The Lord Looks on the Heart

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on June 16, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: 1 Samuel 15:34 – 16:13

As I’m speaking this morning, I’m thinking of two friends I’ve spent some time listening to over the last few weeks. What they have in common is that they’re both coming to terms with the fact that their lives haven’t turned out as they hoped and expected. Somewhere along the way they’d formed in their imaginations a narrative that had a particular shape and direction in which specific things would happen and their lives would have a clear trajectory as a result. They’re different people, and those specifics differ in their respective lives, but in both cases the narrative and trajectory haven’t mapped out as anticipated and they’re each left feeling bewildered and powerless, asking, What did I do wrong? What do I do now? and, Where is God in all this?

People often assume the Bible is a book of moral instruction. But it may be more helpful to approach it as a book of stories that train our imaginations to understand our own story in relation to the stories of others and ultimately to God’s story. I want today to examine the account in First Samuel of the anointing of David. I’m going to look at it in three dimensions. I’ll start by looking at it as a human story, then go on to see it as a story about God, and finally speak directly to my two friends who’re feeling bewildered and powerless right now.

Let’s start with the human story. It comes in three scenes. In Scene One, both God and Samuel are full of grief over the failure of Israel’s first king, Saul. We can all relate to this. We’ve all invested huge amounts of emotional energy, time, sometimes money, and more than anything, love in a person where it all went wrong. We don’t know whether to be upset with them or cross with our own failure of judgement. We wonder whether to invest in anyone in the same way again. But God says to Samuel, ‘Stop staring at the floor. There’s important things to be done. Don’t let your sadness add to the damage.’ The truth is when any relationship, job, or venture fails, along with the grief, there’s always things that we’ve long suppressed or set aside that can now come back into the frame, and part of turning a disaster into an opportunity is recognising and allowing ourselves to enjoy those things.

But in moving forward, Samuel faces two problems. The first is, God’s proposal, that Samuel anoint a new king while Saul still lives, is an act of treason set to endanger everyone involved. It’s a crazy scheme. The second is, to involve others will involve a lie. Samuel must pretend he’s going to Bethlehem to make a sacrifice. Again, we’ve probably all found ourselves being part of a lie that’s in the service of a greater truth. But it feels pretty uncomfortable, especially if it’s putting our life and the lives of others in danger.

In Scene Two, Samuel starts looking over Jesse’s sons. Immediately we see Samuel’s flaws. He chose Saul because Saul was tall, and he takes one look at Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, sees he’s tall, and makes the same mistake again. I’m sure we’ve all placed great authority on someone who’s wise and shrewd – but then found, perhaps as their powers wane, that their weaknesses, that had always been there, become more evident. But we’re reluctant to acknowledge it, because we all want a wise person in our life, and to face up to their flaws not only dispels their aura but forces us back onto the loneliness and vulnerability of our own judgements. Yet Samuel here operates like a friend who, after a painful breakup, immediately starts dating an exact replica of their former partner. Assuming Eliab is the one demonstrates Samuel’s learnt nothing from the fallout from Saul.

Samuel works his way through all seven sons, to no avail. Again, we’ve all had that feeling that we’ve exhausted all the options, like when we search the whole house for our keys and can’t find them anywhere and start to question our memory and logic itself. Samuel scratches his head. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. Like my two friends, his story’s not following the assumed trajectory, and it makes him question everything he thought he knew about life, himself and God. The sequence of rejections feels like a catalogue of failure, steering way off the plan.

But in Scene Three all becomes clear. It turns out Samuel was learning to wait, to discern, and not to despair, despite appearances. Because there’s an eighth son. Samuel has a premonition and says he’ll remain standing till the last son arrives. Now this is where the story’s genuinely funny. We’ve been told the Lord doesn’t look on outward appearances. And David isn’t chosen on outward appearances. But the narrator can’t resist telling us how handsome David is. It seems like a flat contradiction. But notice in the glowing description of David’s charms, there’s nothing about his being tall. Maybe it’s saying, if we can get past the one thing we’re fixated on, we can start to see a person’s equally valuable assets. When Samuel stopped presupposing what kingly qualifications looked like, he could start to see other virtues. We’ve all been taken by surprise when an acquaintance or colleague didn’t have the expected qualities of a friend or collaborator, but once we got over their difference and our prejudice, we started to see their true worth.

That’s the human story. It starts in profound disappointment and hurt. It moves to seeing beyond setback to new opportunity. It learns patience through what feels like a series of failures and rejections. And finally it arrives at something very different from what was originally imagined, but turns out to have wonderful qualities if we only let go of our narrow imaginations about how our lives are supposed to turn out.

Let’s turn to the story about God. If we stick with dividing the story into three scenes, in Scene One we find a very personal, even idiosyncratic, but passionate God. We’re used to a lot of distant, ethereal portrayals of God – ineffable, unchanging, omniscient. But this is very different. God makes mistakes. God grieves. God cooks up a plan that puts a lot of people in danger. God seems quite comfortable with asking Samuel to lie. Many people are content with a vague notion of God who may be distant but is at least eternal and fair. But this is a God who’s down and dirty. Yet wants us to be part of every aspect of the story.

Then in Scene Two we get the central words in the whole story. ‘The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ We’ve just observed how God is alarmingly like us; here we discover how God differs from us. God sees who we really are. How much we base our lives on appearances. How seldom are we content to be fully known, utterly seen, truly understood. How much of our lives we waste on falsehood and pretence. And what do we do with the gains we thus make? This is a story in which Samuel experiences eight failures or rejections – like a resignation and seven failed interviews. Amid such experiences, any of us would wonder if our failures and rejections are based on an image we try to project, or on who we truly are. God does not reject who we truly are.

Then in Scene Three, the Spirit of the Lord comes mightily upon David from the moment Samuel anoints him. There’s no grand coronation, no public endorsement, no standing ovation or applause. All that matters is God’s spirit. God’s spirit departs from Saul – and Saul can do nothing. God’s spirit comes mightily on David – whereupon David can do anything.

But see how this perspective alters when we read the story through the lens of the New Testament. The Samuel story focuses on Bethlehem. Bethlehem’s an obscure town in Judah. But it becomes prominent because of this moment. Bethlehem comes to the fore, not because of its merit or beauty, but because God chooses it – now, and again when Jesus is born there. In that way it’s like the story of Israel as a whole. The story’s about all of Israel’s options being exhausted, but God nonetheless raising up a solution from left field. In just the same way God raises up Jesus from obscure Nazareth when Israel is on its knees, and raises Jesus from death when the crucifixion has extinguished all hope. David is a shepherd, literally an outsider, just as Jesus comes to be. Then, last, the Spirit descends mightily on the obscure and shadowy David, plunging him into the middle of the story, just as the Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism and on the disciples at Pentecost, in each case taking them from the margins to the centre.

The consistent theme is that God takes the person who’s been overlooked, the one who’s beleaguered, the figure who’s an outsider or a failure; finds in that person a quality neither they nor the world recognised; and in the power of the Spirit, transforms that person into something no one dreamed of or imagined. Which makes us recall where, how and why the Bible was put together. The Old Testament was written by a people in exile who, like my two friends, felt their story had absolutely gone astray from where it was supposed to go, and were trying to make sense of who they were and who God was. The New Testament was written by a people coming to terms with the catastrophe of the crucifixion, who were finding that in Jesus’s resurrection and in the coming of the Holy Spirit they were in a very different but absolutely more wonderful story than they ever supposed.

Which brings us to what this story means to the two people I spoke of at the beginning. This story’s saying, your grief is real. In this story, not just Samuel, but also God is bewildered and devastated by what’s gone wrong with Saul. The story’s saying, there comes a time, not straightaway, but after a period, when beyond your grief you can see possibilities that the expected story didn’t have room for. The story’s saying, don’t just look for an identical replica of the story that failed. Maybe God has a different story for you. The story’s saying, there may be many failures and rejections as you discover that new story. The story’s saying, the key element in the new story may be someone or something you’d never taken seriously or previously considered. And finally, the story’s saying, however weak, obscure, frustrated, dismayed or bewildered you may feel, this isn’t a story about your strength, your beauty, your height, your luck, or your talents: this is about what happens when God’s Spirit comes mightily upon you, whereupon everything is possible.

In short: this story’s telling my two friends, and each one of us, you may have a broken heart; but it’s out of God’s broken heart that new, very different, and very wonderful stories come, and what matters is that God looks on your heart, and God’s Spirit comes mightily upon your heart, and, hard as it may be to believe right now, bereft, beleaguered and bewildered as you are, God has chosen you.