Eli: A priest in need of the cross

Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1-21

            There are worse fates in life than to be born a pastor’s kid, but then again there are many better fates, too. I’m not one—a pastor’s kid—but I’ve seen them firsthand, and since I’m kind of going to have one myself soon I’ve been thinking about this some lately. Pastor’s kids, by no fault of their own, are held to an entirely different standards from other children; this is true of police kids and teacher’s kids, too, to different degrees. Because of this, these kids either rise up to that standard to become good, but often sheltered, children; or they fail to rise up to that standard and go the other way, doing pretty much anything they can to distance themselves from that responsibility unfairly entrusted to them.

            This is not a new problem. Eli, the priest in today’s scripture, has two of the worst pastor’s kids you can imagine. The two of them were doing the B.C. equivalent of spray painting the sanctuary, smoking behind the bleachers, and stealing mom and dad’s car. They went the “other” way, and for it Eli and his family are cursed.

This is basically a parent’s worst nightmare.

            And for Eli that’s basically the end of the story. History now remembers him as the end of the priestly leaders who heralds the beginning of the era of the prophets. Chapter 3 begins with those words: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread,” but that was about to change, and in days when the word of the Lord is common priests are less important than prophets. Samuel is that prophet who fits the mold of the unexpected hero that God so often chooses from the least and the littlest. But poor Eli is not about to be let off gently.

            Following Samuel’s three-fold call, Eli questions the boy about what God had to tell him. Already we have learned that he is wise enough to realize that the fact that Samuel is hearing voices may have something to do with God and not just that he’s going crazy. But Samuel is rightfully reticent about sharing what God has told him. If God tells you that your pastor is cursed on account of his terrible children I would urge you, too, to think twice about whether that’s a wise thing to share. Still, Samuel does it; he tells Eli the whole story—how God is going to punish him and his family for the deeds of his sons—and in-so-doing Samuel demonstrates his faithfulness to the prophetic call.

            But Eli also demonstrates his faithfulness as well. This had to be a terrible thing to hear—again, every parent’s worst nightmare. It’s not that Eli didn’t already know it; in many ways he had been punished already—the sleepless nights, the regrets and frustrations. You can imagine that Eli may be so close to giving up that God’s punishment seems only a natural end to his parenting failures. Many parents who have been down that dark hole know the kind of resignation that comes from being unable to make a difference in the way you feel you should, which makes Eli’s faithfulness in his response all the more startling: “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.”

            I suppose we can read this only as resignation—many commentaries suggest as much—but Eli’s ability to discern God at work suggests something more. This is a man who values faithfulness even to his own death. This is the strange paradox of Eli, which demonstrates a remarkably human capacity that all of us share to compartmentalize our lives. Eli fulfilled his duties as a priest to a “t”. He discerned God’s call; he directed Samuel in his upbringing, and he even submitted to God’s will, but Eli was unquestionably a failure. He lost everything that mattered: the ark of the covenant, his family, and eventually his life.

            The story of Eli is a story of a person who could not successfully compartmentalize his life. A person cannot be a success as a priest and a failure as a father, just as a person cannot be a success as a coach and a failure as a husband. God does not judge our lives based on the little compartments we create. We all have many vocations to which we are called—among those are parenthood and marriage and work and service—but none of those can function as it should if one part of the whole is diseased. No matter how successful you are at making money, your life will feel like a disaster if you are fighting depression or if you are in a troubled marriage or if your kids are out stealing cars. We all know this; even if we sometimes try to overcompensate in one area to make up for others.

            It never works. It didn’t matter how good a priest Eli was. Everything went wrong because of two sons who destroyed everything that he held dear, sons who Eli himself could no longer control. Which brings us to the meatier bad news of the story: You cannot control some of the things that will make you a success or a failure—no matter how hard you try. I like to be in control; I like to think that I can handle most things in life; but the truth is that there are certain things outside of my control that can pain me—in fact, it is often those things that cause the deepest hurt. And when something goes wrong it will always be there; no matter how much we wish it weren’t. We like to pretend otherwise, but there is no going back. A bad deed cannot be undone. No amount of band-aids can make it so it never happened. Time does not allow us to fix our misdeeds; they’re back there behind us, condemning us forever, and there’s no Delorean Time Machine to make it otherwise. Sorry.

            The hard underside to that reality of sin also means we have a duty of truth-telling as members of the Christian church. In these cases where sin has taken hold of our past, it is our duty as the body of Christ to rebuke the platitudes that so often follow difficult situations, because sometimes it just doesn’t work out in the end. The promise we cling to as Christians has very little to do with the phrase: “It’ll all work out in the end,” which is good, because it doesn’t take much living in the real world to see that those words mean nothing. “It’ll all work out in the end” is a copout for a cancer patient. “It’ll all work out in the end” is a terrible thing to tell somebody whose spouse or child dies.

“It’ll all work out in the end” at best neglects scripture; at worst it is opposed to it; because the end of all roads is the cross and the cross abhors platitudes. Yes, the cross defeated death and so made right all the powers of sin that condemn us, but don’t think for a moment that that can be summed up in a simple platitude for a person facing a senseless struggle. Can you imagine the hypocrisy of looking at Jesus dying on the cross and saying, “It’ll all work out in the end”? Even if it’s true it’s a stupid thing to say. The cross abhors platitudes, but it also abhors depressing anecdotes of the purposeless of creation. That’s the other side of the Eli story; the side of helpless resignation. The cross sucks in all purpose like a Christ-shaped black hole. Purposelessness and uselessness and depression and eternal regrets, failures to be the husband or wife, father or mother that you wanted to be, failures to be a decent human being; all of them are absorbed by the cross. That’s the promise we cling to as Christians; not that we will be good people or good parents or that it will work out in the end. Shoot, we hope and pray that we are and we pray that it will, but the promise we have is not that we will parent our children in adequate ways or that we won’t fail, like Eli, to leave any kind of good, lasting impression on this earth. We might not.

            But all of that is absorbed by the cross, so that nothing—life nor death, good parenting or bad, a successful life or a failure—nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This is what we proclaim. This is what we believe. Sometimes we need characters who just get the snot beaten out of them by life to remind us why this matters so much, because—like it or not—there will be days when you are Eli or Job or David or countless other biblical heroes who have fallen under a curse. You will feel like a failure. Frankly, you will be a failure, but God can work with failures. In fact, God uses failures; it’s the ones who claim success that can’t be helped.

            I imagine Eli’s pain and sorrow in those latter years of his life and I can see why resignation is tempting. He wasn’t blameless; he was far from perfect; but he was human. We don’t like to read about normal, flawed humans suffering disastrous fates, because it hits too close to home; we don’t want to imagine that happening to us or somebody that we love. But we can either wish it wasn’t so, ignore the reality of suffering in this world, and pretend we live in a world where none of that exists, or we can be glad we have stories that are true to the purposelessness we sometimes experience on this earth. We might not like it, but we didn’t like Jesus much either. So we put him on a cross. And that act of terrible selfishness and fear saved us all.

            It’s a strange thing—this Christian faith. It’s a strange road we walk. But, man, is it a human one; man, is it one that is honest about the deprave depths of humanity. Jesus came to die for you and me because you and I deserve the same fate as Eli, and maybe in this life we’ll get it. Thankfully, our promise is bigger than this life. You will die in sin and rise a new creation. That’s a promise both terrible and wonderful; it’s Eli’s promise; it’s your promise. It’s the only promise that matters.