SAUL, DAVID AND JONATHAN
1 Samuel 18-20
“You son of a perverse and rebellious woman! Don’t I know that you have sided with the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of the mother who bore you? As long as the son of Jesse lives on this earth, neither you nor your kingdom will be established. Now send someone to bring him to me, for he must die!”
This is a reflection of the ugliness of this world. It is a world of winners and losers and Saul lives in this world. He is happy as long as God is on his side and he is winning but the moment he thinks his position is in jeopardy, the ugliness surfaces; there is no other choice because if he is to win someone has to lose.
To David, caught in a world that he has idealised all his life, Saul’s choices are baffling. For him, fighting off bears and lions is straightforward—he must protect his sheep and God protects him. He brought that idealised view to the battleground and, to everyone’s amazement, he won.
But now he has to survive in a world where the king wants to kill him yet rewards him with a command over a thousand men. He has to offer a hundred Philistine foreskins to the king for his daughter’s hand. And even after winning battle after battle, the king still wants to kill him. He runs to the spiritual clarity and shelter of Samuel and yet the world would not let him go.
We are told that at the point when David embraced the life of a fugitive after having been celebrated as a hero, he wept more than the man who had given up his own path to kingship for his sake. Perhaps it was out of gratitude to Jonathan who was the constant in the madness that surrounded him, perhaps grief because his friend and saviour had to lose his own heritage and even turn against his own father for his sake, but perhaps also the tears were for having to accept that he now has to live and walk within the moral ambiguity of this world.
But surely the hero of these chapters is Jonathan, who was true and clear as to what is right and wrong, clear as to where God stands and what his will is, true to his deep belief that good only comes from standing on the side of God and at the end was at peace with his choices.
“Go in peace, for we have sworn friendship with each other in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘The Lord is witness between you and me, and between your descendants and my descendants forever.’”