A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
30 October 2022
The Cathedral of St Martin, Lucca:
Floor mosaic, The Judgment of Solomon, by Antonio Federighi
1 Kings 3.4-28
The question of what kind of person should lead a nation
is not a new one, it seems,
and as the UK embarks on its third Prime Minister in two months,
I wonder what you would put forward as the top priority
for a newly appointed national leader?
The famous political ‘honeymoon period’,
is often an opportunity for a newly appointed leader
to enact decisions that will soon be closed to them;
and they must use it wisely,
with the penalties for getting it wrong severe
as Liz Truss and her team quickly discovered.
So what would you do, if you were handed the golden ticket?
What would you do with your political honeymoon period?
This was the question that God put to Solomon one night,
as he lay dreaming of his future reign,
in the early days of his ascension to the Kingship of Israel.
He could have chosen wealth, health, and a long life,
he could have chosen defeat for his enemies,
but instead he chose wisdom.
Except, well, … he didn’t actually ask for ‘wisdom’
he asked for ‘an understanding mind
able to discern between good and evil’
and he asked for this because he felt inadequate
to the task of governing the people.
But did you notice the resonance with another biblical narrative here?
We’ve heard this phrase ‘discerning between good and evil’ before…
If you cast your mind back to the beginning of Genesis,
you will remember that the tree in the garden of Eden,
that Adam and Eve are instructed to avoid,
is the tree whose fruit gives ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2.17).
Solomon wants as a gift what Adam and Eve were denied,
but which they took anyway.
And I think we’re invited to think here of Solomon as a kind-of new Adam:
like Adam he falls into a deep sleep (Gen. 2.21-23)
and is then met by a woman when he awakes.
Except in Solomon’s case, it’s not Eve handing him forbidden fruit (Gen. 3.6),
it’s the lady Wisdom, the personification of God’s word in human form,
who we meet in other places in the Hebrew Bible.
She appears most notably in the book of Proverbs,
a wisdom text attributed to Solomon,
where she summons people to heed the wise words she speaks,
because in them is found the secret to a long and happy life.
And sure enough, Solomon’s request for the wisdom of discernment
unlocks for him not only the ability to govern Israel well,
but also all the blessings of health and wealth a king could desire.
Well, so far, so archetypical!
This story of Solomon’s inauguration to the kingship
has its parallels in other ancient Near Eastern stories
of kings whose have deities appearing to them in a dream
and commissioning them to their task. [1]
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
as the old proverb goes,
and so we come to the second part of our reading for today,
this disturbing story of one dead baby,
and another baby nearly being cut in half.
It’s in this story that Solomon’s inner wisdom
is put to the test in the real world of people’s lives,
and the question of whether he is fit to govern as a national leader
is demonstrated in the complex realities of difficult decisions.
In researching this sermon,
I discovered a passage from the second book of Kings
which seems to function as a parallel
to our story about the Judgment of Solomon.
And when I read it, I had one of those moments
where I found myself thinking:
‘I’m sure that wasn’t in there last time I looked!’
Listen to this story,
which is set a hundred or so years after the time of Solomon,
with the king of the now-divided Israel a man called Jehoram,
a descendent of the wise Solomon.
2 Kings 6:26-30
Now as the king of Israel was walking on the city wall,
a woman cried out to him, "Help, my lord king!"
27 He said, "No! Let the LORD help you. How can I help you?
From the threshing floor or from the wine press?"
28 But then the king asked her, "What is your complaint?"
She answered, "This woman said to me,
'Give up your son; we will eat him today,
and we will eat my son tomorrow.'
29 So we cooked my son and ate him.
The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son and we will eat him.'
But she has hidden her son."
30 When the king heard the words of the woman he tore his clothes.
Jehoram has no answer to this terrible situation,
in contrast to Solomon, whose brutally ruthless wisdom
enabled him to expose the hearts of the two women
who came to him with their argument
over whose son had died, and whose son had lived.
And I find myself here
wondering what wisdom really is?
Is wisdom threatening to cut a child in half?
I mean, we might argue that Solomon was so wise
that he knew he would not have to go through with the threat;
but that feels a bit like special pleading,
because if it was a bluff, it wouldn’t have worked.
A bit like the contemporary arguments around the nuclear deterrent,
you have to be willing to destroy everything,
for the possibility of not doing so to become viable.
Is this wisdom?
Threatening destruction to secure life?
I’m not sure really,
and find myself with some searching questions
that I’d love to be able to put to Solomon
about how he saw wisdom functioning in the political sphere.
Various great minds have tried to define wisdom.
From Oscar Wild’s adage that,
‘A fool knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’
to the great doctors of the church Augustine and Aquinas,
who sought to differentiate between
a mere rational understanding of facts,
and the deeper wisdom of seeing behind the facts
to the underlying cause of why things are the way they are.
You can think of this difference, between knowledge and wisdom,
as being like the difference between having
on the one hand, a mere knowledge of faith,
and on the other hand,
having the wisdom of love. [2]
And my question of Solomon’s famous judgment,
is where, in his threat to cut a child in half,
do we find the wisdom of love?
Sure, his public political gamble worked,
and like a good detective, he unlocked the truth of who the real mother was;
but is this the wisdom of love?
I think that the love in this story
is found in the heart of the mother of the child:
as she discovered that she was prepared to give up her claim on her baby
in order to preserve its life.
I want to suggest that whilst Solomon’s wisdom
brought him knowledge of the facts of the situation,
which was, of course, what he had asked for in his dream,
the real wisdom, the deep wisdom of love in this story,
is found in the heart of the true mother.
And to understand the real significance of this wisdom,
and how it can speak to us and our lives, and our world,
we have to delve a bit deeper
into the relationship between these two women.
Neither of them are named in the text,
which is not unusual for biblical stories about women,
particularly women who are of low social status.
And these two women were about as far down the social ladder
as it was possible for them to get.
The Bible describes them as prostitutes,
women for whom unmarried pregnancy was highly likely.
A tragic series of events
has created the context for the rivalry between these two,
with one mother desiring the child of another
to replace her own deceased offspring.
This is not a new story,
but neither is it purely an ancient one either,
and you don’t have to look very far online
to find stories of bereaved mothers abducting children. [3]
The mental stress of such a tragedy
can create a context in which someone might do something
that they would never normally consider.
So here we have two women,
both of them victims in multiple ways;
from the abuses of their profession,
to their experiences of grief and outrage.
And they find themselves before the king,
who is about to test his newly acquired superpower of wisdom.
And he commands a bloody sacrifice,
the killing of the living child.
And here I want us to stop for a moment,
and take a step back from the specifics of the story,
and to realise that this is happening all the time,
all around us, again and again and again.
This is the way the world works:
people are traumatised and victimised by violence,
people desire restitution and revenge,
they desire that which is not theirs, and they take it by force,
and we all tell ourselves that the solution to this spiralling conflict
is just one further definitive act of righteous violence.
This is how wars start,
not only actual wars between actual countries,
but also personal individualised wars between people in community.
We can see it happening in Ukraine,
it has been happening for decades in Palestine,
and in so many other countries around the world.
An experience of trauma and violence
gives birth to a desire for retaliation,
and the renewed violence and trauma
simply cycles the situation round to the next level.
Think about it, if you hit me in the face,
my strongest desire will be to hit you back.
In other words, to imitate you. [4]
But, in order to teach you a lesson,
I will hit you in the face that little bit harder,
which will make you hate me even more
and make you want to teach me a lesson too.
Likewise, if someone cuts you off in traffic,
the tendency is to want to do the same thing back,
but maybe a little bit worse.
In this way violence escalates.
When we feel hurt or insulted,
the tendency is to imitate the offensive behaviour in the other person,
but to add just that little bit more.
This cycle of violence can only stopped by someone refusing to imitate,
by someone turning the other cheek and not hitting back,
by someone renouncing and sacrificing their desire to retaliate
in the name of peace.
And so we come to the true mother of the child in our story,
who by giving up her child to the other woman,
enacted at her own cost a nonviolent end to their rivalry.
The bereaved mother had already accepted Solomon’s solution of bloody sacrifice,
with her own experience of grief blinding her to the possibility
that there could ever be a peaceable end to this story.
And how often is it the case
that in a situation of conflict,
one side is willing to destroy what exists
in order to get what they want,
or at least to ensure that their opponent doesn’t
And so, motivated by the wisdom of love,
the mother relinquished her claim to the object of the rivalry.
She sacrificed any hope of winning the argument for the sake of her child,
whereas the bereaved mother was willing to sacrifice the child
for the sake of resolving the rivalry.
Sometimes, and I’m sure some of you at least can relate to this,
winning a competition can start to feel like a matter of life and death.
From the outside, it is ridiculous.
And it is ridiculous.
But my imitating your desire to win,
strengthens your desire to win.
We each become the desired model for the other
in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.
This is why we have football hooliganism,
it’s why we have gang violence on our streets,
it’s why we have escalating conflict in Ukraine.
Too often we close ourselves off from the wisdom of love,
from the wisdom of giving up what we are trying to possess
so that in place of spiralling conflict we might find an abundance of life.
And so to return to the two women before king Solomon,
on the basis of the love shown by the child’s mother,
he publicly declares her to be the mother.
Rene Girard, who has written a lot on the spirals of violence that consume humans,
notes that ‘it does not matter who is the biological mother.
The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life
is in fact the mother.’
He goes on:
‘The first woman [was] willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry,
[and] sacrifice is [always] the foundation of rivalry
[as well as ] the solution to it.
[It was] the second woman [the child’s mother],
[who was] willing to sacrifice everything. [5]
And here, I think, we find ourselves making a leap,
into the example and teaching of Jesus.
Fundamental to the Christian story
is the concept that Christ is a sacrifice
who gave himself ‘for the life of the world.’
And just as Christ died so that humanity might abandon
the habit of violent sacrifice,
so the child’s mother sacrifices her own motherhood
so that the child may live.
She renounces that which is dearest to her, her own child,
in order that life may prevail over death,
peace over violence.
The mother in this story is the personification
of the wisdom of love,
and she offers us a model for understanding God’s love for humans,
as it is made known through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Too many people read into the crucifixion
a transactional understanding of sin,
whereby the only solution to human violent desires
is a God who metes out a corresponding punishment on the divine son.
This is the worldview of Solomon,
it is the ruthless logic of the dictator,
and it traps those already hurt and hurting
into further cycles of violent retribution.
But there is another way:
there is the wisdom of love;
by which the cross becomes the moment
when God relinquishes all claim on that which they love,
in order that human injustice can exhaust itself on the innocent,
and through that sacrifice discover a new and unexpected path to life.
So if you find yourself wondering what this morning’s disturbing story from 1 Kings
has to say to our world, and to our lives,
The question of what kind of person should lead a nation
is not a new one, it seems,
and as the UK embarks on its third Prime Minister in two months,
I wonder what you would put forward as the top priority
for a newly appointed national leader?
The famous political ‘honeymoon period’,
is often an opportunity for a newly appointed leader
to enact decisions that will soon be closed to them;
and they must use it wisely,
with the penalties for getting it wrong severe
as Liz Truss and her team quickly discovered.
So what would you do, if you were handed the golden ticket?
What would you do with your political honeymoon period?
This was the question that God put to Solomon one night,
as he lay dreaming of his future reign,
in the early days of his ascension to the Kingship of Israel.
He could have chosen wealth, health, and a long life,
he could have chosen defeat for his enemies,
but instead he chose wisdom.
Except, well, … he didn’t actually ask for ‘wisdom’
he asked for ‘an understanding mind
able to discern between good and evil’
and he asked for this because he felt inadequate
to the task of governing the people.
But did you notice the resonance with another biblical narrative here?
We’ve heard this phrase ‘discerning between good and evil’ before…
If you cast your mind back to the beginning of Genesis,
you will remember that the tree in the garden of Eden,
that Adam and Eve are instructed to avoid,
is the tree whose fruit gives ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ (Gen. 2.17).
Solomon wants as a gift what Adam and Eve were denied,
but which they took anyway.
And I think we’re invited to think here of Solomon as a kind-of new Adam:
like Adam he falls into a deep sleep (Gen. 2.21-23)
and is then met by a woman when he awakes.
Except in Solomon’s case, it’s not Eve handing him forbidden fruit (Gen. 3.6),
it’s the lady Wisdom, the personification of God’s word in human form,
who we meet in other places in the Hebrew Bible.
She appears most notably in the book of Proverbs,
a wisdom text attributed to Solomon,
where she summons people to heed the wise words she speaks,
because in them is found the secret to a long and happy life.
And sure enough, Solomon’s request for the wisdom of discernment
unlocks for him not only the ability to govern Israel well,
but also all the blessings of health and wealth a king could desire.
Well, so far, so archetypical!
This story of Solomon’s inauguration to the kingship
has its parallels in other ancient Near Eastern stories
of kings whose have deities appearing to them in a dream
and commissioning them to their task. [1]
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating,
as the old proverb goes,
and so we come to the second part of our reading for today,
this disturbing story of one dead baby,
and another baby nearly being cut in half.
It’s in this story that Solomon’s inner wisdom
is put to the test in the real world of people’s lives,
and the question of whether he is fit to govern as a national leader
is demonstrated in the complex realities of difficult decisions.
In researching this sermon,
I discovered a passage from the second book of Kings
which seems to function as a parallel
to our story about the Judgment of Solomon.
And when I read it, I had one of those moments
where I found myself thinking:
‘I’m sure that wasn’t in there last time I looked!’
Listen to this story,
which is set a hundred or so years after the time of Solomon,
with the king of the now-divided Israel a man called Jehoram,
a descendent of the wise Solomon.
2 Kings 6:26-30
Now as the king of Israel was walking on the city wall,
a woman cried out to him, "Help, my lord king!"
27 He said, "No! Let the LORD help you. How can I help you?
From the threshing floor or from the wine press?"
28 But then the king asked her, "What is your complaint?"
She answered, "This woman said to me,
'Give up your son; we will eat him today,
and we will eat my son tomorrow.'
29 So we cooked my son and ate him.
The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son and we will eat him.'
But she has hidden her son."
30 When the king heard the words of the woman he tore his clothes.
Jehoram has no answer to this terrible situation,
in contrast to Solomon, whose brutally ruthless wisdom
enabled him to expose the hearts of the two women
who came to him with their argument
over whose son had died, and whose son had lived.
And I find myself here
wondering what wisdom really is?
Is wisdom threatening to cut a child in half?
I mean, we might argue that Solomon was so wise
that he knew he would not have to go through with the threat;
but that feels a bit like special pleading,
because if it was a bluff, it wouldn’t have worked.
A bit like the contemporary arguments around the nuclear deterrent,
you have to be willing to destroy everything,
for the possibility of not doing so to become viable.
Is this wisdom?
Threatening destruction to secure life?
I’m not sure really,
and find myself with some searching questions
that I’d love to be able to put to Solomon
about how he saw wisdom functioning in the political sphere.
Various great minds have tried to define wisdom.
From Oscar Wild’s adage that,
‘A fool knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’
to the great doctors of the church Augustine and Aquinas,
who sought to differentiate between
a mere rational understanding of facts,
and the deeper wisdom of seeing behind the facts
to the underlying cause of why things are the way they are.
You can think of this difference, between knowledge and wisdom,
as being like the difference between having
on the one hand, a mere knowledge of faith,
and on the other hand,
having the wisdom of love. [2]
And my question of Solomon’s famous judgment,
is where, in his threat to cut a child in half,
do we find the wisdom of love?
Sure, his public political gamble worked,
and like a good detective, he unlocked the truth of who the real mother was;
but is this the wisdom of love?
I think that the love in this story
is found in the heart of the mother of the child:
as she discovered that she was prepared to give up her claim on her baby
in order to preserve its life.
I want to suggest that whilst Solomon’s wisdom
brought him knowledge of the facts of the situation,
which was, of course, what he had asked for in his dream,
the real wisdom, the deep wisdom of love in this story,
is found in the heart of the true mother.
And to understand the real significance of this wisdom,
and how it can speak to us and our lives, and our world,
we have to delve a bit deeper
into the relationship between these two women.
Neither of them are named in the text,
which is not unusual for biblical stories about women,
particularly women who are of low social status.
And these two women were about as far down the social ladder
as it was possible for them to get.
The Bible describes them as prostitutes,
women for whom unmarried pregnancy was highly likely.
A tragic series of events
has created the context for the rivalry between these two,
with one mother desiring the child of another
to replace her own deceased offspring.
This is not a new story,
but neither is it purely an ancient one either,
and you don’t have to look very far online
to find stories of bereaved mothers abducting children. [3]
The mental stress of such a tragedy
can create a context in which someone might do something
that they would never normally consider.
So here we have two women,
both of them victims in multiple ways;
from the abuses of their profession,
to their experiences of grief and outrage.
And they find themselves before the king,
who is about to test his newly acquired superpower of wisdom.
And he commands a bloody sacrifice,
the killing of the living child.
And here I want us to stop for a moment,
and take a step back from the specifics of the story,
and to realise that this is happening all the time,
all around us, again and again and again.
This is the way the world works:
people are traumatised and victimised by violence,
people desire restitution and revenge,
they desire that which is not theirs, and they take it by force,
and we all tell ourselves that the solution to this spiralling conflict
is just one further definitive act of righteous violence.
This is how wars start,
not only actual wars between actual countries,
but also personal individualised wars between people in community.
We can see it happening in Ukraine,
it has been happening for decades in Palestine,
and in so many other countries around the world.
An experience of trauma and violence
gives birth to a desire for retaliation,
and the renewed violence and trauma
simply cycles the situation round to the next level.
Think about it, if you hit me in the face,
my strongest desire will be to hit you back.
In other words, to imitate you. [4]
But, in order to teach you a lesson,
I will hit you in the face that little bit harder,
which will make you hate me even more
and make you want to teach me a lesson too.
Likewise, if someone cuts you off in traffic,
the tendency is to want to do the same thing back,
but maybe a little bit worse.
In this way violence escalates.
When we feel hurt or insulted,
the tendency is to imitate the offensive behaviour in the other person,
but to add just that little bit more.
This cycle of violence can only stopped by someone refusing to imitate,
by someone turning the other cheek and not hitting back,
by someone renouncing and sacrificing their desire to retaliate
in the name of peace.
And so we come to the true mother of the child in our story,
who by giving up her child to the other woman,
enacted at her own cost a nonviolent end to their rivalry.
The bereaved mother had already accepted Solomon’s solution of bloody sacrifice,
with her own experience of grief blinding her to the possibility
that there could ever be a peaceable end to this story.
And how often is it the case
that in a situation of conflict,
one side is willing to destroy what exists
in order to get what they want,
or at least to ensure that their opponent doesn’t
And so, motivated by the wisdom of love,
the mother relinquished her claim to the object of the rivalry.
She sacrificed any hope of winning the argument for the sake of her child,
whereas the bereaved mother was willing to sacrifice the child
for the sake of resolving the rivalry.
Sometimes, and I’m sure some of you at least can relate to this,
winning a competition can start to feel like a matter of life and death.
From the outside, it is ridiculous.
And it is ridiculous.
But my imitating your desire to win,
strengthens your desire to win.
We each become the desired model for the other
in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.
This is why we have football hooliganism,
it’s why we have gang violence on our streets,
it’s why we have escalating conflict in Ukraine.
Too often we close ourselves off from the wisdom of love,
from the wisdom of giving up what we are trying to possess
so that in place of spiralling conflict we might find an abundance of life.
And so to return to the two women before king Solomon,
on the basis of the love shown by the child’s mother,
he publicly declares her to be the mother.
Rene Girard, who has written a lot on the spirals of violence that consume humans,
notes that ‘it does not matter who is the biological mother.
The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life
is in fact the mother.’
He goes on:
‘The first woman [was] willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry,
[and] sacrifice is [always] the foundation of rivalry
[as well as ] the solution to it.
[It was] the second woman [the child’s mother],
[who was] willing to sacrifice everything. [5]
And here, I think, we find ourselves making a leap,
into the example and teaching of Jesus.
Fundamental to the Christian story
is the concept that Christ is a sacrifice
who gave himself ‘for the life of the world.’
And just as Christ died so that humanity might abandon
the habit of violent sacrifice,
so the child’s mother sacrifices her own motherhood
so that the child may live.
She renounces that which is dearest to her, her own child,
in order that life may prevail over death,
peace over violence.
The mother in this story is the personification
of the wisdom of love,
and she offers us a model for understanding God’s love for humans,
as it is made known through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Too many people read into the crucifixion
a transactional understanding of sin,
whereby the only solution to human violent desires
is a God who metes out a corresponding punishment on the divine son.
This is the worldview of Solomon,
it is the ruthless logic of the dictator,
and it traps those already hurt and hurting
into further cycles of violent retribution.
But there is another way:
there is the wisdom of love;
by which the cross becomes the moment
when God relinquishes all claim on that which they love,
in order that human injustice can exhaust itself on the innocent,
and through that sacrifice discover a new and unexpected path to life.
So if you find yourself wondering what this morning’s disturbing story from 1 Kings
has to say to our world, and to our lives,
I suggest it is this:
there is always another way,
there is always a path to be chosen
that avoids perpetuating the cycles of victimhood and violence;
there is a deeper wisdom at work in the world,
and it is the wisdom of love;
and we are each of us invited to discover its call and its reality
in the decisions we take in our lives,
as we take the decisive step away from violence,
as the knowledge of our faith
becomes the deeper wisdom of love.
[1] Such as the Sphinx Steele of Thutmose IV of Egypt.
[2] Charry, 1993. 94.
[3] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/mothers-worst-nightmare-baby-stolen-1712026
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15593513/heartbroken-mum-nurse-hospital/
[4] This next section is from https://voegelinview.com/two-kinds-of-sacrifice-rene-girards-analysis-of-scapegoating/
[5] https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/girard-on-christs-death/
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