, appeal to Christ as a justification for destroying our enemies. The reality is that whenever we appeal to God to be on our side at the expense of our enemy, we our showing our own unfaithfulness. Christ’s teaching to us though is that love of God includes loving our enemies.

Perhaps the person who put it best was German pastor Martin Niemoeller, leader of the confessing chruch in Germany and was eventually arrested, and then imprisoned for eight years at Sachsenhausen and Dachau . I have actually been to Dachau and seen the cells where Niemoller and his fellow pastors were held and the room in which they shared communion together among Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox. Niemoeller once confessed, "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. God is not even the enemy of his enemies."