David Dancing Before The Ark:
The Liturgical Theology Implicit In 2 Samuel 6:14
by Fr Robert Barron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNTSNxFbFxk
Transcript
David Dancing Before The Ark:
The Liturgical Theology Implicit In 2 Samuel 6:14
by Fr Robert Barron
Today’s speaker Fr. Robert Barron is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He’s also a President of The University of Saint Mary of the Lake and Rector of Mundelein Seminary in the same place. He was an M.A. of the Catholic University of America. He did Licentiate in Sacred Theology at St. Mary of the Lake. He has his Doctorate 1992 from the Institut Catholique of Paris under Michelle Homme, author of ten books, most recent ones which are Eucharist and More Capacious Catholicism in 2011. This afternoon, he will address us on the subject: David dancing before the Ark the liturgical theology implicit in 2 Samuel 6:14. Fr. Barron.
Fr. Robert: What I want to share with you this afternoon is a chapter from a book that’s coming out in 2015. Brussels Press is bringing out a whole set of Biblical commentaries but written not so much by Biblical specialists is by theologians in a constant attempt to bring a more patristic style of analysis to the scripture. They asked me to do 2 Samuel a while ago and I was privileged to do so, delighted to do so. I became Rector midway through the process so it slowed things down quite a bit. The book is now finished, it will be coming out in 2015. I’m going to read to you essentially one of the chapters of that book. I have written a little introductory paragraph. The talk will end abruptly. I didn’t really write a conclusion, it’s just the way the chapter’s going to end. I just want to warn you in advance, there will be a somewhat abrupt ending to things.
The general topic is ‘David’s dance before the Ark’ and what that says about worship and the praise of God. 1 and 2 Samuel constitute one of the truly great documents that has come down to us from the ancient world. Its theological significance is obvious but it also stands out as a literally masterpiece marked by narrative subtlety, rich elusiveness, chiastic structuring and remarkable poetic beauty. Moreover, its portraits of Samuel, Saul, Joab and especially David the King, are among the most psychologically perceptive and humanly affecting in all of ancient literature. What I want to do in this paper is to concentrate on a particularly vivid moment in the career of David, Name of the king’s conquest of Jerusalem and its conveyance of the Ark of the Covenant into his new Capital.
The episode is of considerable historical and is of course, but it’s also a hinge moment in the development of a distinctly Israelite theology of worship. As such, it functions as an anticipation of the new and definitive David who roughly a thousand years later, would give his father a perfect worship in that same city. With a defeat of the Philistines in the valley of Raphaim, David’s consolidation of kingly leadership was, for a political standpoint, more or less complete. He had emerged as the new Adam.
That’s to say leader of a properly defended Eden. There is more to Adam than kingliness, the first man was presented by the Rabbis of the inter-testimonial period and by the church fathers as a priest as well as a king. Walking in easy fellowship with Yahweh, Adam was naturally in the stance of adoration. Word derived from Ado-ratio. Adora, literally to the mouth.
To adore is to be mouth to mouth with God. Breathing in the divine life and breathing out praise. We might see in the opening line of the Songs of Songs, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Not only a cry of your erotic desire but a longing of the soul for worship. Mouth to mouth, one is also reconciled to God. Literally, eye lash to eye lash with him. Aligned everything in the worshipper becomes properly ordered, harmonized like the medallions of a rose window around the center. In the attitude of adoration, Adam was accordingly the first priest and the ordered garden that surrounded him was construed again by the rabbis and the fathers as a primordial temple. Right praise, orthodoxy literally, leads to the right ordering of the one who gives praise. It also conduces toward the right ordering of the family, the community, the society, the cosmos that surrounds them.
In this context, perhaps we can understand a remark often associated with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement. Namely, the cult cultivates the culture. Business, finance, politics, the arts, entertainment etcetera all find their proper place and realize their proper finality when they’re grounded in the praise of God. According to Liturgical prayer, glory to God in the highest and an earth peace to people of goodwill. One can read that, not only as a word of praise but also as a kind of formula. When glory is given to God above all things, then peace tends to break out among us. We’ve seen, the original sin can be appreciated as a result of bad kingly leadership on the part of the first king but in light of these clarifications just made, it might be appreciated too as the suspension of right praise. As the consequence of a failure in priesthood.
When they listen to the voice of the serpent and disobeyed the command of God, Adam and Eve fell out of the stance of adoration and it ordered their hearts away from the unconditioned good. This led to the interior disintegration of falling apart of mind from flesh, soul from body and tension from action etcetera. It also gave rise, as we saw, to the disintegration of community and the alienation from nature. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden should be interpreted accordingly, not as sentence passed by an insulted dealing but rather as the inevitable consequence of a bad praise.
When something other than God is given glory in the highest, the garden turns into a desert. You might therefore read the entirety of the Biblical narrative as the story of God’s attempts to lure his people back into orthodoxy. Not as though God needs such devotion but precisely because such devotion is tantamount to human flourishing. With sin resulted in the destruction of the entirety created order.
According to Biblical narrative, God sent a rescue operation in the form of a great ship and which a microcosm of Eden could be preserved. This is why Noah, again, was read by the fathers as a priestly figure presiding over a tiny remnant where right praise was practiced.
Once the flood waters had receded, Noah the priest offered a sacrifice to Yahweh and allowed the good order he’d preserve to flood the world, reconstituting it as a temple. As Yahweh shaped his people Israel, He consistently coupled covenant with sacrificial worship. Thus, Abraham having heard the promise that His descendants would be more numerous than the stars, was asked to sacrifice five animals to the Lord cutting their bodies in two. Moses received the word of Yahweh on Sinai and then slaughtered bulls and sprinkled their blood on the altar and the people. In Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we hear detailed prescriptions governing the offering of sacrifice to the Lord. Oblations that too place in the tabernacle or tent sanctuary accompanying the wandering people in the desert.
Why would the worship that Yahweh demanded be sacrificial in form? Prior to the fall, adoration would have been effortless, but after the tumble into sin, right praise comes only at a cost. This is because heterodoxy, bad praise, had twisted the human person out of shape setting mind against will, body against spirit etcetera. To recover one’s spiritual equilibrium therefore is necessarily painful. When someone brought an animal to the tabernacle and later to the temple for sacrifice, he was saying implicitly that what was happening to the animal should by rights, be happening to him. Now as we know the heart of the tabernacle was the Ark of the Covenant, the gold plated box of acacia wood which housed the remnants of the tablets of the law, the rod of Aaron and some pieces of manna.
All reminders of the Exodus journey and the Sinai covenant. This Ark became the focus of Israelite worship, both a sign of Yahweh’s presence among His people and a pledge of the people’s obedience. Like Noah’s Ark, it was microcosm of Eden, creation rightly ordered around the praise of God which is precisely why the Ark was carried by Israel into battle. In the book of Numbers we hear a quote, “Whenever the Ark set out, Moses would say, Arise oh Lord, let your enemies be scattered and your foes flee before you.” The task of the kingly and priestly people of Israel was to Edenize the world and hence they would carry this emblem of Eden before them when they met the enemies of Yahweh.
One of the central tragedies of Israelite history is described in 1st Samuel, the loss of the Ark during disastrous battle with the Philistines. “So the Philistines fought. Israel was defeated and they fled, everyone to his home. There was a very great slaughter. For the fail of Israel, 30,000 foot soldiers. The Ark of God was captured, the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas died.” That’s 1 Samuel 4: 10 and 11. This represented a colossal failure of the kingly and priestly mission of Israel, the collective Adam.
There’s somewhat comical section of 1st Samuel known as the Ark narrative. We see that the power of the true God is greater than that of the false gods that can beguile the human heart. When the Ark of the Covenant is brought in to the house of Dagon, the shrine of the god, gods of the Philistines, the idols collapse before it, “But when they rose early on the next morning, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord.” Because of the attitude of worship, is much more than an affirmation of one particular ancient Middle Eastern god being more powerful than another.
It’s a showing forth of his absolutely central theme, that human flourishing is a consequence of right praise. The central battle of Israel’s God is always against idolatry. For everything that’s dysfunctional in the human heart in society, flows finally from that primordial skewing. In this regard, the story of the ark’s triumph over Dagon is not unlikely accounted 1st Kings, of Elijah’s victory over the priest of Baal. Now, this brief overview provides however inadequately, a background for the decisively important 6th chapter of 2nd Samuel, at which point I’m going to take off my coat.
Having become king, David knows he must become a priest for he is to preside over a liturgical kingdom. In the book of Exodus, we hear that Yahweh would form an orthodox nation. A people of worship or right, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” That’s Exodus 19:5. The prescription’s given to Moses and the sons of Aaron, as well as the mobile tabernacle of the ark, where the provisional means by which Yahweh was shaping His priestly people during the years of wandering and during the period of consolidation.
David intuited that these strands had to be gathered and that above all, the ark had to come to rest in his new capital city, providing thereby an ambiguous center for the nation. A still point around which all of its various elements could arrange themselves. This is why David’s establishment of the ark in Jerusalem, represents a certain climax to the narrative, that began with the fall and led to the formation of the priestly people, the cutting of covenants, the giving of the law, and the invasion of the promised land. Chapter 6 commences on a triumphant note, “David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, 30,000. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baal, Judah, to bring up from there, the ark of God.”
The king chose a veritable army of his best men, in order to seize an apparently undefended piece of sacred furniture and bring it back to Jerusalem. What we’re meant to see, of course, is the enormous importance that David attaches to this mission. As Robert Paulson, one of the more gifted commentaries in this text, as Paulson’s astutely remarks, “We’re also meant to hear an echo of the 30,000 who were lost when the ark was taken by the Philistines. Baal, Judah or Ba’al in Judah, is a synonym for Kiriath-jearim, mentioned in 1st Samuel 7 and beautifully invoked in 132nd Psalm. “He, David, swore to the Lord and vowed to the mighty one of Jacob, ‘I will not enter my house or get into my bed. I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord. We heard of it in Ephrata, we found it in the fields of Yaar.’” That’s Psalm 132.
This lyrical passage captures so well, the holy obsession of David to ground and center his liturgical empire through right praise. In the account of the scene in 1st Chronicles we hear, that David consulted with the entire people before making this move, and that they enthusiastically supported him. Hence we see the liturgical people gladly shaping themselves around the ark and around the priest king. The Ark of the Covenant we are told was in the house of Abinadab, an Israelite who presumably took it, when it was returned by the Philistines many years before, convinced that it bore a curse. Abinadab’s dwelling is said to be on a hill, which probably carries the implication of a holy place or a shrine of some kind.
What’s of some interest is why, during the long years of Saul’s reign and the civil war, the ark had been more or less forgotten. Was this perhaps emblematic of the fact that suspension of the right worship and the dissolution of Israel, always go hand in hand. Once he found the ark, David endeavored to bring it back. He placed it, we hear, in a new cart, which is to say, a cart that has never been used for any secular purpose, and he commences the journey back to Jerusalem. We then hear that Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were directing the cart and that David and his entourage were dancing with reckless abandon before the ark of the Lord.
When the festive liturgical procession reached the thrashing floor of Nakon, the oxen stumbled and the ark was jostled, so that Uzzah, innocently enough reached out to steady it. At which point he was struck dead by an angry god, we hear. That was probably no story in 2 Samuel that puzzles and irritates a contemporary reader more than this one. To conceive of God’s ark is the bearer of a deadly electric charge or to conceive of God as a cruel tyrant, capable of an utterly disproportionate reaction to a minor and unintentional liturgical infraction, seems at best primitive and it was dangerous. Much of the liberal enlightened theologizing of the last 200 years, in fact, Miller takes against this sort of construal of God’s relationship with humanity.
The problems with liberal theology of course, that this story had 2 Samuel, is hardly egregious. The Bible is filled with accounts of God’s anger, God’s justice and God’s punishment. Often enough, the Biblical authors presented divine retribution, which appears at least to us, disproportionate and exaggerated. What sense can we make of it? The one who created the whole of the cosmos, the heavens and the earth, the more scriptural terminology, cannot be determined by any limitations or ontological conditions that circumscribe creatures. The one who gives the entirety of the being of the world, cannot for example, be characterized as standing in need of any further existential realization. This in turn entails the immutability of the creator.
It’s crucially important to note, this hasn’t a thing to do with God being cold or indifferent to the world that He’s made. Rather God’s immutability means that God cannot change in a creaturely way, which is to say, in the manner of finite being, moving beyond its limits towards some greater perfection of being. From God’s unchangability, we can deduce that God does not pass in and out of emotional states. Shifting as we do, from contentment to discontentment, from joy to anger, from anticipation to disappointment etcetera. As the author of 1 John clarifies, God is love, implying the very to be of God’s identical with the stance an attitude of love.
Mutable as we are, we creatures fall in and out of love. We love to varying degrees, we love and then we don’t love. This can’t be the case with regard to the God, who stands beyond the ontological vagaries of the created realm. How’s this divine love manifest itself? To answer that question adequately, we have to be clear about what love is. For the mainstream with the theological and spiritual tradition, love is not an emotional sentiment, but rather the act of willing the good of the other as other. This means that love will express itself into a variety of ways, depending upon the object of love.
If I love someone who’s on a self-destructive path, my willing as good, will undoubtedly appear as harsh, angry even punitive. If I’m trying to get that person rightly aligned. Therefore, God’s anger in the Bible might be construed as a symbolic expression of God’s passion to set things right. We might think of God’s love as a pure white light, which upon passing through the prism of creation history breaks in a variety of colors. The language the Biblical authors it draws it must be from psychology of general experience, gestures analogically toward the various ways, the one divine love manifests itself for the world.
As we all know a storyteller tends to express themselves in bold and exaggerated ways, and the Biblical narrators are no exceptions. To give just two examples, think of the ages of the patriarchs and the number of warriors mastered for, or killed in battle. Thus, when they want to adjust you toward the divine passion to set things right, they will often present God, a God raging in anger or burning with indignation, even putting thousands to death. We shouldn’t literalize this language either historically or psychologically, instead we should construe it as a poetic indication of the dark face of a love, which remains essentially mysterious to us.
With those clarifications in mind, let’s return to this particular story of Uzzah and the Ark of the Covenant. Why would Yahweh be angry at Uzzah’s attempt to prevent the sacred ark from falling to the ground? The case just seems to be liturgical impropriety. In Exodus 25, we hear of God’s explicit instruction regarding the construction of the ark. “You shall make poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold. You shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark by which to carry the ark. The pole shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.” That’s Exodus 25:13-15.
God wanted the ark designed in a very particular way, and he ordained it to be carried in a very particular way. The principle problem with David’s first attempt to carry the ark into his capital city is that he was hauling it by cart, rather than carrying it by the poles. It was this faster but more precarious form of transport that caused the ark to tip, and Uzzah to react. Now, once more, we’re surely tempted to conclude that a God, who’d respond with deadly violence to such a minor violation of liturgical law, is surely a tad unbalanced.
Yet we have to keep the symbolic nature of the language in mind, and get to the spiritual truth the author is endeavoring to communicate. The entire purpose of liturgy is to restore humanity to right order. Adoratio leading to the harmonizing of self in society as we’ve seen. Over the course of many centuries, Yahweh had been forming His people in the of orthodoxy, and at the heart of His right praise, is a decentering of the self, a twisting away from the ego and a turning toward God. As we saw, the founder of Israel, Abraham, was a man who listened to God and the whole of Israel had life. Covenant, worship, prophesy etc., was a systematic attempt to help the people to listen, to attend to the Lord. Hence, “Hear o Israel, the lord your God is Lord alone.” The famous Shema in Deuteronomy 6.
It was indeed more convenient to convey the ark by the means of an oxcart, but the Lord had instructed it to be carried by poles. A small matter, perhaps, but obedience, listening, is the hinge on which Israelite life turns. God was angry, not because Uzzah’s act personally offended Him, and point the fact that one who needs nothing from the world, cannot even in principle be offended. Rather because it represented a compromising of the liturgical attitude. Now, the church fathers, whom I’m imitating here, are eminently clear on this score.
Chrysostom says, “As the wrath of God was drawn down on Uzzah for intruding on an office that was not his own, so God’s wrath will likewise advance against those who subvert the gospel.” Salvian [of Marseilles) remarks, “Uzzah’s punishment for steadying the ark, shows that nothing may be considered lightly when it pertains to God.” Finally Pacian of Barcelona comments, “So greater concern was there of reverence toward God, that God did not accept bold hands even out of help.” There’s another theological theme that emerges from this odd tale which is worthy of some careful consideration, namely that of the divine inscrutability and sublimity. The creator of the universe cannot, as we saw, be categorized in any conventional philosophical system.
God cannot be definitely defined or set an easy contrast to other beings or states of affairs. Thomas Aquinas catches the sheer strangeness of God, when he comments that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being. Further the providential range of God includes the whole of creation, which means the totality of time and space. All this implies that God’s activities and purposes in the world will necessarily remain inscrutable to a finite mind. All the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God, how in-searchable are his judgments, how inscrutable His ways, says Paul in Romans 11. The strangers of God and His actions have nothing to do with capriciousness on God’s part. That’s read with the function of God’s absolutely unique manner of being and our limited consciousness.
The author of the book of Job, of course, makes much of the same point in his magnificently constructed dialog between a frustrated human sufferer and the providential Lord of the entire cosmos. We might utilize a content conceptual framework and speak of the sublimity of God. Which is to say, God’s overwhelming of the human sensorium and intellect. Hans Von Balthasar spoke of God as a raging alpine torrent which utterly smashes any receptors designed to channel it and convert it to human use. The divine sublimity is by torrents thrilling and terrifying.
The Prophet Isaiah could exalt of the overwhelming beauty of God manifested in a temple vision of clouds and angels. As the letter to the Hebrews has it, it’s a fearful thing to fall out of the hands of a living God. A one sided stress on the latter quality gives us an arbitrary God. But a unilateral stress on the former gives us a superficial and manipulatable God. Without for a moment rescinding any of the clarifications made above, I would simply say this, Yahweh’s striking down of Uzzah is finally inexplicable. It’s a symbolic expression if you want, of the sublimity of God. The sheer weirdness of God’s act would help to explain why, “David was angry because the Lord had burst forth, with that outburst upon Uzzah.” That’s 2 Samuel 6:8.
Robert Alter renders the Hebrew here as afraid of the Lord and the ambivalence is eloquent. For both anger and fear would indeed be understandable reactions to the disorienting sublimity of God. To be sure in pastoral context, the Christian minister often discovers that anger at and fear of God are very common states of soul, among those who are striving to believe in God. On account of this anger/fear, David resolved not to bring the ark into his capital and instead had it sent, ‘to the house of Obed Edom, the Gittite.’ Most likely a Philistine from Gath, who had attached himself to David during the time when David was a vessel of the King of Gath. In the earlier sections of the so called ark narrative, the presence of the ark of the covenant in the temple of the Philistines had caused, if you saw, the foreign gods could fall.
Now however, while the sacred vessel resides in a house of a Philistine within Israel, “The Lord blessed Obed Edom, and all his household.” 2 Samuel 6:11. Is there a foreshadowing here of the ingathering of the nations? A hint of the blessings that would come to the peoples of the world when they ordered themselves to the right praise of God. Inspired by this benediction of Obed Edom’s home, David and Deborah knew to bring the ark into its proper house in Jerusalem. What ensued was one of the richest and most festive liturgical processions described in the Bible. The king was careful not to make the same mistake he’d made before, hauling the ark by oxcart, this time he arranged for bearers, to carry the ark by poles set through rings, as Exodus specified.
Further he ordered, that when the bearers had taken but 6 steps, they sacrifices, “An ox and a fatling.” There’s some ambiguity here, does the author mean to insinuate that the procession stopped every 6 paces to sacrifice? Or simply they did so at the beginning of the match? If the former were true, the pray would have been endless and Israel would have been emptied of oxen. In either case, the point is made that the ark is conduced in a festive but sacrificial attitude. The people aware of both of their blessing and of their sin. In the killing of the animals, we see an anticipation, of the thousands upon thousands of sacrifices that would take place over the centuries in the Jerusalem temple.
Though the practice is of course, utterly alien to us, the logic of sacrifice is actually quite straightforward. One returns to God some aspect of creation, in order to signal one’s gratitude for the whole of creation or for a blessing received or in reparation for sins committed. Again, the creator of the universe cannot possibly need anything in the universe, but the offer of the sacrifice needs the act of sacrifice in order to become rightly ordered to God. Further sacrifice involved the death of an animal, so that the inner pain of this reorientation might be adequately symbolized.
This great sacrificial procession, evocative of the entire sacrificial history and attitude of Israel, was presided over by the one who is not only king, but priest as well. The priesthood of David is unmistakably referenced in the gird the king dons for the parade, “He was girded with a linen ephod.” 2 Samuel 6:14. In the description of the priestly vestments to be worn by Aaron and his sons, the ephod is mentioned a number of times. In Leviticus we hear that Moses, “Brought Aaron and his sons forward and washed them in water. He put the tunic on him, fastened the sache around him, clothed him with the robe and put the ephod on him.” That is Leviticus 8:6.
Most tellingly for our purpose is Saul. Having invaded the sanctuary of Nob in search of David, ordered Doeg the Edomite to kill the priest. We’re told, “On that day he killed 85 who wore the linen ephod.” 1 Samuel 22:18. Quite clearly David had decided in putting on the garment of the priesthood to assume the role and take up the task of those fallen victims of Saul. He was also harkening back to Samuel, Eli, and the ironic priesthood, as well as the priesthood of Adam, the first one to assume that stance of adoration.
Only in light of the connection to Adam, can we fully understand the energetic dance of the king before the ark of the Lord. Before the fall, Adam would have walked in easy fellowship with Yahweh, thinking His thoughts, moving as He moved. He danced, you might say, in unison with the Lord. What is sin, but a falling out of step with God, an insistence upon dancing to one’s own rhythm. The whole of the history of salvation therefore, might be characterized as Yahweh’s attempt to restore the sacred dance. To get His human creatures to move with him. Accordingly, David dancing with energy before the ark is humanity dancing with the Lord, recovering the effortless harmony of Eden.
It’s been argued that the gestures and movements of the priests in the Jerusalem temple were intended to mimic in a stylized way, the exuberant dance of the king. Since the ritual moves with the Byzantine and Catholic Mass, trace their origins to the temple, we could conclude that the processions, gestures and bows of Christian priests today, participate in the priesthood of the king who wore the ephod, as he danced before the ark. I’d wager, there’s still another element of this story that makes it puzzling for most moderns, namely why David and his people would be dancing before, of all things, the law.
As we saw the Ark contained manna on the staff of Aaron, but it contained most importantly the tablets of the 10 commandments. The rather strict provisions and prohibitions given by Yahweh to Moses on Sinai. Most reasonable people in the west today would accept the law from traffic regulations to required income tax as a necessary evil. Something they had in the best of all possible worlds they would do without. Therefore, it would be difficult to imagine anyone dancing with joy before the tax code, with the latest prescriptions determined by a county board or even before the constitution.
To understand the coherence of David’s dance, we have to grasp the sea change that occurred from Biblical to modern times in regard both to law and to freedom. On the modern reading, freedom is primarily choice and self-determination. The roots to this view is stretched back to the late medieval period to the speculations of William of Ockham. For the English Franciscan, human freedom is utterly autonomous forced the capacity to choose on the basis of no constraint, either interior or exterior. The sheer independence of the will he argued is proved by an act of suicide committed by a sincere religious believer. For such a move against a supreme good is made in the presence of a supreme good. The contemporary Thomist Servais Pinckaers, refer to this alchemist notion as “the freedom of indifference,” for its predicated on the assumption that the free agent hovers indifferently above the yes and the no.
An implication of this way of construing freedom is that each moral act is monadic. Something like a white heady and the actual occasion. Precisely because a truly free choice can be determined by nothing whatsoever, now you’re the character of the agent nor the succession of his previous moral moves can have a determining influence on his present ethic al choice. On this interpretation, law must be seen as a limitation on freedom, hence, as at best, a necessary evil. Freedom perforce will chafe against the law and law by its right nature, will set limits to unruly freedom. Moreover, we’re not going to extrapolate theologically from this construal of freedom. He arrives in deed at an understanding of God as supremely arbitrary power. Since the divine freedom is as unconstrained in its essence as human freedom, infinite and finite liberty will necessarily confront each other as opponents. Their relationship will be mediated only by divine law powerfully imposed.
Many have argued that this account of the God-human relationship conduced by a few short logical steps to atheism. For such a God will inevitably be seen as a threat to human flourishing hence Ludwig Feuerbach can conclude that “no to God is yes to man.” Sarte would formulate the pithy syllogism, “If God exists, I cannot be free but I am free. Therefore, God does not exist.” All that follows seems to me from this Ockhamist construal of freedom.” Prior to Ockham, it was a very different notion of freedom. What Pinckaers calls “liberte de qualite”, freedom for excellence. Here freedom is not primarily choice in self-creation but the disciplining of desire in order to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.
One becomes a free player of the violin, capable of playing any type of music. Precisely in the measure that one submits to a range of disciplines, laws and practices. One becomes a free swinger of the golf club able to respond effortlessly with a shift in demands of the game in as much as one has internalized the laws and rules that governing good swinging. On this interpretation, law is not the opponent to freedom but rather the condition for its possibility. A most important contenement of this notion is if you articulated in the philosophical anthropology of Aquinas, namely that will is a function of intellect.
For Aquinas, the will emerges at the moment when the mind understands the good as good. This entails that the objective good never stands over and against freedom as a constraint but rather informs it and guides it at every turn. The theological implications are significantly non-alchemist. God is free, not as in much as he stands in sovereign indifference to the yes and the no but in as much as He can only say yes. That is in a measure that His will is utterly congruent with the goodness of His being. God and freedom are so construed that divine will is not a threat to human flourishing, just the contrary. Hence, the sacred law is indeed something in the presence of which a grateful humanity might be tempted to dance.
I’ll make a final set of observations and associations before turning from David’s stance. A connection of the fathers of the church made with particular enthusiasm was between the Ark of the Covenant which bore the divine law and Mary of Nazareth who bore the divine presence in the fullest possible sense. Hence Maximus of Turin says, “But what will we say the Ark was if not Holy Mary since the Ark carried within it the tables of the covenant while Mary bore the Master of that same covenant.” One of the many artistic depictions of this patristic association is the relief of a juxtaposed Mary and Ark which is curved in stone over the left portal of Notre Dame in Paris.
A number of symbolic echoes can now be heard. David rose and went to get the Ark which was in the house of Abinadab situated, we heard, on a hill, probably a shrine in the country of Judah. In the Gospel of Luke we’re told, that just after the annunciation, “Mary set out and went in haste to a Judean town in the hill country where she entered the house of Zachariah and greeted Elizabeth.” Luke 1:39. In other words, the supreme Ark, like its prototype, situates itself on a hilltop shrine in Judea. I don’t say shrine casually here, for Zachariah is a temple priest and Elizabeth a descendant of Aaron, the first priest. Further, after death of Uzzah, David said, “How can the Ark of the Lord come into my care?” 2 Samuel 6:9. Upon receiving her cousin, Elizabeth said, “Why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” Luke 1:43.
Both David and Elizabeth are unworthy to be in the presence of the bearer of the Lord. The King danced with all his might before the Ark and quote, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.” Luke 1:41. The unborn John the Baptist performing an infant’s dance in the presence of the true Ark. Finally an intriguing detail after the Uzzah incident, David sent the Ark as we saw to the home of Obed-edom where it stayed for three months. After delivering her great magnificat, “Mary remained with her, Elizabeth, about three months and then returned to her home.” Luke 1:56.
There can be little doubt that Luke is consciously echoing these stories of the Ark in order to highlight Mary’s identity as Theotokos. Now, as the procession wounds its way into the city, it caught the attention of Michal, the daughter of Saul, the first wife of David, who watched from a window high above the scene. We are told, “She despised him in her heart.” 2 Samuel 6:16. We only begin to imagine the texture of her feelings at this point in the narrative. She had witnessed the deaths of her father and brother and the fall of Saul’s kingdom. Her husband had gone on to marry several other women and fathered children with them while she remained childless.
David had her beloved second husband torn away from her as part of a cynical, political gain. Certainly, she had a right to feel angry and resentful toward the one whom she knew as an upstart shepherd boy who had now become king in the place of Saul and instead of Jonathan. Significantly, Michal is referred to in this short section, not as the wife of David but consistently as the daughter of Saul. Signaling that she represents the fading house of the former king that she gazes down from the window rather than participate in the celebration indicates that she represents the sullied past.
From her height, she regards David with the same haughty distain that her father once showed to his rival. Before, resuming the story of Michal, the narrator lingers over David’s performance of a variety of priestly and kingly tasks. First he established the Ark in its tent or tabernacle within the Holy City. Thus, anticipating the eventual installation of the Ark in a proper temple by his son, Solomon. Next he offered up burnt offerings and offerings of wellbeing to prototypes of what would become temple sacrifice. Finally, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of Hosts, 2 Samuel 6:18. Going into the Ark, offering sacrifice and then returning to bless the assembled crowd, David is anticipating the moves of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, reconciling Yahweh in Israel and establishing a new garden. Finally, David performed a distinctively kingly act feeding, “The whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat and a cake of raisins.” 2 Samuel 6:19.
Here is Moses who promised to give the people food and drink during their sojourn in the desert and it’s Joshua who pledged to bring Israel to a land flowing with milk and honey. Is Adam sharing the fruitfulness of the garden. The Ark which was constructed in the shadow of Sinai had finally found a resting place and Jerusalem was thereby established as the center of Israelite worship, the still point around which the nation could turn. After performing these priestly and kingly functions, David returned home to his less than contented wife. Astonishingly, the conversation that follows, the only dialogue between Michal and David recorded in the Samuel literature. In 1 Samuel 19, she had urgently instructed David to flee from Saul but we heard nothing of David’s response to her in that episode. When we finally hear them speak to one another, we perceive only sarcasm, anger and incrimination.
Not content to wait for her husband to come in, Michal went out with energy to meet him and then poured invective into his ear, “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servant’s maids as any bolder fellow might shamelessly uncover himself.” 2 Samuel 6:20. The verb for uncovering clearly is a sexual connotation reflecting Michal’s insinuation that David crudely been offering his nakedness for the delighted contemplation of slave girls. There is no question there is more than a hint of sexual jealousy in Michal’s observation as well as for she added dangers to come through David’s sexual imprudence.
The king’s willingness to expose his nakedness even at the most public of settings, also harkens back to the garden and the time before the fall when Adam and Eve walked unselfconsciously naked in one another’s presence and in the sight of the Lord. That the nakedness of David is revealed precise in the act of worship, only reinforces the connection to the Adam of innocent pre-lapsarian Adoratio. The king’s response to his first wife is both psychologically devastating and theologically interesting, “It was before the Lord who chose me in place of your father and all your household to appoint me as prince over Israel. The people of the Lord, that I have danced before the Lord.” 2 Samuel 6:21.
With those words, David put pain the notion that the house Saul would have any say in the governance of Israel. In the perhaps when the hope of Saul in his more elusive moments that his house would endure precisely through the son of David and Michal but Saul himself, when the wicked spear was upon him, had so interrupted their marriage that no progeny came from them. Now David is definitively shutting the door on that possibility and thereby shutting down the Sauline line. Moreover, the decision of David is given qausi-divine sanction since a sort of curse settled upon her from that moment, “And Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child to the day of her death.” 2 Samuel 6:23.
Now, I said David’s rejoinder was also theologically interesting in this for several reasons. First we see the paradox that a person’s debasement before God is tantamount not to diminution him but to elevation and enhancement. If one human being debased himself before another, such an act would indeed be humiliating and dehumanizing. For a competitiveness or zero sum dynamic does obtain among finite things. However, as I’ve been saying over and over, the creator God is not one being however supreme among many.
Therefore, there is no ontological competition between Him and creatures. God does not stand over and against the world but exists precisely as the ground of the world’s existence. Accordingly, the debasement of a human being before God does not result in that person’s annihilation but rather in his fulfillment. It’s this very paradoxical quality of the Biblical God’s relationship with humanity that permits Saint Irenaeus to assert “the glory of God as a human being fully alive.” And this is why David can honor Yahweh precisely through an exuberant dance and in the spirit of joy.
Secondly, the episode sheds considerable light on the relationship between political power and the authority of God. King David’s abeyance before God is a clear indication that he realizes his worldly rule must be situated in the context of God’s providence and placed upon the foundation of moral principles derived from God. Once more, the correlation to the kingship of Adam is illuminating. The first man function as a good rule of Eden as long as he was obedient to the divine word and responsive to the promptings of the divine spirit.
His kingship foundered the moment he seized for himself the propagative with determining the difference between good and evil. When he arrogates to himself, the power to establish the moral foundation for his kingly choices. This move which is functionally equivalent to the suspension of orthodoxy leads inevitably to expulsion from the garden and to loss of rule. Once more, the whole Biblical narrative, from Genesis to the account of David‘s kingly dance might be construed as a story of humanity struggling to recover the right relationship between human and divine authority.
Again and again, the biblical authors tell us an earthly kings are rightly conceived under the egis of God. They consistently show us the devastation, both personal and societal that follows from the laying aside of this truth. The Lords at the tower of babel, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, the kings and the Malachi’s of Philistines. All recapitulate is sin of Adam and set themselves up as the criteria for good and evil. Israel, in principle, was meant to be the countersign, a corporate Adam, a people whose political and cultural life unfolded according to God’s will and principle. In his treatise on law, Thomas Aquinas teaches that positive law, which to say that concrete prescription by which society is governed is derivative from the natural law. The first principle of morality and their immediate applications which in turn is grounded in eternal law which is none other than the reasonability of the divine mind itself.
When this nesting relationship is overlooked, positive law becomes but an expression of the will to power of the legislator and the moral integrity of a society so governed is fatally compromised. At least a vestige of this Thomistic understanding can be discerned in the American declaration of Independence, precisely in its affirmation of the rights to life, liberty and happiness exclusively recognized as co-endowed by the creator. The implications that the positive laws which would govern the United States must be correlated to the objective moral principles articulated as rights which in turn are implanted in us by God.
Joseph Ratzinger proposes a reading of Jesus conversation with Pilate which is opposite here under pressure from rest of crowd. Pilate both abdicates more responsibility and confesses ignorance of any objective ground for moral decision making. What is the truth? Having severed any possible link between positive law and natural law, he surrenders to the whim of the crowd, asking them to decide whether an obviously guilty man or an obviously innocent man should be released. This, Ratzinger argues is the prototype of the moral governance by public opinion poll so prevalent in our society today. With the severance of positive moral and internal law and then with results in, is as we saw, the ultimacy of the legislator’s will to power.
Thus Pilate bullyingly says to Jesus, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Don’t you know I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you” to which the one who came to testify to the truth said, “You would have no power over me unless it would have been given to you from above. Pilate’s authority, the legitimacy of which Jesus does not question is nevertheless sub-alternate to the higher authority of God. David, the king who danced to his joyful reverence before God is an apt iconic representation of this truth.
A third theological implication of David’s response to Michal was that in a properly religious context, the ecstatic trumps are rational and are moralistic. In a certain sense, Michal was right in critiquing the king for a somewhat imprudent display. It would not be hard to find all together respectable and reasonable moral categories. According to which David’s dance would be categorized as inappropriate. Perhaps he truly gave scandals, some in Jerusalem that day and was the occasion for lustful thoughts and others. The prim, downward looking Michal aptly symbolizes the moral dimension that’s legitimately part of religion.
You might say this is sort of ancient Israelite Kant for whom religion was entirely a matter of morality rationally construed. Kant’s programmatic text, religion was within the limits of reason alone, gives away the nature of the project. As Paul Tillich once argued, real religion can never be captured within the limits of reason alone. Precisely because it involves the honoring of the unconditioned. Whatever can be grasped by reason is ipso facto condition. Therefore, the relationship to the properly unconditioned must involve the bursting of the bonds of reason.
An ecstatic leap outside of the self and beyond the controlling aspect of the mind. John Henry Newman speaks of the kingly prophetic and priestly dimensions of the church. In its kingly mode, the church is marked by order, authority, discipline. In its prophetic mode, it’s rational, inquisitive, engaged in dialogue with the wider culture. In its priestly mode, it's prayerful, contemplative and mystical. Without the levering of the priestly, Newman contents, the prophetic dimension devolves in short order into a dry rationalism. The moral Michal might be read as the prophetic side of religion. The dancing David as the priestly side of religion which refuses to be constrained by reason alone.
With that … Without proper conclusion I’ll bring the talk to a close. Thanks for listening so greatly. Thank you.
The Liturgical Theology Implicit In 2 Samuel 6:14
by Fr Robert Barron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNTSNxFbFxk
Transcript
David Dancing Before The Ark:
The Liturgical Theology Implicit In 2 Samuel 6:14
by Fr Robert Barron
Today’s speaker Fr. Robert Barron is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago. He’s also a President of The University of Saint Mary of the Lake and Rector of Mundelein Seminary in the same place. He was an M.A. of the Catholic University of America. He did Licentiate in Sacred Theology at St. Mary of the Lake. He has his Doctorate 1992 from the Institut Catholique of Paris under Michelle Homme, author of ten books, most recent ones which are Eucharist and More Capacious Catholicism in 2011. This afternoon, he will address us on the subject: David dancing before the Ark the liturgical theology implicit in 2 Samuel 6:14. Fr. Barron.
Fr. Robert: What I want to share with you this afternoon is a chapter from a book that’s coming out in 2015. Brussels Press is bringing out a whole set of Biblical commentaries but written not so much by Biblical specialists is by theologians in a constant attempt to bring a more patristic style of analysis to the scripture. They asked me to do 2 Samuel a while ago and I was privileged to do so, delighted to do so. I became Rector midway through the process so it slowed things down quite a bit. The book is now finished, it will be coming out in 2015. I’m going to read to you essentially one of the chapters of that book. I have written a little introductory paragraph. The talk will end abruptly. I didn’t really write a conclusion, it’s just the way the chapter’s going to end. I just want to warn you in advance, there will be a somewhat abrupt ending to things.
The general topic is ‘David’s dance before the Ark’ and what that says about worship and the praise of God. 1 and 2 Samuel constitute one of the truly great documents that has come down to us from the ancient world. Its theological significance is obvious but it also stands out as a literally masterpiece marked by narrative subtlety, rich elusiveness, chiastic structuring and remarkable poetic beauty. Moreover, its portraits of Samuel, Saul, Joab and especially David the King, are among the most psychologically perceptive and humanly affecting in all of ancient literature. What I want to do in this paper is to concentrate on a particularly vivid moment in the career of David, Name of the king’s conquest of Jerusalem and its conveyance of the Ark of the Covenant into his new Capital.
The episode is of considerable historical and is of course, but it’s also a hinge moment in the development of a distinctly Israelite theology of worship. As such, it functions as an anticipation of the new and definitive David who roughly a thousand years later, would give his father a perfect worship in that same city. With a defeat of the Philistines in the valley of Raphaim, David’s consolidation of kingly leadership was, for a political standpoint, more or less complete. He had emerged as the new Adam.
That’s to say leader of a properly defended Eden. There is more to Adam than kingliness, the first man was presented by the Rabbis of the inter-testimonial period and by the church fathers as a priest as well as a king. Walking in easy fellowship with Yahweh, Adam was naturally in the stance of adoration. Word derived from Ado-ratio. Adora, literally to the mouth.
To adore is to be mouth to mouth with God. Breathing in the divine life and breathing out praise. We might see in the opening line of the Songs of Songs, let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Not only a cry of your erotic desire but a longing of the soul for worship. Mouth to mouth, one is also reconciled to God. Literally, eye lash to eye lash with him. Aligned everything in the worshipper becomes properly ordered, harmonized like the medallions of a rose window around the center. In the attitude of adoration, Adam was accordingly the first priest and the ordered garden that surrounded him was construed again by the rabbis and the fathers as a primordial temple. Right praise, orthodoxy literally, leads to the right ordering of the one who gives praise. It also conduces toward the right ordering of the family, the community, the society, the cosmos that surrounds them.
In this context, perhaps we can understand a remark often associated with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement. Namely, the cult cultivates the culture. Business, finance, politics, the arts, entertainment etcetera all find their proper place and realize their proper finality when they’re grounded in the praise of God. According to Liturgical prayer, glory to God in the highest and an earth peace to people of goodwill. One can read that, not only as a word of praise but also as a kind of formula. When glory is given to God above all things, then peace tends to break out among us. We’ve seen, the original sin can be appreciated as a result of bad kingly leadership on the part of the first king but in light of these clarifications just made, it might be appreciated too as the suspension of right praise. As the consequence of a failure in priesthood.
When they listen to the voice of the serpent and disobeyed the command of God, Adam and Eve fell out of the stance of adoration and it ordered their hearts away from the unconditioned good. This led to the interior disintegration of falling apart of mind from flesh, soul from body and tension from action etcetera. It also gave rise, as we saw, to the disintegration of community and the alienation from nature. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden should be interpreted accordingly, not as sentence passed by an insulted dealing but rather as the inevitable consequence of a bad praise.
When something other than God is given glory in the highest, the garden turns into a desert. You might therefore read the entirety of the Biblical narrative as the story of God’s attempts to lure his people back into orthodoxy. Not as though God needs such devotion but precisely because such devotion is tantamount to human flourishing. With sin resulted in the destruction of the entirety created order.
According to Biblical narrative, God sent a rescue operation in the form of a great ship and which a microcosm of Eden could be preserved. This is why Noah, again, was read by the fathers as a priestly figure presiding over a tiny remnant where right praise was practiced.
Once the flood waters had receded, Noah the priest offered a sacrifice to Yahweh and allowed the good order he’d preserve to flood the world, reconstituting it as a temple. As Yahweh shaped his people Israel, He consistently coupled covenant with sacrificial worship. Thus, Abraham having heard the promise that His descendants would be more numerous than the stars, was asked to sacrifice five animals to the Lord cutting their bodies in two. Moses received the word of Yahweh on Sinai and then slaughtered bulls and sprinkled their blood on the altar and the people. In Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we hear detailed prescriptions governing the offering of sacrifice to the Lord. Oblations that too place in the tabernacle or tent sanctuary accompanying the wandering people in the desert.
Why would the worship that Yahweh demanded be sacrificial in form? Prior to the fall, adoration would have been effortless, but after the tumble into sin, right praise comes only at a cost. This is because heterodoxy, bad praise, had twisted the human person out of shape setting mind against will, body against spirit etcetera. To recover one’s spiritual equilibrium therefore is necessarily painful. When someone brought an animal to the tabernacle and later to the temple for sacrifice, he was saying implicitly that what was happening to the animal should by rights, be happening to him. Now as we know the heart of the tabernacle was the Ark of the Covenant, the gold plated box of acacia wood which housed the remnants of the tablets of the law, the rod of Aaron and some pieces of manna.
All reminders of the Exodus journey and the Sinai covenant. This Ark became the focus of Israelite worship, both a sign of Yahweh’s presence among His people and a pledge of the people’s obedience. Like Noah’s Ark, it was microcosm of Eden, creation rightly ordered around the praise of God which is precisely why the Ark was carried by Israel into battle. In the book of Numbers we hear a quote, “Whenever the Ark set out, Moses would say, Arise oh Lord, let your enemies be scattered and your foes flee before you.” The task of the kingly and priestly people of Israel was to Edenize the world and hence they would carry this emblem of Eden before them when they met the enemies of Yahweh.
One of the central tragedies of Israelite history is described in 1st Samuel, the loss of the Ark during disastrous battle with the Philistines. “So the Philistines fought. Israel was defeated and they fled, everyone to his home. There was a very great slaughter. For the fail of Israel, 30,000 foot soldiers. The Ark of God was captured, the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phineas died.” That’s 1 Samuel 4: 10 and 11. This represented a colossal failure of the kingly and priestly mission of Israel, the collective Adam.
There’s somewhat comical section of 1st Samuel known as the Ark narrative. We see that the power of the true God is greater than that of the false gods that can beguile the human heart. When the Ark of the Covenant is brought in to the house of Dagon, the shrine of the god, gods of the Philistines, the idols collapse before it, “But when they rose early on the next morning, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord.” Because of the attitude of worship, is much more than an affirmation of one particular ancient Middle Eastern god being more powerful than another.
It’s a showing forth of his absolutely central theme, that human flourishing is a consequence of right praise. The central battle of Israel’s God is always against idolatry. For everything that’s dysfunctional in the human heart in society, flows finally from that primordial skewing. In this regard, the story of the ark’s triumph over Dagon is not unlikely accounted 1st Kings, of Elijah’s victory over the priest of Baal. Now, this brief overview provides however inadequately, a background for the decisively important 6th chapter of 2nd Samuel, at which point I’m going to take off my coat.
Having become king, David knows he must become a priest for he is to preside over a liturgical kingdom. In the book of Exodus, we hear that Yahweh would form an orthodox nation. A people of worship or right, “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” That’s Exodus 19:5. The prescription’s given to Moses and the sons of Aaron, as well as the mobile tabernacle of the ark, where the provisional means by which Yahweh was shaping His priestly people during the years of wandering and during the period of consolidation.
David intuited that these strands had to be gathered and that above all, the ark had to come to rest in his new capital city, providing thereby an ambiguous center for the nation. A still point around which all of its various elements could arrange themselves. This is why David’s establishment of the ark in Jerusalem, represents a certain climax to the narrative, that began with the fall and led to the formation of the priestly people, the cutting of covenants, the giving of the law, and the invasion of the promised land. Chapter 6 commences on a triumphant note, “David again gathered all the chosen men of Israel, 30,000. David and all the people with him set out and went from Baal, Judah, to bring up from there, the ark of God.”
The king chose a veritable army of his best men, in order to seize an apparently undefended piece of sacred furniture and bring it back to Jerusalem. What we’re meant to see, of course, is the enormous importance that David attaches to this mission. As Robert Paulson, one of the more gifted commentaries in this text, as Paulson’s astutely remarks, “We’re also meant to hear an echo of the 30,000 who were lost when the ark was taken by the Philistines. Baal, Judah or Ba’al in Judah, is a synonym for Kiriath-jearim, mentioned in 1st Samuel 7 and beautifully invoked in 132nd Psalm. “He, David, swore to the Lord and vowed to the mighty one of Jacob, ‘I will not enter my house or get into my bed. I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the Lord. We heard of it in Ephrata, we found it in the fields of Yaar.’” That’s Psalm 132.
This lyrical passage captures so well, the holy obsession of David to ground and center his liturgical empire through right praise. In the account of the scene in 1st Chronicles we hear, that David consulted with the entire people before making this move, and that they enthusiastically supported him. Hence we see the liturgical people gladly shaping themselves around the ark and around the priest king. The Ark of the Covenant we are told was in the house of Abinadab, an Israelite who presumably took it, when it was returned by the Philistines many years before, convinced that it bore a curse. Abinadab’s dwelling is said to be on a hill, which probably carries the implication of a holy place or a shrine of some kind.
What’s of some interest is why, during the long years of Saul’s reign and the civil war, the ark had been more or less forgotten. Was this perhaps emblematic of the fact that suspension of the right worship and the dissolution of Israel, always go hand in hand. Once he found the ark, David endeavored to bring it back. He placed it, we hear, in a new cart, which is to say, a cart that has never been used for any secular purpose, and he commences the journey back to Jerusalem. We then hear that Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, were directing the cart and that David and his entourage were dancing with reckless abandon before the ark of the Lord.
When the festive liturgical procession reached the thrashing floor of Nakon, the oxen stumbled and the ark was jostled, so that Uzzah, innocently enough reached out to steady it. At which point he was struck dead by an angry god, we hear. That was probably no story in 2 Samuel that puzzles and irritates a contemporary reader more than this one. To conceive of God’s ark is the bearer of a deadly electric charge or to conceive of God as a cruel tyrant, capable of an utterly disproportionate reaction to a minor and unintentional liturgical infraction, seems at best primitive and it was dangerous. Much of the liberal enlightened theologizing of the last 200 years, in fact, Miller takes against this sort of construal of God’s relationship with humanity.
The problems with liberal theology of course, that this story had 2 Samuel, is hardly egregious. The Bible is filled with accounts of God’s anger, God’s justice and God’s punishment. Often enough, the Biblical authors presented divine retribution, which appears at least to us, disproportionate and exaggerated. What sense can we make of it? The one who created the whole of the cosmos, the heavens and the earth, the more scriptural terminology, cannot be determined by any limitations or ontological conditions that circumscribe creatures. The one who gives the entirety of the being of the world, cannot for example, be characterized as standing in need of any further existential realization. This in turn entails the immutability of the creator.
It’s crucially important to note, this hasn’t a thing to do with God being cold or indifferent to the world that He’s made. Rather God’s immutability means that God cannot change in a creaturely way, which is to say, in the manner of finite being, moving beyond its limits towards some greater perfection of being. From God’s unchangability, we can deduce that God does not pass in and out of emotional states. Shifting as we do, from contentment to discontentment, from joy to anger, from anticipation to disappointment etcetera. As the author of 1 John clarifies, God is love, implying the very to be of God’s identical with the stance an attitude of love.
Mutable as we are, we creatures fall in and out of love. We love to varying degrees, we love and then we don’t love. This can’t be the case with regard to the God, who stands beyond the ontological vagaries of the created realm. How’s this divine love manifest itself? To answer that question adequately, we have to be clear about what love is. For the mainstream with the theological and spiritual tradition, love is not an emotional sentiment, but rather the act of willing the good of the other as other. This means that love will express itself into a variety of ways, depending upon the object of love.
If I love someone who’s on a self-destructive path, my willing as good, will undoubtedly appear as harsh, angry even punitive. If I’m trying to get that person rightly aligned. Therefore, God’s anger in the Bible might be construed as a symbolic expression of God’s passion to set things right. We might think of God’s love as a pure white light, which upon passing through the prism of creation history breaks in a variety of colors. The language the Biblical authors it draws it must be from psychology of general experience, gestures analogically toward the various ways, the one divine love manifests itself for the world.
As we all know a storyteller tends to express themselves in bold and exaggerated ways, and the Biblical narrators are no exceptions. To give just two examples, think of the ages of the patriarchs and the number of warriors mastered for, or killed in battle. Thus, when they want to adjust you toward the divine passion to set things right, they will often present God, a God raging in anger or burning with indignation, even putting thousands to death. We shouldn’t literalize this language either historically or psychologically, instead we should construe it as a poetic indication of the dark face of a love, which remains essentially mysterious to us.
With those clarifications in mind, let’s return to this particular story of Uzzah and the Ark of the Covenant. Why would Yahweh be angry at Uzzah’s attempt to prevent the sacred ark from falling to the ground? The case just seems to be liturgical impropriety. In Exodus 25, we hear of God’s explicit instruction regarding the construction of the ark. “You shall make poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold. You shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark by which to carry the ark. The pole shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.” That’s Exodus 25:13-15.
God wanted the ark designed in a very particular way, and he ordained it to be carried in a very particular way. The principle problem with David’s first attempt to carry the ark into his capital city is that he was hauling it by cart, rather than carrying it by the poles. It was this faster but more precarious form of transport that caused the ark to tip, and Uzzah to react. Now, once more, we’re surely tempted to conclude that a God, who’d respond with deadly violence to such a minor violation of liturgical law, is surely a tad unbalanced.
Yet we have to keep the symbolic nature of the language in mind, and get to the spiritual truth the author is endeavoring to communicate. The entire purpose of liturgy is to restore humanity to right order. Adoratio leading to the harmonizing of self in society as we’ve seen. Over the course of many centuries, Yahweh had been forming His people in the of orthodoxy, and at the heart of His right praise, is a decentering of the self, a twisting away from the ego and a turning toward God. As we saw, the founder of Israel, Abraham, was a man who listened to God and the whole of Israel had life. Covenant, worship, prophesy etc., was a systematic attempt to help the people to listen, to attend to the Lord. Hence, “Hear o Israel, the lord your God is Lord alone.” The famous Shema in Deuteronomy 6.
It was indeed more convenient to convey the ark by the means of an oxcart, but the Lord had instructed it to be carried by poles. A small matter, perhaps, but obedience, listening, is the hinge on which Israelite life turns. God was angry, not because Uzzah’s act personally offended Him, and point the fact that one who needs nothing from the world, cannot even in principle be offended. Rather because it represented a compromising of the liturgical attitude. Now, the church fathers, whom I’m imitating here, are eminently clear on this score.
Chrysostom says, “As the wrath of God was drawn down on Uzzah for intruding on an office that was not his own, so God’s wrath will likewise advance against those who subvert the gospel.” Salvian [of Marseilles) remarks, “Uzzah’s punishment for steadying the ark, shows that nothing may be considered lightly when it pertains to God.” Finally Pacian of Barcelona comments, “So greater concern was there of reverence toward God, that God did not accept bold hands even out of help.” There’s another theological theme that emerges from this odd tale which is worthy of some careful consideration, namely that of the divine inscrutability and sublimity. The creator of the universe cannot, as we saw, be categorized in any conventional philosophical system.
God cannot be definitely defined or set an easy contrast to other beings or states of affairs. Thomas Aquinas catches the sheer strangeness of God, when he comments that God is not in any genus, even the genus of being. Further the providential range of God includes the whole of creation, which means the totality of time and space. All this implies that God’s activities and purposes in the world will necessarily remain inscrutable to a finite mind. All the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God, how in-searchable are his judgments, how inscrutable His ways, says Paul in Romans 11. The strangers of God and His actions have nothing to do with capriciousness on God’s part. That’s read with the function of God’s absolutely unique manner of being and our limited consciousness.
The author of the book of Job, of course, makes much of the same point in his magnificently constructed dialog between a frustrated human sufferer and the providential Lord of the entire cosmos. We might utilize a content conceptual framework and speak of the sublimity of God. Which is to say, God’s overwhelming of the human sensorium and intellect. Hans Von Balthasar spoke of God as a raging alpine torrent which utterly smashes any receptors designed to channel it and convert it to human use. The divine sublimity is by torrents thrilling and terrifying.
The Prophet Isaiah could exalt of the overwhelming beauty of God manifested in a temple vision of clouds and angels. As the letter to the Hebrews has it, it’s a fearful thing to fall out of the hands of a living God. A one sided stress on the latter quality gives us an arbitrary God. But a unilateral stress on the former gives us a superficial and manipulatable God. Without for a moment rescinding any of the clarifications made above, I would simply say this, Yahweh’s striking down of Uzzah is finally inexplicable. It’s a symbolic expression if you want, of the sublimity of God. The sheer weirdness of God’s act would help to explain why, “David was angry because the Lord had burst forth, with that outburst upon Uzzah.” That’s 2 Samuel 6:8.
Robert Alter renders the Hebrew here as afraid of the Lord and the ambivalence is eloquent. For both anger and fear would indeed be understandable reactions to the disorienting sublimity of God. To be sure in pastoral context, the Christian minister often discovers that anger at and fear of God are very common states of soul, among those who are striving to believe in God. On account of this anger/fear, David resolved not to bring the ark into his capital and instead had it sent, ‘to the house of Obed Edom, the Gittite.’ Most likely a Philistine from Gath, who had attached himself to David during the time when David was a vessel of the King of Gath. In the earlier sections of the so called ark narrative, the presence of the ark of the covenant in the temple of the Philistines had caused, if you saw, the foreign gods could fall.
Now however, while the sacred vessel resides in a house of a Philistine within Israel, “The Lord blessed Obed Edom, and all his household.” 2 Samuel 6:11. Is there a foreshadowing here of the ingathering of the nations? A hint of the blessings that would come to the peoples of the world when they ordered themselves to the right praise of God. Inspired by this benediction of Obed Edom’s home, David and Deborah knew to bring the ark into its proper house in Jerusalem. What ensued was one of the richest and most festive liturgical processions described in the Bible. The king was careful not to make the same mistake he’d made before, hauling the ark by oxcart, this time he arranged for bearers, to carry the ark by poles set through rings, as Exodus specified.
Further he ordered, that when the bearers had taken but 6 steps, they sacrifices, “An ox and a fatling.” There’s some ambiguity here, does the author mean to insinuate that the procession stopped every 6 paces to sacrifice? Or simply they did so at the beginning of the match? If the former were true, the pray would have been endless and Israel would have been emptied of oxen. In either case, the point is made that the ark is conduced in a festive but sacrificial attitude. The people aware of both of their blessing and of their sin. In the killing of the animals, we see an anticipation, of the thousands upon thousands of sacrifices that would take place over the centuries in the Jerusalem temple.
Though the practice is of course, utterly alien to us, the logic of sacrifice is actually quite straightforward. One returns to God some aspect of creation, in order to signal one’s gratitude for the whole of creation or for a blessing received or in reparation for sins committed. Again, the creator of the universe cannot possibly need anything in the universe, but the offer of the sacrifice needs the act of sacrifice in order to become rightly ordered to God. Further sacrifice involved the death of an animal, so that the inner pain of this reorientation might be adequately symbolized.
This great sacrificial procession, evocative of the entire sacrificial history and attitude of Israel, was presided over by the one who is not only king, but priest as well. The priesthood of David is unmistakably referenced in the gird the king dons for the parade, “He was girded with a linen ephod.” 2 Samuel 6:14. In the description of the priestly vestments to be worn by Aaron and his sons, the ephod is mentioned a number of times. In Leviticus we hear that Moses, “Brought Aaron and his sons forward and washed them in water. He put the tunic on him, fastened the sache around him, clothed him with the robe and put the ephod on him.” That is Leviticus 8:6.
Most tellingly for our purpose is Saul. Having invaded the sanctuary of Nob in search of David, ordered Doeg the Edomite to kill the priest. We’re told, “On that day he killed 85 who wore the linen ephod.” 1 Samuel 22:18. Quite clearly David had decided in putting on the garment of the priesthood to assume the role and take up the task of those fallen victims of Saul. He was also harkening back to Samuel, Eli, and the ironic priesthood, as well as the priesthood of Adam, the first one to assume that stance of adoration.
Only in light of the connection to Adam, can we fully understand the energetic dance of the king before the ark of the Lord. Before the fall, Adam would have walked in easy fellowship with Yahweh, thinking His thoughts, moving as He moved. He danced, you might say, in unison with the Lord. What is sin, but a falling out of step with God, an insistence upon dancing to one’s own rhythm. The whole of the history of salvation therefore, might be characterized as Yahweh’s attempt to restore the sacred dance. To get His human creatures to move with him. Accordingly, David dancing with energy before the ark is humanity dancing with the Lord, recovering the effortless harmony of Eden.
It’s been argued that the gestures and movements of the priests in the Jerusalem temple were intended to mimic in a stylized way, the exuberant dance of the king. Since the ritual moves with the Byzantine and Catholic Mass, trace their origins to the temple, we could conclude that the processions, gestures and bows of Christian priests today, participate in the priesthood of the king who wore the ephod, as he danced before the ark. I’d wager, there’s still another element of this story that makes it puzzling for most moderns, namely why David and his people would be dancing before, of all things, the law.
As we saw the Ark contained manna on the staff of Aaron, but it contained most importantly the tablets of the 10 commandments. The rather strict provisions and prohibitions given by Yahweh to Moses on Sinai. Most reasonable people in the west today would accept the law from traffic regulations to required income tax as a necessary evil. Something they had in the best of all possible worlds they would do without. Therefore, it would be difficult to imagine anyone dancing with joy before the tax code, with the latest prescriptions determined by a county board or even before the constitution.
To understand the coherence of David’s dance, we have to grasp the sea change that occurred from Biblical to modern times in regard both to law and to freedom. On the modern reading, freedom is primarily choice and self-determination. The roots to this view is stretched back to the late medieval period to the speculations of William of Ockham. For the English Franciscan, human freedom is utterly autonomous forced the capacity to choose on the basis of no constraint, either interior or exterior. The sheer independence of the will he argued is proved by an act of suicide committed by a sincere religious believer. For such a move against a supreme good is made in the presence of a supreme good. The contemporary Thomist Servais Pinckaers, refer to this alchemist notion as “the freedom of indifference,” for its predicated on the assumption that the free agent hovers indifferently above the yes and the no.
An implication of this way of construing freedom is that each moral act is monadic. Something like a white heady and the actual occasion. Precisely because a truly free choice can be determined by nothing whatsoever, now you’re the character of the agent nor the succession of his previous moral moves can have a determining influence on his present ethic al choice. On this interpretation, law must be seen as a limitation on freedom, hence, as at best, a necessary evil. Freedom perforce will chafe against the law and law by its right nature, will set limits to unruly freedom. Moreover, we’re not going to extrapolate theologically from this construal of freedom. He arrives in deed at an understanding of God as supremely arbitrary power. Since the divine freedom is as unconstrained in its essence as human freedom, infinite and finite liberty will necessarily confront each other as opponents. Their relationship will be mediated only by divine law powerfully imposed.
Many have argued that this account of the God-human relationship conduced by a few short logical steps to atheism. For such a God will inevitably be seen as a threat to human flourishing hence Ludwig Feuerbach can conclude that “no to God is yes to man.” Sarte would formulate the pithy syllogism, “If God exists, I cannot be free but I am free. Therefore, God does not exist.” All that follows seems to me from this Ockhamist construal of freedom.” Prior to Ockham, it was a very different notion of freedom. What Pinckaers calls “liberte de qualite”, freedom for excellence. Here freedom is not primarily choice in self-creation but the disciplining of desire in order to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.
One becomes a free player of the violin, capable of playing any type of music. Precisely in the measure that one submits to a range of disciplines, laws and practices. One becomes a free swinger of the golf club able to respond effortlessly with a shift in demands of the game in as much as one has internalized the laws and rules that governing good swinging. On this interpretation, law is not the opponent to freedom but rather the condition for its possibility. A most important contenement of this notion is if you articulated in the philosophical anthropology of Aquinas, namely that will is a function of intellect.
For Aquinas, the will emerges at the moment when the mind understands the good as good. This entails that the objective good never stands over and against freedom as a constraint but rather informs it and guides it at every turn. The theological implications are significantly non-alchemist. God is free, not as in much as he stands in sovereign indifference to the yes and the no but in as much as He can only say yes. That is in a measure that His will is utterly congruent with the goodness of His being. God and freedom are so construed that divine will is not a threat to human flourishing, just the contrary. Hence, the sacred law is indeed something in the presence of which a grateful humanity might be tempted to dance.
I’ll make a final set of observations and associations before turning from David’s stance. A connection of the fathers of the church made with particular enthusiasm was between the Ark of the Covenant which bore the divine law and Mary of Nazareth who bore the divine presence in the fullest possible sense. Hence Maximus of Turin says, “But what will we say the Ark was if not Holy Mary since the Ark carried within it the tables of the covenant while Mary bore the Master of that same covenant.” One of the many artistic depictions of this patristic association is the relief of a juxtaposed Mary and Ark which is curved in stone over the left portal of Notre Dame in Paris.
A number of symbolic echoes can now be heard. David rose and went to get the Ark which was in the house of Abinadab situated, we heard, on a hill, probably a shrine in the country of Judah. In the Gospel of Luke we’re told, that just after the annunciation, “Mary set out and went in haste to a Judean town in the hill country where she entered the house of Zachariah and greeted Elizabeth.” Luke 1:39. In other words, the supreme Ark, like its prototype, situates itself on a hilltop shrine in Judea. I don’t say shrine casually here, for Zachariah is a temple priest and Elizabeth a descendant of Aaron, the first priest. Further, after death of Uzzah, David said, “How can the Ark of the Lord come into my care?” 2 Samuel 6:9. Upon receiving her cousin, Elizabeth said, “Why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” Luke 1:43.
Both David and Elizabeth are unworthy to be in the presence of the bearer of the Lord. The King danced with all his might before the Ark and quote, “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb.” Luke 1:41. The unborn John the Baptist performing an infant’s dance in the presence of the true Ark. Finally an intriguing detail after the Uzzah incident, David sent the Ark as we saw to the home of Obed-edom where it stayed for three months. After delivering her great magnificat, “Mary remained with her, Elizabeth, about three months and then returned to her home.” Luke 1:56.
There can be little doubt that Luke is consciously echoing these stories of the Ark in order to highlight Mary’s identity as Theotokos. Now, as the procession wounds its way into the city, it caught the attention of Michal, the daughter of Saul, the first wife of David, who watched from a window high above the scene. We are told, “She despised him in her heart.” 2 Samuel 6:16. We only begin to imagine the texture of her feelings at this point in the narrative. She had witnessed the deaths of her father and brother and the fall of Saul’s kingdom. Her husband had gone on to marry several other women and fathered children with them while she remained childless.
David had her beloved second husband torn away from her as part of a cynical, political gain. Certainly, she had a right to feel angry and resentful toward the one whom she knew as an upstart shepherd boy who had now become king in the place of Saul and instead of Jonathan. Significantly, Michal is referred to in this short section, not as the wife of David but consistently as the daughter of Saul. Signaling that she represents the fading house of the former king that she gazes down from the window rather than participate in the celebration indicates that she represents the sullied past.
From her height, she regards David with the same haughty distain that her father once showed to his rival. Before, resuming the story of Michal, the narrator lingers over David’s performance of a variety of priestly and kingly tasks. First he established the Ark in its tent or tabernacle within the Holy City. Thus, anticipating the eventual installation of the Ark in a proper temple by his son, Solomon. Next he offered up burnt offerings and offerings of wellbeing to prototypes of what would become temple sacrifice. Finally, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of Hosts, 2 Samuel 6:18. Going into the Ark, offering sacrifice and then returning to bless the assembled crowd, David is anticipating the moves of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement, reconciling Yahweh in Israel and establishing a new garden. Finally, David performed a distinctively kingly act feeding, “The whole multitude of Israel, both men and women, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat and a cake of raisins.” 2 Samuel 6:19.
Here is Moses who promised to give the people food and drink during their sojourn in the desert and it’s Joshua who pledged to bring Israel to a land flowing with milk and honey. Is Adam sharing the fruitfulness of the garden. The Ark which was constructed in the shadow of Sinai had finally found a resting place and Jerusalem was thereby established as the center of Israelite worship, the still point around which the nation could turn. After performing these priestly and kingly functions, David returned home to his less than contented wife. Astonishingly, the conversation that follows, the only dialogue between Michal and David recorded in the Samuel literature. In 1 Samuel 19, she had urgently instructed David to flee from Saul but we heard nothing of David’s response to her in that episode. When we finally hear them speak to one another, we perceive only sarcasm, anger and incrimination.
Not content to wait for her husband to come in, Michal went out with energy to meet him and then poured invective into his ear, “How the king of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servant’s maids as any bolder fellow might shamelessly uncover himself.” 2 Samuel 6:20. The verb for uncovering clearly is a sexual connotation reflecting Michal’s insinuation that David crudely been offering his nakedness for the delighted contemplation of slave girls. There is no question there is more than a hint of sexual jealousy in Michal’s observation as well as for she added dangers to come through David’s sexual imprudence.
The king’s willingness to expose his nakedness even at the most public of settings, also harkens back to the garden and the time before the fall when Adam and Eve walked unselfconsciously naked in one another’s presence and in the sight of the Lord. That the nakedness of David is revealed precise in the act of worship, only reinforces the connection to the Adam of innocent pre-lapsarian Adoratio. The king’s response to his first wife is both psychologically devastating and theologically interesting, “It was before the Lord who chose me in place of your father and all your household to appoint me as prince over Israel. The people of the Lord, that I have danced before the Lord.” 2 Samuel 6:21.
With those words, David put pain the notion that the house Saul would have any say in the governance of Israel. In the perhaps when the hope of Saul in his more elusive moments that his house would endure precisely through the son of David and Michal but Saul himself, when the wicked spear was upon him, had so interrupted their marriage that no progeny came from them. Now David is definitively shutting the door on that possibility and thereby shutting down the Sauline line. Moreover, the decision of David is given qausi-divine sanction since a sort of curse settled upon her from that moment, “And Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child to the day of her death.” 2 Samuel 6:23.
Now, I said David’s rejoinder was also theologically interesting in this for several reasons. First we see the paradox that a person’s debasement before God is tantamount not to diminution him but to elevation and enhancement. If one human being debased himself before another, such an act would indeed be humiliating and dehumanizing. For a competitiveness or zero sum dynamic does obtain among finite things. However, as I’ve been saying over and over, the creator God is not one being however supreme among many.
Therefore, there is no ontological competition between Him and creatures. God does not stand over and against the world but exists precisely as the ground of the world’s existence. Accordingly, the debasement of a human being before God does not result in that person’s annihilation but rather in his fulfillment. It’s this very paradoxical quality of the Biblical God’s relationship with humanity that permits Saint Irenaeus to assert “the glory of God as a human being fully alive.” And this is why David can honor Yahweh precisely through an exuberant dance and in the spirit of joy.
Secondly, the episode sheds considerable light on the relationship between political power and the authority of God. King David’s abeyance before God is a clear indication that he realizes his worldly rule must be situated in the context of God’s providence and placed upon the foundation of moral principles derived from God. Once more, the correlation to the kingship of Adam is illuminating. The first man function as a good rule of Eden as long as he was obedient to the divine word and responsive to the promptings of the divine spirit.
His kingship foundered the moment he seized for himself the propagative with determining the difference between good and evil. When he arrogates to himself, the power to establish the moral foundation for his kingly choices. This move which is functionally equivalent to the suspension of orthodoxy leads inevitably to expulsion from the garden and to loss of rule. Once more, the whole Biblical narrative, from Genesis to the account of David‘s kingly dance might be construed as a story of humanity struggling to recover the right relationship between human and divine authority.
Again and again, the biblical authors tell us an earthly kings are rightly conceived under the egis of God. They consistently show us the devastation, both personal and societal that follows from the laying aside of this truth. The Lords at the tower of babel, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, the kings and the Malachi’s of Philistines. All recapitulate is sin of Adam and set themselves up as the criteria for good and evil. Israel, in principle, was meant to be the countersign, a corporate Adam, a people whose political and cultural life unfolded according to God’s will and principle. In his treatise on law, Thomas Aquinas teaches that positive law, which to say that concrete prescription by which society is governed is derivative from the natural law. The first principle of morality and their immediate applications which in turn is grounded in eternal law which is none other than the reasonability of the divine mind itself.
When this nesting relationship is overlooked, positive law becomes but an expression of the will to power of the legislator and the moral integrity of a society so governed is fatally compromised. At least a vestige of this Thomistic understanding can be discerned in the American declaration of Independence, precisely in its affirmation of the rights to life, liberty and happiness exclusively recognized as co-endowed by the creator. The implications that the positive laws which would govern the United States must be correlated to the objective moral principles articulated as rights which in turn are implanted in us by God.
Joseph Ratzinger proposes a reading of Jesus conversation with Pilate which is opposite here under pressure from rest of crowd. Pilate both abdicates more responsibility and confesses ignorance of any objective ground for moral decision making. What is the truth? Having severed any possible link between positive law and natural law, he surrenders to the whim of the crowd, asking them to decide whether an obviously guilty man or an obviously innocent man should be released. This, Ratzinger argues is the prototype of the moral governance by public opinion poll so prevalent in our society today. With the severance of positive moral and internal law and then with results in, is as we saw, the ultimacy of the legislator’s will to power.
Thus Pilate bullyingly says to Jesus, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Don’t you know I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you” to which the one who came to testify to the truth said, “You would have no power over me unless it would have been given to you from above. Pilate’s authority, the legitimacy of which Jesus does not question is nevertheless sub-alternate to the higher authority of God. David, the king who danced to his joyful reverence before God is an apt iconic representation of this truth.
A third theological implication of David’s response to Michal was that in a properly religious context, the ecstatic trumps are rational and are moralistic. In a certain sense, Michal was right in critiquing the king for a somewhat imprudent display. It would not be hard to find all together respectable and reasonable moral categories. According to which David’s dance would be categorized as inappropriate. Perhaps he truly gave scandals, some in Jerusalem that day and was the occasion for lustful thoughts and others. The prim, downward looking Michal aptly symbolizes the moral dimension that’s legitimately part of religion.
You might say this is sort of ancient Israelite Kant for whom religion was entirely a matter of morality rationally construed. Kant’s programmatic text, religion was within the limits of reason alone, gives away the nature of the project. As Paul Tillich once argued, real religion can never be captured within the limits of reason alone. Precisely because it involves the honoring of the unconditioned. Whatever can be grasped by reason is ipso facto condition. Therefore, the relationship to the properly unconditioned must involve the bursting of the bonds of reason.
An ecstatic leap outside of the self and beyond the controlling aspect of the mind. John Henry Newman speaks of the kingly prophetic and priestly dimensions of the church. In its kingly mode, the church is marked by order, authority, discipline. In its prophetic mode, it’s rational, inquisitive, engaged in dialogue with the wider culture. In its priestly mode, it's prayerful, contemplative and mystical. Without the levering of the priestly, Newman contents, the prophetic dimension devolves in short order into a dry rationalism. The moral Michal might be read as the prophetic side of religion. The dancing David as the priestly side of religion which refuses to be constrained by reason alone.
With that … Without proper conclusion I’ll bring the talk to a close. Thanks for listening so greatly. Thank you.
