Mephibosheth

MEPHIBOSHETH WAS ONLY FIVE YEARS OLD when news came through that his father, Jonathan, and his grandfather, King Saul, had both been killed in battle. Terrified that the child might be next, his nurse snatched him up in her arms and started to run off with him when she tripped and fell in her panic, and the boy was so badly crippled that he never walked right again.

The new king, David, might very well have decided to get rid of him. It was standard procedure then to wipe out your predecessor's entire family when you came to the throne just in case any of them happened to have political ambitions; but maybe because Mephibosheth was a cripple and thus not likely to give him much trouble, or maybe because his father had been David's best friend, or maybe just because he felt sorry for him, or maybe some combination of all these, David decided to be generous. It was the kind of crazy, magnificent gesture he liked to make every once in a while, like the time some soldiers risked their necks breaking through the enemy lines to bring him a cup of cool water from Bethlehem, his hometown, and David won the hearts of everybody by saying, "Shall I drink the blood of the men who went at the risk of their lives?" (2 Samuel 23:15-17), and poured it out on the ground.

In any case, he had Mephibosheth brought to him, and the poor child fell on his face in terror at what for all he knew was going to be the ax, but David told him not to be afraid. He told him that he was to have all the property that rightfully belonged to him and a man named Ziba to look after him, and he also promised him that from then on he was to take all his meals at the king's table as if he was his own son.

Ziba was a sly one, as it turned out, and years later when there was a revolt against David, Ziba told him that Mephibosheth had defected to the other side. What motivated this lie was the hope that David would grant him not only his favor, but also all of Mephibosheth's real estate, and so David did.

After the revolt was successfully put down, however, Mephibosheth showed up and convinced David that Ziba had been lying and he had been on the right side all along, and David seemed to believe him. But poor David—he was so shattered by everything that had happened, especially by the death of his beloved if treacherous Absalom, that he couldn't give the matter his full attention and more or less brushed Mephibosheth off by telling him that he and Ziba could divide the real estate between them for all he cared and to stop pestering him.

It would be sad if the relationship had ended on such an unsatisfactory note—the old king too broken-hearted to care much about anything anymore, and Mephibosheth limping home to work things out somehow with Ziba. But that isn't where it ended.

Before David had a chance to leave, Mephibosheth said that he was so overjoyed that David had driven the rascals out and come through the battle safe and sound that just to celebrate he was prepared to let Ziba take the whole damn place. Whether or not he made good on the offer, or even intended to, hardly matters. It was a crazy and magnificent gesture to make, and maybe David was not too lost in his own grief to realize, however dimly, at whose knees he had learned to make it.

2 Samuel 9; 16:1-4; 19:24-30

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words

Memory

THERE ARE TWO WAYS OF REMEMBERING. One way is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie. The faraway look in his eyes is partly the beer and partly that he's really far away.

The other way is to summon the dead past back into the living present. The young widow remembers her husband, and he is there beside her.

When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:24), he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Meditation

IN OUR MINDS we are continually chattering with ourselves, and the purpose of meditation is to stop it. To begin with, maybe we try to concentrate on a single subject—the flame of a candle, the row of peas we are weeding, our own breath. When other subjects float up to distract us, we escape them by simply taking note of them and then letting them float away without thinking about them. We keep returning to the in-and-out of our breathing until there is no room left in us for anything else. To the candle flame until we ourselves start to flicker and burn. To the weeds until we become only a pair of grubby hands pulling them. In time we discover that we are no longer chattering.

If we persist, every once and so often we may find ourselves entering the suburbs of a state where we are conscious but no longer conscious of anything in particular, where we have let go of almost everything.

The end of meditation is to become empty enough to be filled with the kind of stillness the Psalmist has in mind when he says, "Be still, and know that I am God" (46:10).

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Me

AS IN "ME FIRST" and "gimme," the pronoun me has gotten a bad name over the years. It's other people we're told we should be thinking about. It's giving to them. But taken all by itself—just me—there's something rather poignant about it. Only two letters long. Barely one syllable. It looks as though it needs all the help it can get.

"Love your neighbor as yourself," we're told. Maybe before I can love my neighbor very effectively, I have to love me—not in the sense of a blind passion, but in the sense of looking after, of wishing well, of forgiving when necessary, of being my own friend.

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Matthew

THE APOSTLE MATTHEW was a tax collector, and one of the Gospels bears his name. Like Mark's, the book was written anonymously and the name attached to it later. Maybe it contains some of Matthew's recollections buried in it somewhere. Maybe not. In any case, it's the man who wrote it who's of chief interest here, and all we know about him is what his book tells us. He didn't write it from scratch, but included virtually all of Mark in it plus a collection of the sayings of Jesus that seems to have been floating around plus some other material peculiar to him. It's what he did with it all that tells the kind of man he was.

What he did with it especially was to show that if, on the one hand, faith in Jesus was as new as a newborn babe, on the other hand, it was as old as the hills. As very likely a Jew himself, Matthew knew his Torah, and according to him Jesus was what the Torah was all about, whether anybody knew it or not. Much of his life was foretold there, Matthew keeps saying, and he loved to give examples. "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel," the prophet Isaiah had said, and Matthew nailed his idea that Mary was a virgin to that (Matthew 1:23). Jesus was born at Bethlehem, and that's just where the prophet Micah had said he'd be born (2:6). Hosea was the one who predicted the flight into Egypt when Jesus was still on his mother's knee (2:15), and it was Zechariah who said he'd come riding into Jerusalem on a donkey like a king great in his humbleness and humble in his greatness (21:5). But things like this were mere window dressing compared with the main thing Matthew wanted to say.

The main thing he wanted to say was that, although Jesus was born in the sticks and never had two cents to rub together and was ignored by just about everybody who mattered and was strung up in the end between two crooks, he was the same Messiah, the same Christ, the same Anointed of the Lord, that for centuries Israel had been waiting for with tears in its eyes. Everything Matthew wrote was aimed at convincing people that this was so and that to accept it was to find eternal life and that to deny it was to be like the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, "Woe to you . . . sons of those who murdered the prophets . . . you serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?" (23:29-33). Nobody loved the Jews more than Matthew did, writing till he was blue in the face so they would believe and be saved, but nobody was harder on them either. It was Matthew who added to Mark's account the terrible words they spoke when Pilate washed his hands of the whole grim business: "His blood be on us and on our children" (27:25).

Jesus was the Messiah, Matthew said, and he was also a second Moses, giving his Sermon on the Mount just as Moses had brought the tablets down from Mt. Sinai, but taking the fierce old stone and making pure gold of it. "You have heard that it was said 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' but I say to you, do not resist one who is evil" (5:38-39). "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbors and hate your enemies,' but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (5:43-44). As Matthew saw it, Jesus came not to drown the old law out, as the Jews supposed, but to make it sing anew, like an angel.

It worried him a little the way in Mark's Gospel the Son of God sometimes sounds so much like anybody's son, and he did what he could to make him sound more godly. Where Mark wrote that when Jesus healed the leper, he was "moved with pity" (Mark 1:41), Matthew leaves out the pity and says he just healed him. When Mark says he looked at the people who objected to miracles on the Sabbath "with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart" (Mark 3:5), Matthew leaves that out too. He won't let him "sigh deeply" when they ask him for a sign (Mark 8:12), and Mark's "he could do no mighty work" in his own hometown (Mark 6:5) becomes just "he did not" do any in Matthew (13:58). "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone," Jesus says in Mark to the man who greets him that way (Mark 10:18), and Matthew tinkers with it till it reads, "Why do you ask me about what is good?" (19:17). You can't blame him for tinkering really. He can't help retouching the photograph when he loves its subject so—making the warts a little less wartlike, the miracles a little more miraculous—and in the end he lets him at least die like a man as well as like a God with the same dark cry that Mark reports—"My God, my God, why have you let me down?" (27:46).

Mark ends his Gospel with the women tearing out of the empty tomb in terror. Things were happening beyond their power to cope with, "and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid" (Mark 16:8). But in Matthew the angel tells them not to be. "Don't be afraid," he says (28:5). There was no reason to be afraid, Matthew says. It was all set down right there in the Torah if you just knew how to read it right. Hadn't Isaiah written, "He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will any one hear his voice in the streets; he will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick"? (12:19-20). Such a man as that, so gentle and kind, was bound to come to such an end. There was no need to be afraid. And yet wasn't it written also, "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region of the shadow of death, light has dawned" (4:16)? Dawned for the gentle man himself, and for the frightened women, and dawned for everyone else too who would only hear and believe.

The women took the angel's word to heart apparently because, though "they departed quickly from the tomb with fear," Matthew says, they departed also with "great joy" and ran to tell the disciples what had happened because they couldn't hold it in any longer (28:8). And just in case there should be any question as to what their great joy was all about, Matthew ends his Gospel with words that explain it. "Lo, I am with you always," Jesus says, "even unto the end of the world" (28:20), and for once Matthew felt that no Old Testament reference was necessary.

-Originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words