• I Samuel 3: 1-10, [11-20]

In those days, “visions were not widespread.”   Samuel, the young follower of the old priest Eli is lying down next to the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple where “the lamp of the Lord had not yet gone out.”  The Lord called Samuel’s name, but the boy thought it was Eli who was calling him.  So Samuel rushed to the old priest, but the old priest told the young boy that he did not call him and to lie down again.  This happens three times.  Eli suspects it is the Lord who is calling the boy.  Again Eli tells the boy to return and lie down and this time if he hears the call to respond, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”  The Lord tells the boy something that will cause the ears of the boy to “ring.”  The Lord is ready to execute judgement, which the Lord had warned (chapter 2), against the house of Eli.  The next morning, Eli implore Samuel to tell him the Lord’s message, to “not hide it.”  When Eli hears the news, he seems resigned.  As Samuel grew into a young man, he became a reliable prophet of the Lord.  (This passage marks the transition from priestly to prophetic leadership for God’s people.)

• Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17

The psalmist reaches a profound insight: our most hidden thoughts and motives are not secure secrets.  The Lor our Creator, knows us better than we know ourselves.  No matter where we go, we never escape this sense that we are known by our Creator.  God’s vision sees in the light, but God’s vision sees just as clearly in the dark.

OR

• Deuteronomy 5: 12-15

In the other version of the Decalogue (Exodus 20: 8-11), rest on the seventh day is linked to God’s resting on the seventh day of creation.  In this version, a proscribed day of rest is linked to remembering “that you were  a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a  mighty hand and an outstretched arm….”  Therefore, all people and creation deserves the same equal time for rest.

• Psalm 81: 1-10

The psalmist lists the instruments in the orchestra that have been mobilized to celebrate the festival of the “new moon.,” which is a required “festal day.”  This lunar celebration is now linked, in the poetry of this psalm, with God’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt and the opening line of the Decalogue.

• II Corinthians 4: 5-12

Paul describes himself as a “Slave” for the sake of Jesus.  Then he casts himself as a “darkness” out of which comes “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”  He uses a third analogy, calling himself a “clay jar,”  so it might be obvious that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.  Paul alludes to the physical abuse he has endured for his witness, but turns this experience into a reminder “that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our bodies.”  “So death is at work in us, but life in you,” he tells his readers.

• Mark 2: 23-3:6

Interpretation of the injunction to keep the sabbath “holy” and to keep it a s a day of “rest” preceded the time of Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures, of course.  In Mark’s telling, the longstanding, traditional debate about whether there are exceptions to a literal interpretation of the scriptures is presented as an opportunity to present Jesus on the practical side of this debate and to heighten the mounting opposition to him.  The setting is a sabbath when Jesus and his disciple are walking through a grain field.  As they walked, they “plucked” some grain.  Apparently, some “Pharisees” saw what happened and challenged Jesus about the “unlawful” behavior of his disciples.  Mark then inserts Jesus’ recalling an event (that actually never happened in scripture) so that Jesus can declare: “the sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath, so the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbath.”   Mark follows with a separate event.  The setting is a synagogue on another sabbath, where there is a man with a “withered hand.”  An unidentified “they” watch Jesus to see if he will cure the man “so that they might accuse him.”  Jesus invites the man to come closer.  He asks the congregation, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?”  There was silence.  Mark writes that Jesus looked at the congregation with “anger.”  And that he was also “grieved at their hardness of heart….”  Jesus healed the man.  For the first time in his text,  Mark specifically identifies the Pharisees among the religious leaders who were out to get Jesus.

In his fifty books and countless essays and reviews, the British literary critic, Frank Kermode, pursued a singular conviction: “Interpretation is the principal concern of our waking lives,” as he expressed it in the Charles Elliot Norton Lecture at Harvard and later published as The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, (p.49)  In these famous lectures, he examined in some detail the Gospel of Mark.  He finds that in both form and substance, Mark requires interpretation.  Because the form of Mark is clumsy, opaque and disconnected, it constantly begs the questions: what exactly does he mean?  can we pin down exactly what he meant?  In substance, the text dwells on a “secret” that constantly perplexes those closest to Jesus and irritates his growing list of antagonists.   Mark “reveals and conceals,” Kermode concludes (p. 59), throwing any reader into  unavoidable, continuous interpretation. 

Consider the two episodes from Mark’s gospel this Sunday.  The debate about whether to interpret the Law literally had been going on long before the appearance of Jesus.  Yet the way Mark tells these two stories, he emphasizes the confusion and “hardness” of his listeners, when he was in fact relieving the suffering of a man with a “withered arm.”  These stories from Mark illustrate a truth about our normative reactions to all biblical texts that witness to God and God’s ways:  we can never fully see or completely understand, yet we are given quick glimpses which, if we pursue them, they can lead us. 

God sees clearly and completely.  We see only partially and partially. Because we are not capable of seeing the same way God sees, “Interpretation is the principal concern of our waking lives.”

Old Eli’s vision had grown “dim,”  but the Lord was about to use a young boy to provide new vision to God’s people.  The psalmist makes an important discovery:  we can see only in the  light, but God can see just as clearly in the dark.  Paul compares himself to “darkness.”  But then he declares that even out of his “darkness” can come “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” 

This Sunday’s readings, psalms and gospel establish that our lives are more like a kind of “darkness.”  We try to figure things out as best we can.  We rely on what we have been told or read. We read, listen and interpret everyday of our lives.  We have been told that we come closest to honest clarity when we see “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” and we try to figure out what that means not as an interesting,  abstract piece of information, but what it means personally.  The truth is we never fully grasp what that claim means.  In the two stories as Mark’s tells them the religiously pious want clarity and absolute religious certainity.  In their quest, they miss the higher priority Jesus has.   They focus on the alw regaring the sabbath.  Jesus focuses on responding to the immediate need of those on need.  Jesus leaves enough ambiguity that beguiles some and infuriates others.  Those who want tidy answers, especially moral or religious answers, that require no interpretative work, are angry at Jesus,  Others are intrigued enough to want more.