Solomon's Wisdom

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 1 November 2026

1 Kings 3.4–28
Matthew 6.9–10
 
If you could have one wish –
          just one –
          what would it be?
 
Children go for a pony
          or a million pounds.
Adults get cagier,
          and try to wish for more wishes.
 
But underneath the game is a serious question:
          what would we really ask for,
          if we could have anything at all?
 
Solomon gets asked that question by God.
          'Ask what I should give you.'
It comes in a dream at Gibeon.
 
He doesn't ask for wealth,
          or long life,
          or the life of his enemies.
 
He calls himself a little child
          who doesn't know how to go out or come in,
and he asks for an understanding mind –
          or, as the older translations put it more literally,
          a listening heart –
to govern God's people
          and to tell good from evil.
 
It's a lovely answer.
          But it's worth noticing where it comes in the story.
 
The chapter before this one isn't lovely at all.
          David dies,
          and Solomon's first acts as king are a series of killings.
 
His older brother Adonijah,
          who had a decent claim to the throne,
          is executed.
Joab, David's old general,
          is cut down while he's clinging to the altar.
Shimei is killed on a technicality.
 
And the chapter closes:
          so the kingdom was established in the hand of Solomon (1 Kings 2.46).
 
Then chapter three opens with a marriage alliance with Pharaoh –
          the king of Egypt,
          the empire Israel's whole story began by escaping.
 
So when Solomon tells God
          he hasn't asked for the life of his enemies,
          there's an irony in it.
He doesn't need to ask.
          He's already taken them.
 
None of us comes to God from a clean place,
          and God meets Solomon there anyway.
 
The dream comes to a man
          who's made himself secure by the sword,
and God offers him another way to rule:
          not by the sword,
          but by listening.
 
 
Then, as if to test whether the gift has taken,
          the story hands him a case.
 
Two women come and stand before the king.
          The text calls them prostitutes.
They aren't named,
          and they have no one to speak for them.
 
One of them tells the story.
          We live in the same house,
          just the two of us.
I had a baby,
          and three days later she had one.
In the night her son died,
          because she lay on him.
 
She got up at midnight
          and took my son from beside me while I slept,
          and laid her dead son at my breast.
 
In the morning I went to feed my child
          and he was dead –
but when I looked at him in the light,
          he wasn't the son I'd borne.
 
And the other woman says,
          no –
          the living one is mine,
          and the dead one is yours.
And they go back and forth in front of the king.
 
This isn't a riddle.
          It's poverty and exhaustion and grief,
          and a shared bed in a crowded room.
 
One of these women has woken to find her baby dead
          and is out of her mind with it.
The other has had her child taken from her side.
 
There are no villains in a house like that –
          only people the world has left
          with nothing but each other to fight over.
 
And notice that they get in –
          the last people we'd expect to stand before a king –
          and he hears them out.
 
Then he does something careful.
          He says their claims back to them:
this one says,
          'The living son is mine and the dead one is yours',
and that one says,
          'No, your son is the dead one and mine is the living.'
 
That's what a listening heart sounds like:
          it gives back what it's heard.
 
 
And then the king says,
          'Bring me a sword.'
 
Imagine standing in that court.
          The young king who came to the throne over his brother's body
          has called for a weapon,
and the thing he means to use it on
          is a baby.
 
'Divide the living boy in two;
          give half to one,
          and half to the other.'
 
We've turned this into a figure of speech.
          'Splitting the baby' is what we call it
          when a negotiation ends
          with each side getting half of what it wanted.
 
But in the story it isn't a compromise.
          It's the logic of every sword.
 
When two claims collide
          and nobody can tell who's right,
make it equal
          by destroying the thing they both want.
 
Each gets half.
          Nobody gets anything.
 
Whether Solomon ever meant it,
          the text doesn't say.
What it tells us is what happens next.
 
 
One of the women cries out.
          The text says her compassion for her son burned within her –
          and the word for compassion there is related to the word for womb,
so this is a love felt in the body.
 
'Please, my lord, give her the living boy;
          certainly don't kill him!'
And the other says,
          'It shall be neither mine nor yours;
          divide it.'
 
There it is.
          One woman would rather lose the child than see him die.
          The other would rather the child die than lose.
 
That second voice is rivalry in its purest form:
          if I can't have it,
          neither will you.
 
René Girard saw in this story
          two kinds of sacrifice side by side.
One woman is ready to sacrifice the child
          in order to win.
The other is ready to sacrifice her own claim –
          her own heart –
          so that the child can live.
 
Girard said she was as perfect a picture of Christ
          as could be imagined.
A prostitute,
          in a story told to make a king look good.
 
And here's something easy to miss.
          We're never told which woman gave birth to that boy,
          and the king doesn't need to know.
 
'Give the first woman the living boy,' he says.
          'Don't kill him.
          She is his mother.'
 
She's his mother
          because she's the one who'd let him go
          to keep him alive.
 
Motherhood, in this story,
          isn't settled by biology or by possession.
It's recognised in love
          that is willing to lose.
 
That's good news for those of us
          who've parented children we didn't bear,
          or loved children we couldn't keep,
          or been parented by people who weren't our biological parents.
 
So Solomon's wisdom wasn't the trick with the sword –
          the oldest tool kings have.
It was in recognising self-giving love
          when it stood in front of him,
and putting the whole weight of the throne behind it.
 
A listening heart heard the difference
          between the cry that says 'let him live'
          and the cry that says 'divide it',
and gave the child to the first.
 
 
That's what we ask of our courts,
          and it's a live question this autumn.
 
The Courts and Tribunals Bill
          passed its third reading in the Commons on 13 October
          and has gone to the Lords.
 
Most of the headlines have been about juries,
          but another clause sits right alongside this story.
 
It removes from the Children Act
          the presumption that a parent's involvement in a child's life
          is for the child's good.
 
It was meant to protect children's relationships with both parents,
          but survivors of domestic abuse have shown
          how it was also used by abusive parents to keep their hold –
          on children,
          and through them on former partners.
 
The law is catching up with what this story already knew:
          a claim on a child isn't the same as love for a child,
and when the two pull apart,
          the child's life comes first.
 
Some of us know this not from the papers
          but from our own lives –
          from family courts,
          from contact arrangements,
          from fights over children that seemed to go on for ever.
 
Nobody's pain should be turned into an illustration.
          But this ancient story does insist on one thing:
God isn't on the side of whoever has the strongest claim.
          God is on the side of the child,
          and of the one who loves the child enough to let go.
 
 
The story of Solomon doesn't end there.
          Read on through 1 Kings
          and the listening heart slowly turns into something else.
 
The temple is built with forced labour –
          thirty thousand men conscripted from across Israel (5.13).
 
Silver becomes as common in Jerusalem as stones,
          horses and chariots are imported from Egypt,
          and there are seven hundred wives (10.27–29; 11.3).
 
Deuteronomy had warned that a king mustn't multiply horses,
          or wives,
          or silver and gold (17.16–17),
and Solomon manages all three.
 
The young man who asked for a heart to hear his people
          ends up building an empire on their backs.
 
After his death they come to his son and say,
          your father made our yoke heavy (12.4),
and the kingdom splits in two.
 
The sword that was put down in chapter three
          comes back in the end.
 
Wisdom asked for at the beginning
          isn't the same as wisdom kept.
Power has a way of turning a listening heart deaf.
 
 
Which may be why,
          when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray,
          he doesn't teach them Solomon's prayer.
 
Matthew's Gospel has its eye on Solomon:
          a few verses later Jesus says
          that Solomon in all his glory
          wasn't clothed like the wild lilies (6.29).
 
And the prayer he gives us
          begins a long way from the throne room:
'Our Father in heaven,
          hallowed be your name.
          Your kingdom come.
          Your will be done,
          on earth as it is in heaven.'
 
Here at Bloomsbury,
          when we pray this prayer together,
          we don't usually begin with 'Our Father'.
We say 'Loving God in heaven'.
 
We've done that for the best part of a decade,
          because we want the words we use for God,
          and for one another,
either to step beyond gender
          or to use it evenly.
 
Some of us find that a relief.
          For others, 'Father' is the word
          that has carried their faith for a lifetime,
and setting it aside
          can feel like losing something close.
 
Both of those are true in this room,
          and this isn't a contest that one side has to win.
 
Solomon's court may help us here.
          The woman the king called mother
          wasn't recognised by her claim,
          or by biology.
She was recognised by a love
          that would let go rather than see the child harmed.
 
When Jesus teaches us to call God 'Father',
          that's the kind of parent he has in mind:
not ownership or control,
          but care that gives itself away.
 
For some of us 'Father' says that perfectly.
          For others,
          because of the fathers we've had
          or the ways the word has been used,
it doesn't,
          and 'Loving God' says what Jesus meant more clearly.
 
Either way we're praying to the same God,
          the one we've just sung about,
          mother and father of us all,
who's always more than any name we bring.
 
Your name, not ours.
          Your kingdom, not ours.
          Your will, not ours.
The prayer begins by letting go of our claim.
 
It's the prayer of the woman in Solomon's court
          rather than the prayer of the king:
give it to her,
          only let the child live.
 
And it's prayed together.
          Whichever words we begin with,
          the prayer is plural all the way through –
give us,
          forgive us,
          lead us.
 
We aren't rivals at this prayer.
          Whoever stands next to us
          has exactly the same claim on God as we do,
which is no claim at all,
          and every right to be there.
 
 
Solomon's kingdom was established by the sword.
          The kingdom Jesus teaches us to pray for
          comes another way.
 
At the end of Matthew's Gospel,
          Jesus stands before a different court.
The governor's wife sends word
          that she's suffered much in a dream
          because of this innocent man.
 
Solomon listened to his dream;
          Pilate doesn't listen to hers.
 
He washes his hands in front of the crowd
          and hands over to the sword of empire
          the one person in the room
          who has claimed nothing for himself.
 
He's the child under the sword,
          and he's the love that lets go.
 
And on the third day
          God gives the verdict Solomon gave:
give him back,
          alive.
 
The resurrection is God's judgment
          on the logic of the sword.
The living one isn't divided.
 
 
Which brings us to this table.
          In a few moments we'll break bread,
          and that breaking is nothing like the sword in Solomon's court.
 
The sword divides to settle a rivalry:
          half to you,
          half to me,
          and nothing for anyone.
 
Bread is broken so that it can be shared,
          and the more it's broken
          the further it goes.
 
At this table nobody has a better claim than anybody else.
          We don't come because we've won.
 
We come empty-handed,
          like Solomon in his dream,
          like the woman who gave her claim away,
and what we receive isn't half of anything.
          It's the whole of Christ,
          given to each of us
          and to all of us at once.
 
So we don't come here as rivals,
          and we don't have to establish anything by our own hand.
 
The wisdom we asked for at the start of this service
          is a listening heart,
          given rather than earned –
given here,
          in bread broken and a cup poured out,
by the God whose name we hallow
          and whose kingdom is already breaking in among us.
 
The sword has been put down.
          The living one is not divided.
 
And he's been given to us –
          to all of us,
          together,
          and whole.
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