July 7, 2024 -- 7th Sunday after Pentecost

                                Biblical Words                                      [889]

II Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10; Psalm 48; II Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13. 

The great City may have a humble beginning, and God’s servants may be denied by their own. 

II Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10.  

(An under-stated report.  This passage is not a narrative, it is a report.  A narrative has some kind of tension and a release at its climax.  A report simply states incidents and conditions.) 

The reading from the Prophets is a plain, not to say flat-footed, statement of David’s becoming king of all Israel after being king of the “house” of Judah for a few years (5:1-5; on Judah see 2:1-4).  It continues with the barest report that David captured and expanded the city-state of Jerusalem, making it his personal property, the City of David (5:9-10).  

The passage immediately following our reading tells that David built a cedar-decorated royal palace and installed his wives and children (5:11-16).  As later times looked back, they saw David, in his new capital city, as a substantial king and a power to be reckoned with among the nations. 

In that later viewpoint, however, the City was as important as the Anointed King.  This is the point in God’s history with Israel at which the long-term destiny of the people begins to be focused on the City of God.  Toward this city much devotion, exaltation, and yearning hope would be directed.    

[See more at About ancient Jerusalem below.]

As the Samuel narrative continues (in next week’s reading), David will take steps to make Jerusalem the glorious dwelling place of the God of Israel by bringing the Ark of God into the city (2 Samuel 6) and planning a great temple of cedar for God there (7:1-3). 

However, the real glory of God’s dwelling in Zion is not in these historical books, but in the Psalms. 

Psalm 48.  

The simplicity and unpretentiousness of the Samuel account contrasts sharply with the presentation of Zion, the glorious mountain and city of God, in the Psalm reading.  

Together with psalms 46 and 76, this psalm alludes to and gives glimpses of a grand liturgical drama that was celebrated and enacted within the holy city over the centuries. 

In this drama, the city of God is assaulted by an assembly of many nations, who come against it from the north and threaten to overwhelm it.  At the critical moment, God displays God’s power in some traumatizing fashion, and the nations are shattered and dispersed.  The city is saved and magnified to the heights for all the world to see. 

Then the kings assembled,

      they came on together.

As soon as they saw it, they were astounded;

      they were in panic, they took to flight. (Psalm 48:4-5)

The prophets used this liturgical drama to portray the looming judgment of a righteous God on God’s own corrupt city (Isaiah 5:26-30 and 10:5-11).  The early prophecies of Jeremiah portray this drama becoming reality in the land: 

Blow the trumpet through the land;

      shout aloud and say,

“Gather together, and let us go

      into the fortified cities!”

Raise a standard toward Zion,

      flee for safety, do not delay,

for I am bringing evil from the north,

      and a great destruction.

(Jeremiah 4:5-6.  All of Jeremiah 4:5-31 is shaped by this drama.) 

Psalm 48 glories in the deliverance of Zion from this danger and celebrates the beauty and earthly glory of the royal city of God. 

The latter part of the psalm verges on idolatry by equating a specific historic structure with God’s own holiness. 

Walk around Zion, go all around it,

      count its towers, …

that you may tell the next generation

      that this is God,

our God forever and ever. 

The “this” of this statement probably refers not to the walls and towers only, but to
the event of God’s deliverance as the sole basis for security and peace.  Still, the temptation to “idolize” the city of masonry and cedar would eventually bring the divine judgment of destruction and exile.  (See, for example, Jeremiah’s “Temple Sermon,” Jeremiah 7:1-15.) 

II Corinthians 12:2-10.  

The Epistle reading for this Sunday is one of the most remarkable personal revelations of the apostle Paul in the New Testament. 

In his ongoing hassle to get the Corinthians to recognize the true nature of his apostleship, he is led to “boast” of his spiritual “adventures,” as it were – to contrast his own experiences with those of some self-important “apostles” with glowing credentials who are trying to set up as leaders of the Corinthian church. 

In this passage he speaks of himself in the third person – “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows” (verse 2, NRSV).  On behalf of this “person” Paul will boast of experiences in Paradise and heavenly things heard. 

Though these marvelous heavenly things are impressive, still they are not what the true service of God is about.  To keep him ever mindful of that, God gave Paul a “thorn in the flesh” – some physical or nervous disability that repeatedly humbled him.  Three times Paul asked that this tormenting burden be removed, but, like Jesus in Gethsemane, it was God’s will that the servant bear the burden and suffer among the people in God’s service (verses 7-9). 

“So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. …for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”   This is Paul’s statement of the great contrast between the prosaic everyday conditions of life and the glory of God’s reign behind it. 

Mark 6:1-13.  

In the Gospel reading Jesus goes home again, and, as in the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel (“You Can’t Go Home Again”), it doesn’t work. 

The folks in Nazareth knew Jesus back when.  He is a nice boy and all that, but he has taken to putting on airs.  What is this about deeds of power done with his hands, about wisdom from divine sources?  His hands are good at carpentry, but for divine acts …?? 

The people of Nazareth know the everyday reality, the ordinary world of a boy and young man growing into a tradesman with peculiar religious intensities.  The wonders that came to Capernaum and to places on the other shores of the Galilean lake are not available to them.  Not available, because… “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (verse 4, RSV, not NRSV).  Since they lacked faith in the healer, there was little healing experienced in Nazareth, “and he was amazed at their unbelief” (verse 6, NRSV). 

But our reading does not stop with the failure in Nazareth.  Jesus now begins to mobilize his movement through “the twelve” – who are not called disciples or apostles here (verses 6b-13).  They go out two by two, traveling lightly, taking what is given them, moving on when rejected.  They summon people to repentance, presumably with the corollary that the reign of God is at hand (Mark 1:15), and, as Jesus had done from the beginning, they struggle with people’s demons and work to heal the sick. 

The power and reign of God is moving secretly through the countryside, whether the people of Nazareth, and even Jesus’ own family, know it or not. 

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About ancient Jerusalem.

The earliest traces of Jerusalem by name are on Egyptian Execration Texts.  The Egyptians had rituals in which they wrote the names of their enemies on clay jars, uttered curses over them, and then shattered the jars in ritual actions.  The fragments of such broken jars have been recovered and some contain the name “urushalim.”  This was around the 1800’s BCE. 

In the 1300’s, the “king” of Jerusalem wrote letters to Pharaoh in Egypt, six of which have survived in “the Amarna Letters.”  These were diplomatic archives, written in the international cuneiform script, found in Egypt.  The king, Abdu-Heba, declares his faithfulness to the Pharaoh and denounces the treachery of his neighboring city-state kings. 

The next king of Jerusalem we hear about is Adoni-zedek, who appears in Joshua 10, leading a coalition of Canaanite city-state kings against Joshua – unsuccessfully, needless to say. 

Archeologically, there is evidence of settlement in Jerusalem in the Early Bronze age (3300-2200 BCE) and also in the Middle Bronze Age (1800-1600) before the time of Abdu-Heba. 

One writer, commenting about the extensive fortifications of early Jerusalem, says: 

Why anyone would covet Jerusalem…remains a mystery.  It had nothing to offer.  It’s natural resources (sheep, olives, fruit) were shared by every other hill town.  It was dominated by higher hills on three sides.  The water supply was poor.  It did not lie on any trade route in antiquity. 

[Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “Jerusalem,” The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Abingdon, 2008, Vol. 3, pp. 246-259, the quote on p. 247.] 

The Lord [Yahweh] – and David – must have found something to like!