BETWEEN THE LINES
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; Mark 5:24b-34
July 2, 2006
By Rev. Dr. Jeanne Knepper

“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.�

When I was a girl, I ran across references to great, historic friendships, the noblest of relationships: Damon and Pythias, Achilles and Patrocles, Jonathan and David, Thoreau and Emerson. As a sixteen year old, I read the treatise on friendship in Thoreau’s travelogue, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers.� It was my favorite of all of Thoreau’s writings, for friendship seemed the highest of human relationships to me.

It was later, as an adult engaged in scholarship, that I learned that these celebrated friendships all had a sexual component, a part of the story left out of the versions presented to children, and, in the case of David and Jonathan, left out of the story as it was presented and interpreted for children and adults alike. Partly, this is because the church is almost universally uncomfortable with sex, regardless of the gender of the participants. But even more, I suspect, it is because so much of the church holds to an unarticulated belief that there can be no internal contradictions within the Bible: if same-gender sexual activity is proscribed in Leviticus, it can’t be celebrated in the stories of First and Second Samuel. David was a great man, a married man, the king who established the united kingdom, a luster after Bathsheba; he couldn’t have been a lover of Jonathan. Deep and abiding friends, yes. Lovers? No way. Liberal Biblical Scholar Bruce Birch, author of the analysis of First and Second Samuel in the New Interpreter’s Bible, dismisses the argument of gay scholar Tom Horner’s book, Jonathan Loved David, writing:

Some have felt that the statement of this love, which for David surpassed the love of women, is indicative of a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan. There is nothing in the language of this verse that explicitly suggests this or rules it out. Of course, David’s many liaisons with women are well known and in some cases notorious. We should be alert to the possibility that this phrase says less about David’s sexual orientation than it says about the status of women in ancient Israel. In an era of arranged marriages, love was not considered the basis of most relationships between men and women. Liaisons with women existed either in the context of marriage, where the purpose was child-bearing, or in illicit contexts, where the purpose was to satisfy lust. Love of women in such limited contexts might indeed pale in comparison to the deep and personal commitment represented by the love of David and Jonathan for each other.

An abiding principle of liberation scholarship is that our social location determines what we see. Our social location: where we stand in the midst of our culture. In the simplest of applications, this tells us that I, standing here, can’t see what the choir is doing nearly as well as you can. My location in this room makes it nearly impossible for me to observe their expressions or actions. So any report I might give to you about the choir’s behavior during the sermon is of necessity suspect.

The principle is easy to understand when we apply it to me and the choir. The next step is to consider that I am not able to experience our worship service the way that Leanna does. My social location, as a person with sight, actually blinds me to understanding, on my own, where our worship is less accessible to a person who relies on hearing, not vision. If I want to know how Leanna experiences worship, I need to be humble enough about my lack of awareness to ask her. I won’t know it on my own, just as I won’t pick up on subtle racism or anti-Semitism that might make its way into the service when I am not intending it. To know whether we are succeeding in creating a service that is free of racism, we must listen to the voices of those who have experienced the sting of racial stereotypes. To know how a text affects women, male scholars must listen to women. To know how a sermon impacts young people, we must listen to young people. And to know how a biblical text sounds to a gay man or lesbian, we must listen to what gay or lesbian scholars have had to say about it.

For this, I turn to David F. Greenberg’s book, The Construction of Homosexuality, where he writes:

After David slew Goliath,
The soul of Jonathan was knot with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. [1Samuel 18:1-2]
Later, when told that Saul and Jonathan had fallen in battle, David lamented both deaths, recalling that Jonathan’s love had been “wonderful . . . surpassing the love of women.� [2 Samuel 1:26]

In neither case does the text mention a sexual aspect to the relationship, but this need not be decisive. The Hebrew Bible underwent extensive editing before being put into final form, and an explicit homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan could easily have been deleted by priestly editors. Nevertheless, homophilic innuendos permeate the story. Saul loved the young David “greatly� and made him his armor bearer. Learning that David and Jonathan had become intimates, Saul flew into a rage, tried to kill David, and cursed Jonathan: “Thou son of perverse rebellion, do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to thine own shame, and unto the shame of thy mother’s nakedness?� [1 Samuel 20:30] No doubt Saul’s fear of David’s growing popularity contributed to his explosive outbursts, but sexual jealousy runs through the narration like a red thread.

We might ask, well, since we can’t know, for sure, what does it matter whether David and Jonathan were lovers? Is there any good reason to devote a sermon to such scholarly musings? What possible good can come from taking up the issue in worship today?

I think of three answers, reasons that convinced me that it was important to engage the presence of this text in the lectionary. The first is that Biblical passages have been quoted selectively and brutally to convince gay men and lesbians that our shared faith has nothing positive to say about their lives and loves. Because so much harm has been done by one-sided and slipshod scholarship, justice demands that we take the opportunity to challenge that perception.

The second is a response to a film I watched this week. In it, gay and lesbian citizens of Pittsburgh were reeling from hateful anti-gay rhetoric voiced by supposed Christians as they campaigned for a “Proposition 14,� a close copy of some of our Oregon anti-gay initiatives. What disturbed me the most about the story was there were no Christian voices speaking words of justice, love, celebration or mercy. And what disturbs me tremendously in real life is that this is the experience of so many lesbians and gay men—the voice of the churches that they hear is a voice of condemnation and judgment. To overcome that reality, we who disagree with the hateful rhetoric must speak more clearly and more boldly.

My third reason is that we have much to learn from the love of David and Jonathan for each other. Did you know that, with the exception of the Song of Songs, all of the stirring words of covenantal human love in the Bible are spoken between people of the same gender? In Genesis 31:49, Laban raises up a pile of stones as a pillar and asks his son-in-law Jacob to make a covenant sealed with the words, “The Lord watch between you and me, when we are absent one from the other.� Do those words sound familiar to you? Countless couples wear twin pendants, broken circles engraved with the words of this Mizpah, a sign of their promise to be committed to each other even when they are apart. Or perhaps you recognize these words: “Entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried.� [Ruth 1:16-17] These words, spoken by Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi, both widows, are among the most popular choices for wedding scriptures.

Why is it that such memorable words of commitment and covenant are spoken between people of the same gender in our Biblical record? I think it is because, as Bruce Birch said, there was no equality between men and women in ancient Israel. What our studies tell us, in words both memorable and beautiful, is that relationships of great commitment, devotion, and tenderness require a foundation of mutuality and respect. This is a word of great importance to every one of us: none of us can have lasting, loving, relationships of full and beautiful intimacy if it is not based on an essential equality. And this is the connection between our two scripture stories today: when a woman who had been hemorrhaging for years approached Jesus in a crowd and dared to touch him—rendering him ritually unclean by her touch—he responded with conversation, not condemnation, respecting her reasons and applauding her boldness with the words, “Your faith has made you well.� Jesus acted to overturn the unequal roles of men and women, knowing that we will never find the realm of God in our midst as long as we hold to social mores that value people unequally.

Here we are, in the midst of the Fourth of July weekend. What message could be more important that this: we have much to learn from each other; we are strengthened by our acceptance of the strangers among us; we are ennobled when we treat all people as God’s beloved; we find ourselves in God’s presence when we share the meal of fellowship with everyone who would come. As a culture, as a nation, as a church, let us throw the doors wide open and welcome all to the feast. And may our sung prayer, that God would “crown our good with brotherhood,� ring throughout our land! Amen.

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