Epiphany 2 2024

 

1 Samuel 3.1-20, John 1.43-end

 

In today’s readings we have two stories about people who took a bit of getting through to, who just didn’t seem to be able to hear or see something which they needed to. Nathanael can’t believe that Jesus might be the Messiah; Samuel takes all night to realise that God is speaking to him and the old priest Eli has been unable or unwilling to hear the voice of God for many years. I expect we can all sympathise with them. I’m sure we’ve all been confronted with a truth about someone or something which, looking back, we feel we should have known all along. Worse still, perhaps we realise that we did know it, but couldn’t acknowledge it.

 

Why didn’t governments see Covid coming and make better preparation for it?

Why couldn’t the Post Office have seen that the financial losses they had spotted were a glitch in the computer system, not a sudden outbreak of widespread criminality among their subpostmasters and mistresses.

On a personal level we might ask ourselves why we didn’t we take notice of the niggling symptoms that later turned out to be a serious illness?

Or Why we didn’t spot the warning signs of a relationship that was getting into difficulties?

Or Why it took us so long to realise that were called into, or out of, a particular role or career?

In hindsight it all seems so obvious, but so often our vision is clouded and our ears stopped.

 

In Nathanael’s case it seems to be prejudice which gets in the way of him seeing the truth about Jesus. “A Messiah from Nazareth! You’ve got to be joking” he says to his friends. We’re not sure why Nazareth seemed such a dodgy place to hail from, but presumably people at the time would have understood. It might have been because the northern territory of Galilee was more mixed ethnically and religiously than the southern lands of Judea around Jerusalem. It was also where the majority of the occupying Roman soldiers were stationed, forcing the people into greater collaboration with them. Or perhaps Nazareth just had a bad reputation – a backwater, hicksville place people wanted to avoid. Whatever it was though, Nathanael seems convinced that Nazarenes are not Messiah material, and he can’t get past that.   

 

It‘s only when he meets Jesus that he realises his mistake. This man knows him, somehow, even better than Nathanael knows himself, because he sees Nathanael’s potential as a disciple, something which was also way off Nathanael’s radar. Seeing a new truth about Jesus enables him to see a new truth about himself.

 

The Old Testament story of Eli and Samuel is a more complex tale, and a sadder one. Eli was the old priest at the shrine of Shiloh where the Ark of the Covenant – the symbol of God’s presence in Israel - was kept. He had two adult sons who should have followed him as priests in this important position. But they had gone off the rails and are abusing their positions. They are stealing the offerings that people are bringing to Shiloh. Eli knows this at some level, but he’s never quite found the courage or energy to confront them. In the end, of course, they are responsible for themselves, but at least Eli could have tried to influence them, and it seems he hasn’t.

 

And that’s where Samuel comes in, a young boy whose mother, Hannah, had brought him to the sanctuary for Eli to bring up as his own. It might seem like an odd thing for a loving mother to do, but there is, of course, a back story. Hannah is one of two wives of her husband, Elkanah . The other wife has borne him lots of children, but Hannah hasn’t been able to conceive, and her co-wife and step-children never let her forget it, making her life a misery. In desperation, Hannah comes to the shrine at Shiloh and prays for a child. Her prayers are so passionate that Eli thinks she must be drunk, but when she explains the situation, he assures her that God had heard her prayer, and that she will have a son. It all happens as he said it would and once the child is weaned, Hannah decides that, in thanksgiving, she will entrust the child to Eli to help at the shrine as soon as he is old enough to leave her. As I said, it seems like an odd decision, but maybe he will be safer there than at home with step-brothers and sisters who treated his mother so badly, and will probably do the same to him. Whatever Hannah’s motivation, it is clear that Hannah has realised that her child matters, not only to her, but to the people of Israel and that God is calling him to do something important.

 

But, as the story says “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread”, so when God literally calls to him, one dark night as he lies asleep in the sanctuary at Shiloh, it takes a while for both Samuel and Eli to work out what is going on. And when Samuel finally does say, “speak Lord for your servant is listening”, the message he is asked to give Eli is grim.

 

It is the end of the road for Eli’s household. His sons will eventually be killed in battle, and Eli himself will die of sorrow. No wonder Samuel seems reluctant to pass this message on. But Eli finds the courage to urge Samuel to tell the truth, no matter what it is, and by doing that he teaches Samuel a vital lesson which he will need to draw on often in the future – that the truth, however painful, can’t be avoided forever.

 

Samuel goes on to be one of Israel’s most important prophets, instrumental in the lives of King Saul and King David. He is often called by God to challenge them – and those who challenge kings need all the courage they can muster. I like to hope that Eli would have been glad, for all his own failures, to know that he had been able to play at least a little part in God’s work.

 

And that is what it is about – God’s work. Because it is most often where the pain and the mess are that God is. We see this in Jesus, born in a dung-strewn stable, growing up in that dodgy town of Nazareth, dying on a cross, alone and reviled, looking to all the world as if he had failed. Who would have thought that God could be in these squalid places, in these squalid things? Not the Magi who headed first for Herod’s palace. Not Nathanael with his blinkered views. Not the horrified disciples who ran away from the crucifixion. But that is where God was, at work in the world through Christ. And that is where he still is. In the places, the people, the situations we would rather not see at all – the things within ourselves we’d rather bury or ignore. It is there that God waits patiently with his healing and his love because it’s there that we need him most. Turn away from that place and we turn away from God too.

 

I wonder what would happen today if we were to say, as Samuel does, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening?” I don’t know, and that’s why it frightens me, as perhaps it does you, but if we are serious in our search for God’s presence in our lives and in our world then the places where we least want to be may turn out to be the very places where we will find him. Amen