CS Lewis the writer of the Narnia series was 58 when he married an American English Teacher & Poet Joy Gresham in 1956. The couple spent 4 years together until Joy’s death from cancer in 1960. Joy was 45. To deal with his grief Lewis wrote about it as his way of processing it “A Grief Observed” is what came out of reflection on that time, of walking through the death of Joy. Lewis wrote:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” [1]
Today we run into David’s experience of grief, as it is a grief rightly grieved, of Saul & Jonathon’s deaths. David in lament is as someone put it this way
“where God draws us into the depths of a healthy human spirit as it deals honestly and prayerfully with devastating loss and all its attendant emotions.”[2]
Grief, sadness, loss all step us into the tangle of life alongside the good and bad of all of it. As we step into this passage today we see in the long story of David’s life in 2 Samuel is the continuing story about God’s protective providence; which doesn’t mean we are sparred from meeting head on the heat of life lived in a fallen world. This story of David will now turn towards kingship, just as our gaze is now shifted forwards seeing that there is no ordinary crown for God’s one and only Son, who will come to deal with death, and show us how to live. As we read in 2 Samuel 1:17-18
17 David took up this lament concerning Saul and his son Jonathan, 18 and he ordered that the people of Judah be taught this lament of the bow (it is written in the Book of Jashar):
Saul & Jonathon both die at the battle that David and his men were turned away from in 1 Samuel 29. Here we find David still in exile, still taking his protection from the Philistine King Achish of Gath, which is also the hometown tribe of Goliath the slain giant. David and his men hired themselves out as mercenary fighters, and so it is while David is out of the way, and in no way can he be implicated in the death of Saul, a messenger comes to him right from the battlefield to Ziklag. The condition the messenger arrives in cannot be good news verse 2
2 On the third day a man arrived from Saul’s camp with his clothes torn and dust on his head. When he came to David, he fell to the ground to pay him honor
The news he bears comes in two parts, and David displays a need to know the details about Saul death, how Israel’s King was killed on the battlefield. When David presses for more information about how Saul died, everything about his death becomes complex and troubled, Verse 10.
10“So I stood beside him and killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”
The messenger of this awful news was also Saul’s killer he was also one cool customer, who was not only capable of killing a king, stripping his dead body, seizing the symbol of Saul’s royal legitimacy, the crown and the amulet. With all these things in hand he races off to Ziklag to a waiting claimant to the throne. He was expecting his payday. It is the tension of the story that we all hold our breath for how David will respond? Any lessor man would maybe have rejoiced. I want you to just think of Saul’s track record with David. David was driven to the wilderness with his band of social misfits, to the fringes of his nation, as a fugitive. David and his men were hunted, tracked and attacked by Saul. We can recall all those daring escapes and thrilling escapades, which all have taken their toll, so we could understand if David gloated over Saul’s death. So it is here we get to David’s response, and it isn’t the way this messenger expected things to go. For David instead of celebration, David grieves; instead of hoped for gratitude, David falls into an immediate inconsolable grief. Notice that David’s first response isn’t to celebrate that the way to power is now open, David first wants to grieve the King is dead. It is here we find that this messenger is an outsider, an Amalekite, a descendant of Esau and one of Israel’s enemies. What the messenger doesn’t know is, that it’s not messengers who crown kings, it’s God who anoints them. David’s response is loyal to Saul, to kill God’s anointed King is an act of treason. This messenger expected a reward, and is instead met his swift and decisive execution. It is why when we step on the pages of the New testament we’re meant to get that when Jesus comes into our world, He is the Messiah King of all the earth, as John put it this way John 1:14
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
At the death of Jesus, we are to see we all deserve death, for killing the author of life, and with the completed work of the cross, Jesus is able to bring to us instead forgiveness from our sins, and new life for our future.
If we step into the pages of the Psalms so many of them are laments, where the brutality of life, is met with the gaze of grace, to see the God we trust in, is the same one who lifts up our heads with hope in the face of the darkest hour. Like I wonder if David was thinking of this time when he wrote Psalm 13
1 Long enough, God— you’ve ignored me long enough. I’ve looked at the back of your head long enough. 2 Long enough I’ve carried this ton of trouble, lived with a stomach full of pain. Long enough my arrogant enemies have looked down their noses at me. 3 Take a good look at me, God, my God; I want to look life in the eye, 4 So no enemy can get the best of me or laugh when I fall on my face. 5 I’ve thrown myself headlong into your arms— I’m celebrating your rescue. 6 I’m singing at the top of my lungs, I’m so full of answered prayers. (The Message)
David’s grief was because he cared, and David draws us into a grief observed, just like CS Lewis did on the death of his wife.
With David life matters, as we keep on seeing David lived with extravagance he also grieved fiercely, and here’s why for David “His exuberance and lamentation were aspects of the same life-orientation and commitment: life matters. David honored human life…extravagantly.”[3] So take the way we see our world deals with death, and how our media fixates on all that’s bad. It’s true isn’t it that one sure fire way to get your name in the news is do something bad, really bad. It is a kind of trivialization of life, where it is all about the optics of a disaster than it is about lamenting seriously or loving carefully. It is why I want us to take notice how David responds in verses 19-21
19 “A gazelle lies slain on your heights, Israel. How the mighty have fallen! 20 “Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice. 21 “Mountains of Gilboa, may you have neither dew nor rain, may no showers fall on your terraced fields. For there the shield of the mighty was despised, the shield of Saul—no longer rubbed with oil.
Then verse 24
24 “Daughters of Israel, weep for Saul, who clothed you in scarlet and finery, who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold.
In the face of all the dangers David faced from Saul, David choses to be shaped by God’s sovereignty. Just as we face the fact, that if David had allowed Saul’s hate to determine his life, he would have been destroyed, he would have been consumed by that hatred and the desire to have his revenge. David would have lived a life bent over with self-preoccupation. The question is do we see how God’s grace is freeing even in the face of grief? That we come to the one who not only brings mercy, but also knows how to speak to us in the darkness by shining the light of his truth in our souls. Our comfort comes from the Lord who can invade the darkness with love, forgiveness and mercy. God understands what it is to face death and through it bring about his full purposes as we see him do for us in Jesus. The grief we feel is so often a sorrow that continually reckons with the specific promises of God: his lovingkindness, his watchful care, his forgiveness, the reality that he is our only true refuge. As someone puts it this way “This experience of sorrows in search of the God who willingly makes himself known can become increasingly our own. Like the Psalms take us by the hand. We learn how to honestly face trouble, how to give voice to deep internal struggles… can we see here is where God can fill us with a sense of confidence, safety, and even (on occasion) exultant joy.”[4] Christian faith is riveted down by the humility that honestly reckons with our need. See how David doesn’t run for pity, he doesn’t turn inwards, instead he reaches out to know God’s strength.
What I keep on taking away from seeing David here is seeing how I deal with my grief, affects the way I will come towards you in your grief. The temptation of grief is to lose sight of God, and start thinking that all we have is now, when we are to see that in God we have one who lifts up our heads with his tender mercy and love and knows the way through the valley of the shadow of death, with Jesus as our shepherd. As the cross not only is the place Jesus deals with our sin, he also there begins to prepare us for the resurrection to come.
It’s in the face of death Jesus has the last word when he tells us in Matthew 10:38-39
38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.
Let’s pray…
David Hassan @ Tamworth Community Presbyterian Church 7/8/16