The cry of the people to Samuel was ‘Give us a king like other nations have!’ That cry was a blasphemous denial of the Kingship of God, and a faithless denial of God’s choice of this people for his own. [Exodus 6.7; Deuteronomy 4.8] Samuel went so far as to declare the request ‘a very wicked thing.’ [I Samuel 12.17]

Nevertheless, Israel as a confederation of tribes, each with its own leadership, was no match for the strength of the nations and empires that surrounded it. The word monarch literally means ‘one ruler.’ A king is a unifying force, drawing the hearts and minds of the people together by drawing them to himself. Though the history of the monarchy in Israel will prove a disaster (and the books of the Kings appear to have been written by someone whose outlook was hostile to the monarchy) nonetheless it is presented as a virtual inevitability, a necessary stage in the development of God’s chosen people as a nation.

God’s condemnation of the house of Eli [I Samuel 3.12-14] is enacted in a dramatic way as an emboldened Philistine army defeated Israel in a kind of blitzkrieg and captured the Ark as well. The two sons of Eli died, and shortly afterwards the 98-year-old Eli himself breathed his last. [4.18] Almost immediately the wife of Phinehas underwent premature labour and gave birth to a son. She died in childbirth, naming her son Ichabod: ‘Where is the glory?’ [4.19-22]

The prophet Isaiah [43.7] declared that God created humanity for his glory; millennia later
the Bishop of Lyon, St Irenaeus, in the 2^nd Century of our era, exuberantly declared that ‘the Glory of God is a human being fully alive.’ The glory of God is his splendour, his radiance; at once it attracts us and astounds us; it makes us want to come near him and at the same time it repels us from his pervasive holiness.

To be fully alive, Jesus reminds us, necessitates first our death [Luke 9.24]—death to our self-centredness, death to our preference for the appetites of the flesh instead of our true hunger for God himself. The glory of God departs from us whenever we choose to be less than God made us to be. The glory of God shines out from our lives whenever like Christ Jesus himself [Hebrews 1.3] we offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, as living sacrifices. [Romans 12.1-2] Pontius Pilate himself unwittingly declared Jesus to be ‘the real man’ [John 19.5]: the truest exemplar of God’s own will and purpose, the radiance of God’s own glory.

Samuel’s call to particular service by a Voice calling him in the night has about it the aura of a script from The Twilight Zone. (The first-century Jewish historian Josephus said that this took place when Samuel was 11 years old.) The text contrasts the faithful boy, still at his prayers late at night, with the indolence and corruption of the Temple priesthood. Nothing they do can ever amount to anything [3.14]; by contrast ‘no word of Samuel’s will fall to the ground.’ [cf Isaiah 55.11]

Samuel’s response is portrayed as entirely naïve; as yet ‘he had no knowledge of the lord.’ To know the lord is less an accomplishment of the intellect than it is a disposition of the will; to use our common dichotomy, it is an act of the heart, not of the head. For the prophets, a common theme is the desire God has for our knowledge (Da’at) of him rather than for the sacrifices of the Temple. [Hosea 6.6] Samuel had been given over by his mother to a life of sacrifice [I Samuel 1.27-28] but God had even larger and better things in store for him.

The prayer of Hannah, Samuel’s mother, for a son is wonderfully dramatic. The aged (and useless [2.27-36]) high priest Eli interpreted her passionate pleadings with the lord as a drunken idiolect; she shows that she is far better attuned to hear the lord when she names her son the answer to her prayers: ‘the asked-for of the lord.’ (The Hebrew verb sha’al means to ask; strikingly, another form of this same word becomes the name Saul, the first king of Israel, anointed by Samuel.)

Hannah’s song of thanksgiving at the birth of her son [2.1-10], which we recite instead of a Psalm after the first reading at today’s mass, bears much similarity to the Magnificat, the rejoicing song of the Blessed Virgin Mary [Luke 1.46-55] Both of them understand themselves as ‘poor’ women raised to a place of honour, that is, everlasting joy in the presence of the lord who is honoured by their faithful lives.

The 54 chapters of the two books called Samuel continue the history of Israel after the book of Judges. It begins with the story of the birth of Samuel, who is consecrated as a prophet even before he is born, and continues long after Samuel’s death until nearly the end of King David’s reign. It is impossible to say who the author of this lengthy work was.

The sons of the high priest Eli, Hophni and Phineas, are candidly dismissed as ‘scoundrels who cared nothing for the lord.’ [2.12] Like the book of Judges with its repeated refrain that ‘there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased’ [Judges 21.25] the books of Samuel from the first set out the necessity for the establishment of monarchy in Israel. The judges could not keep the nation true to the Torah, the gracious ‘teaching’ of the lord; neither could the priests. Monarchy, though, wasn’t an inevitable development; Samuel himself expressed extreme reluctance about it [I Samuel 8.7-9] and Moses was said to have prophesied darkly about the likely misdeeds of a future king. [Deuteronomy 18.14-20; 28.36-37]

Samuel (who lived in the 11^th Century Before Christ), therefore, is a transitional figure: the last of the judges, and the one who would anoint the first two of Israel’s kings. According to the Chronicler [I Chronicles 6.33], Elkanah his father was a Levite (that is, of the hereditary priestly line), though that isn’t mentioned in I Samuel. Like many others, Samuel’s birth is presented as the lord’s gracious act in the life of a barren woman. [cf Luke 1.7]

3 January 1 John 2:29-3:6; Psalm 97(98):1,3-6; John 1:29-34

As we continue through the Christmas Season, let us continue to focus on the First Letter of St John which is given in almost its entirety in this time. Every word in scripture is important - today, the one word that shouts out is 'children'. John reminds us in a striking manner that we are God's children reinforced by "for that is what we are".

This relationship, between child and Father, is very strong. The bond, in the trinity, between Jesus and Father is so strong that whenever the son is honoured, so to is the Father, whoever knows the Son, Knows the Father who sent him (Luke 10:22 and John 14:9 for examples).

We are human and therefore not yet perfected - as we sin. We are reminded that Jesus appeared in order to abolish sin, and that our 'adoption' as God's heirs will complete this process for us all (Romans 8:23). Only then will we truly know the Father, in the way that Jesus does, yet by pondering on the relationship between the two, we may come closer to understanding what that might mean for us.