Friday, July 12, 2024 | Trey Comstock
What is David thinking? I don’t mean in the way that Michal’s despising heart does of, “Oh my God, what an embarrassment! What could possibility be on this mind?” Rather, to interpret this text effectively, one must decide David’s core motivation for dancing around in a linen ephod alongside the rest of the nation. Why does it do it? What audience does he have in mind? Does he dance with abandon so that the people may observe a demonstration of his faithfulness? Or, does he get so caught up in honoring God that nothing else, certainly not kingly reserve and graces, matter much to him?
A lot of living faithfully boils down to a question of motivation – not specific actions. As I talk and write about often, humans want the black and white rules to govern our action. We want a checklist of approved/encouraged actions and a list of banned ones, but as God knows your innermost being, doing the right action for wrong reason still constitutes a problem. Jesus deals with this directly in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. One commits adultery or murder simply by having the motivation even if one doesn’t act, and God, unlike your spouse or the person who cut you off in traffic, knows the full contents of your brain and lower centers.
This gets particularly fraught when dealing with public displays of religiosity and virtue.
‘Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
‘So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:1-6 NRSV)
Don’t give so that the public can observe it and think well of you. If you want to pray in public to gain admiration, then, you earn your reward merely from an earthly audience. We see Jesus pray in front of others and take part in public religious ceremonies, so we can embrace this as hyperbole with a clear point. In your devotion to God and your acts of good, keep God as the primary audience. As soon as the desire for observation and credit seeps in, we lose the thread. Coming directly from the Word of God made flesh, motivation, not merely action, matters.
In light of this, I choose to read this scene of David worshipping with abandon in his underwear as an illustration of his fundamental heart for God. As a king and a human, David lives a far from perfect existence, but the prophet Samuel, speaking on behalf of God to King Saul, who also made a legion of mistakes, describes a fundamental difference between Saul and David.
Samuel said to Saul, ‘You have done foolishly; you have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which he commanded you. The Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel for ever, but now your kingdom will not continue; the Lord has sought out a man after his own heart; and the Lord has appointed him to be ruler over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.’ (1 Samuel 13:13-14 NRSV)
All knowing God, peering deep into both men, recognizes something different and important about David. Neither man reach perfection, but David is a man after God’s own heart. Ecstatic liturgical performance fits with this view of David’s faith and motivation. In that moment, as the Ark of the Covenant enters Jerusalem, as David sacrifices to the Lord, as the all the people come together to worship, David gets caught up in it all and worships from the bottom of his heart. He doesn’t bait a public reaction (positive or negative). He seeks to honor God, and people end up noticing.
We all have to walk this fine line when doing religious things in the public square. Do we pray to bless our food in a crowded restaurant out of a desire for God’s blessing or for others to see our religiousness? Adding evangelism onto this makes it all doubly confusing. We want the world to know of the power of God, and to do so, we need to live our faith out loud. However, we can’t just do things for human attention or specifically to create a spectacle, but then, how will people know about our faith to ask us about it?
We live in a profoundly performative age, where even simple acts like eating food, parenting children, and maintaining one’s body in our never ending struggle against insects are done for public display. A week ago, as I jogged, slowly, ugly sweating around Herman Park, I witnessed a woman livestreaming her run. Some high end restaurants ban phones at their tables, so people will eat the fancy food rather than take pictures of it. In this time of the self-aggrandizing panopticon, living a simple and genuine faith stands out. We live like David and keep only God in view. We love, serve, worship, and pray as part our relationship with the only audience that truly matters. Others may well take notice. We need to worry about that. We need to just genuinely be people after God’s own heart.