- Valson Thampu
To Hamlet, the agonizing question was: ‘To be, or not to be’. To us, as Christians today living in Modi’s India, the corresponding question is: To be with David, or to be with Goliath? Let me explain.
The David-Goliath face-off, chronicled compactly, but with mythological resonance, in 2 Samuel 21:15-22, pertains to the universal pattern of the weak endangered by the mighty. The story that comes closest to this, in children’s literature, is Jack the Giant Killer. In David’s world, where Jehovah was less modern, the weak stood a good enough chance to prevail. Not so in our world. Today, it is the mighty, indeed the Super Mighty, who prevail. A brave world for the strong, but a bad world for the weak.
When Jesus stood trial before Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, wasn’t he, I tend to muse, re-enacting the David-Goliath pattern? The Resurrection is good news to the poor, because it affirms, as is feasible only because of God, that the weak of the world do stand a chance! Not many expositors of the meaning of the Resurrection care to recognize that that crowning event embodies and re-validates the divine logic that ultimately it is the weak of the world who prevail. So, as Paul says, God chooses the weak of the world to shame the powerful of the world (1 Corinthians 1:27). This, by the way, is the litmus test of faith, spiritually understood. However, our faith is of a different pedigree. It is faith in the powerful, which is not different from faith in Mammon. And it shows!
Our idea of God is corrupted by faith of this kind. We value God because God is Almighty. To the Jews, he was the Supreme Warrior. Jehovah was duty-bound to defeat their enemies. It rarely strikes us, despite our routinized annual ‘meditations on the Cross’, that the God revealed in the Jesus Event, is characterised not by power, but by powerlessness. The Sacrament of the broken Body and the shed Blood, is a liturgical celebration of the power of brokenness. Its logic is simple; perhaps, too simple to be understood. If God is Love, he cannot be Power. Love is necessarily vulnerable. To love is to incur the tragic; for whatever is ultimate is perforce tragic in our kind of world. Jesus’s power is, therefore, perfected in vulnerability; for vulnerability is of the hallmark of love. As Sheridan intuited, love stoops to conquer. Jesus, at the acme of his power humbled himself, as Paul wrote to the Philippians- to death on the Cross.
The Cross embodies the paradox that it is only the weak who can be humanely brave. It is in vain that we expect a Herod to die for us. It is as a perpetual reminder of this fact that Herod is there in the gospel narrative, in the first place. The Herods of this world will kill us and our children for their sake. Only the Babe will die for us that we may have life in its fullness. Ironically, the Babe is also the measure of Herod’s insignificance. But this seems, as Paul says, foolishness to those who are orientated to death. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. 16 To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. (2 Cor 2: 15-16)
If we re-write the David-Goliath encounter in light of the assumptions that prevail today, in our account Goliath will surely prevail. It seems insanely Quixotic to us to assume that David could stand a chance; Vietnam and Afghanistan, notwithstanding.
“I have come,” Jesus proclaimed, “to preach the good news to the poor”. (St Luke 4:18) What is that good news? We know the good news to the rich: God is on their side. God gives bloated worldly blessings to his beloved even in sleep! In contrast, the good news to the poor was intuited by Mary, which we mutter mechanically as the Magnificat. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)
It is this vision, radically different to what prevails in this world, that we owe to the world. When Jesus said to the Pharisees, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.” (Mark 12:17), he meant not only that we should be honest tax-payers. What he means is also that we bear credible witness to the divine justice that pulsates through Mary’s ecstatic words. It is easy to adore Mary; but terrifyingly difficult to be Mary. As a rule, adoration excludes emulation. We worship what we cannot be; and don’t have to be; unless, of course, we worship ‘in spirit and truth’ (John 4: 24)
So, what are we to do as custodians of the spiritual legacy of Jesus Christ? Endeavour to be Davids vis-à-vis the Goliaths of our world? Or, having become wiser, like Dostoevsky’s Cardinal in The Grand Inquisitor, cultivate the giants of the world? Much depends on what we mean by bravery. Goliath is distinguished for his bravado; David by his bravery. The pity today is that for most of us ‘bravery’ and ‘bravado’ mean pretty much the same today.
