Read Time: 9 minutes1 Samuel 14
The chapter sets Jonathan against his father, and the contrast is the contrast of faith against natural Israel’s self-will. Jonathan — his name means Yahweh has given — lives up to it: while Saul sits under a pomegranate tree with six hundred men and a priest, doing nothing, Jonathan and his armour-bearer climb alone against a Philistine garrison on the word, “there is no restraint to Yahweh to save by many or by few.” The one named Yahweh has given ventures everything on what Yahweh gives. This is the faith Saul lacked in the chapter before — not forcing the moment, but venturing on Yahweh’s power regardless of numbers. Jonathan does not know whether Yahweh will use him, and says so; he asks for a sign and acts on it. The two climb up on their hands and feet, and Yahweh delivers the garrison into Israel’s hand, and the earth quakes — “a very great trembling” — so that the whole Philistine host melts away.
Saul’s response to the victory is to make it about himself, and the curse he lays bare his folly. He binds the people with a rash oath — “Cursed be the man that eateth any food until evening, that I may be avenged on mine enemies” — and the oath does nothing but exhaust his own army and nearly kill his own son. Jonathan, who had not heard the oath, dips his rod in honey and eats, and his eyes are enlightened; and he names the foolishness of it plainly: “my father hath troubled the land.” The king who would not wait in chapter 13 now binds others with a vow he had no business making. Natural Israel’s king leads by a series of self-regarding impulses that trouble the very people he rules.
The faint and famished people, when the oath’s hold finally breaks at evening, fall on the spoil and eat the animals with the blood — driven into sin against the law by Saul’s own rash vow. The king’s folly produces the people’s transgression; bad shepherding breeds the flock’s stumbling. Saul builds an altar — his first — almost as an afterthought, and even his piety here has the flavor of reaction rather than devotion. Everything in the chapter measures the king by his fruit and finds the fruit troubling.
The sharpest moment is the near-execution of Jonathan. The lot falls on Jonathan for breaking the oath, and Saul, rigid in his own rash word, is ready to kill the very son whose faith won the day: “thou shalt surely die, Jonathan.” It is the people who rescue him — “shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel?… there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground.” The man who wrought salvation is condemned by the king’s law and ransomed by the people. There is a faint, inverted foreshadowing here: the one who works the great deliverance is the one the ruler would put to death — though here the people rescue him, where at the crucifixion the rulers will prevail for a time. And there is something in the sonship too, held carefully: Jonathan is the son of the natural king, the heir of the line, yet the man of faith who wrought salvation — a true son arising from within the natural house that his father embodies. It is not that Saul is any figure of the Father; it is that the deliverer comes as a son of the nation, as the greater Deliverer would be called out of Egypt as Yahweh’s son, the true Son standing where natural Israel the son had failed. The faithful son is condemned by the natural king and loved by the people, and Yahweh will not let one hair of his head fall.
Faith ventures on Yahweh, who is not restrained to save by many or few; natural Israel’s king binds the people with rash oaths and troubles the land. Measure the king by his fruit — and mark the one who wrought salvation, condemned by the ruler and loved by the people.
Isaiah 58
The chapter is a stripping-bare of false religion and a setting-out of the true. Israel fasts and seeks Yahweh daily and delights to know his ways — outwardly — and complains that their fasting goes unnoticed: “Wherefore have we fasted, and thou seest not?” The answer cuts to the root: “in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness.” Their fasting is a performance that leaves their oppression intact — the bowed head like a bulrush, the sackcloth and ashes, while the workers under them are crushed. This is the same hollow worship as Saul’s reactive altar and the greedy watchmen of chapter 56: the form of devotion with no justice in it.
Then the great redefinition of the fast Yahweh chooses: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free… Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?” True fasting is mercy made active — loosing burdens, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked. The religion Yahweh chooses is not self-denial turned inward for display but self-giving turned outward toward the broken. It is the same heart as the Lord Jesus’ judgment of the nations on what was done to the least of these.
And the promises that follow are some of the most luminous in the prophet. “Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily… then shalt thou call, and Yahweh shall answer.” The light, the healing, the answered prayer, the guidance — all flow from the turn toward mercy. “Thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places… thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” The merciful people become a watered garden and a rebuilder of ruins, the repairer of the breach — a title that points to the work of restoration the Servant himself accomplishes, healing the breach between Yahweh and a broken people.
The chapter ends on the Sabbath rightly kept — “if thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day… then shalt thou delight thyself in Yahweh.” The Sabbath honoured not as a burden but as delight, not seeking one’s own pleasure but Yahweh’s, brings the promise: “I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob.” The true fast and the true Sabbath are one — the turning away from self toward Yahweh and the neighbor, which is the whole law in small, and the gateway to the inheritance.
The fast Yahweh chooses is to loose burdens, feed the hungry, clothe the naked — mercy made active, not religion made for show. Be the repairer of the breach, delight in the Sabbath, and thy light shall break forth as the morning.
Matthew 1–2
The Gospel opens, and it opens with a genealogy — “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Every name in the line has been reaching toward this: the seed of Abraham in whom all nations are blessed, the son of David to whom the throne was sworn. Matthew arranges it in three fourteens — fourteen generations from Abraham to David, from David to the carrying away, from the captivity to Christ — the number of David himself (the numerical value of his name) stamped three times on the line, declaring the genealogy’s whole point: this is David’s promised Son. And the line breaks its own rhythm at the last link: the chain of begat after begat gives way at verse sixteen to of whom was born Jesus — Joseph is named the husband of Mary, not the father of her Son; the natural line is severed at its final link, and the begetting is the Spirit’s. And woven into the male line are the women the world would have hidden — Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah — outsiders and the shamed, the grace that gathers strangers running right through the King’s own ancestry, exactly as Isaiah’s stranger and eunuch are brought into the house.
The birth itself is told around the Name and the names. The child is conceived of the Holy Spirit, and the angel commands the Name: “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.” The Name is the meaning — Yahshua, Yahweh saves — and the whole purpose of the incarnation is folded into it: not a king to throw off Rome, but a Saviour from sin, the deeper bondage. And Matthew names the second name from Isaiah: “they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” The two names together hold the mystery — the One who saves his people from their sins is the One in whom God is with us, the tabernacle of God with men begun in a manger.
The visit of the wise men sets the new King against the old order at once. The magi come from the east asking “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” — and Herod, natural Israel’s king sitting on a borrowed throne, is troubled, “and all Jerusalem with him.” Here at the very start is the pattern that ran through Saul: the reigning king of natural Israel cannot bear the true King and seeks his life. The chief priests name the place from Micah — Bethlehem, house of bread — and the name itself is a sign: the Bread of Life, the true manna that came down from heaven, is born in the house of bread, as he will later be laid in a manger where the beasts are fed. The star goes before the magi to the house, and they fall down and worship and open their treasures — gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for one marked for death and burial. The Gentiles from the east worship the King of the Jews while Jerusalem’s king plots murder; the outsiders come in and the insiders turn away, the very reversal Isaiah foretold.
The chapter closes in flight and slaughter and a return, each one sealed as the fulfilment of prophecy. The child is carried down into Egypt, “that it might be fulfilled… Out of Egypt have I called my son” — the new Israel retracing the old nation’s path, the true Son succeeding where the national son failed. Herod slaughters the children of Bethlehem, and Rachel weeps for her children — the sorrow of Ramah sounding again over the seed of the woman struck at by the serpent, as the dragon stood before the woman to devour her child. And the family returns to settle in Nazareth, “that he should be called a Nazarene” — the despised town, the despised name, the King who comes with no form that the eye would choose, as the Servant was foretold. Natural Israel’s king rages; the true King is hidden, preserved, and grows up unregarded in a place men scorned.
David’s promised Son is born, and his Name is the gospel — Yahshua, Yahweh saves his people from their sins; Emmanuel, God with us. The Gentiles worship while natural Israel’s king plots murder, and the true Son is called out of Egypt, the King hidden in a town men despised.
Synthesis and Exhortation
Today the long preparation turns into the arrival. For months the readings have traced a barren-womb-to-throne pattern reaching toward a King, and here the King is born — the son of David, the son of Abraham, his Name the whole gospel in a word: Yahshua, Yahweh saves. And the moment he appears, the old contrast sharpens to a point. Saul troubles the land with rash oaths and would kill the son who wrought salvation; Herod, troubled at the news of a true King, slaughters the children to be rid of him. The king of natural Israel cannot abide the King after Yahweh’s heart — it could not in Saul, it cannot in Herod, and it will not at the end. From the first chapter of the Gospel the reigning power of natural Israel is set against the hidden, despised, preserved Son.
The thread that binds all three readings is the gathering of the outsider and the turning-away of the proud. Isaiah throws the fast open to mercy and the house open to the stranger and the eunuch; Matthew runs Tamar and Rahab and Ruth through the King’s own genealogy and brings the Gentile magi to worship at the manger while Jerusalem’s king plots. The grace that reaches the stranger and lifts the broken-hearted is the same grace that chose the despised town of Nazareth and the lowly manger. And it is matched by its shadow: the religion that fasts for strife and smites with the fist of wickedness, the king who slaughters to keep his throne, the city troubled at its own Messiah. The light breaks forth for the merciful and the contrite; it is darkness to the proud who will not have it.
The hope stands where it has always stood — the King has come, but the kingdom is not yet. The Gospel opens with Emmanuel, God with us, the first instalment of the promise that ends in Revelation with the tabernacle of God is with men — but between the manger and the city lies the whole road of the Servant, the rejection, the offering, the long age of the bride waiting and thirsting. The child is born and hidden; the true King grows up unregarded; the throne of David is sworn but not yet taken. The saint reads the genealogy knowing the Son has come and the kingdom is coming, living in the with us that points to the with men.
So the exhortation gathers the day into a turning of the heart toward mercy and the true King. Let your fast be the one Yahweh chooses — loose the burdens, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, hide not yourself from your own flesh — and your light shall break forth as the morning. Be the repairer of the breach, not the watchman who feeds himself. Worship the King the magi worshipped, the despised Nazarene whose Name is salvation, and do not be Herod or Saul, grasping a throne against the One to whom it belongs. The Son of David is born; God is with us; bring your gold and frankincense and myrrh, and bow.
The King is born and his Name is salvation — Yahshua, Emmanuel, God with us. Choose the fast of mercy, worship the despised Nazarene the Gentiles knelt to, and do not be the king of natural Israel who rages against his own Messiah.