L.D. 40, I Kings 21:1-16 "Seeing the Person" Scott Hoezee

One of the finer films I have ever seen is the French movie Jean de Florette. The title character of Jean is an endearing man possessed of a generous, outgoing, and optimistic spirit. Jean is also a hunchback with all the attendant physical limitations that come with that difficulty. As the film opens, Jean learns that he has inherited a large plot of land in the French countryside. He has been a city slicker his whole life but decides that it's time to get back to nature. So he moves his wife and daughter to the farmhouse on his new property and decides to take up vegetable farming. It may be difficult because, as Jean well knows, that particular region was known for long and at times devastating droughts.

What Jean does not know, however, is that there is a natural spring on his property. With the water this spring provides, Jean could irrigate his crops easily and year-round. But the spring is of no use to Jean because he doesn't know it exists. And he doesn't know it exists because no one tells him. Just prior to Jean's moving to the country, the neighbors on a nearby farm find the spring and decide to plug it up. They purposely keep Jean in the dark in the hopes that his efforts at farming will fail dismally. Once Jean moves back to the city, the neighbors will generously offer to take that "useless" property off his hands, uncork the spring, and make themselves rich by growing carnations on the fertile property.

As it turns out, however, Jean was a determined man. Despite a withering drought his first summer there, Jean works himself nearly to death, hauling heavy buckets of water from a well some miles from his farm. Despite his yeoman's efforts, however, Jean fails and we sadly watch as Jean's hopes wither along with his crops. Still not to be outdone, though, Jean goes for broke. Believing that there had to be subterranean water available, he decides to use dynamite to blast out a well. So he lays TNT in a shallow hole not 50 feet from the hidden spring. But after the blast, debris flies everywhere, including a large stone that strikes Jean on the head and kills him. After Jean's widow and daughter move back to the city, the neighbors take over the land and they makes themselves exceedingly wealthy.

The Catechism claims that Jean de Florette's neighbors killed this man. No, they had not shot him, stabbed him, or poisoned him. They had not even lit the fuse on the dynamite whose blast did Jean in. But by their envy, greed, and deception, they had insulted and belittled their neighbor even as they set off the series of calamitous events that resulted in a good and innocent man's death.

The sordid story in I Kings 21 is similar, even though in this story the perpetrators of murder take a more direct hand in the killing off of a good man. But unlike the fictional tale of Jean de Florette, the story in I Kings is included in Scripture to teach us something about God, about ourselves, and about God's designs for his creation. As we consider the sixth commandment's injunction against murder, we will look at this story of Ahab, Jezebel, and Naboth with an eye to what it teaches us about the value of life also today.

With a little embellishing help from Frederick Buechner, let's review this sad story and take note of some undercurrents we might otherwise miss. As this chapter opens, we see that King Ahab, although the lord of all he surveys, is finally bored. A partial reason for this looks to be that his wife, Jezebel, has taken over all the official duties of the monarchy. Ahab has become just a royal figurehead, the man who gets to hold the scepter for official photo ops but who otherwise has been sidelined by his scheming wife who can sign his name better than he can. And she does sign it, affixing the royal seal to all kinds of documents that Ahab never actually gets to see.

So with nothing but idle time on his idle hands, Ahab decides he needs a hobby and settles on gardening. And this was going to be his avocation, something that his wife could not touch. But where could he establish this little agricultural paradise far from the nagging of his nettlesome wife? The answer came to Ahab one day when he was sitting at his desk, looking out the window. The desk was clean and tidy as always--official documents never made it that far. So as he idly drummed his fingers on the desk blotter, he spied a neighboring vineyard--the perfect place for his garden! A quick check of the property records revealed that this vineyard belonged to one Naboth of Jezreel. So, without telling Jezebel, Ahab goes to Naboth and offers him a sweet deal.

"Naboth, I'm rich but bored. You are poor but overworked. So I am going to make you an offer you can't refuse: if you give me your vineyard, I will grant to you any vineyard in the kingdom you want. Or, if you prefer, I'll give you cash on the barrel-head and let you name your price. Just think, Naboth, you could retire, buy a villa in Jaffa overlooking the Mediterranean and spend the rest of your years taking your ease with your wife. So what do you say, do we have a deal?"

They did not. Naboth didn't even ask to sleep on it. And the reason why Naboth was able to make such a snap decision is revealed in the first thing he says: "Yahweh forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers." Naboth invokes the sacred name of God, of Yahweh, the Lord of Israel. But what does Yahweh have to do with a simple real estate deal involving deeds and titles and notary publics? Naboth knows what Ahab long ago forgot: the land of Israel does not belong to any mere person. The land belongs to Yahweh. The Israelites were tenants on God's land. The distribution of the land had been a matter of holy covenants between God and his children. Each tribe and family received a certain allocation of property with the stipulation that this land was to remain with that family in perpetuity. In other words, the land was not Naboth's to give away, trade, or sell.

Naboth respected God. He honored God's designs for life, knowing that God set up the rules the way he did for a reason. At least part of the reason was to extend God's faithfulness generation to generation. So if Naboth had taken Ahab up on his sweet offer, sure it would have set him and his wife up nicely for a few years, but there would be no inheritance for his children and grandchildren. So he refused.

All of that looks to have been lost on Ahab. All he knew was that he had been rebuffed. And he was so used to being powerless (despite being king) that he doesn't even protest. It does not even occur to him to flex a little royal muscle. Instead he goes home like a petulant child, draws the curtains shut in his bedroom, lies down on the bed and pulls the covers up to his chin to engage in some world-class sulking. Jezebel finds him in this snit and soon enough discovers the cause. "Are you a man or a cup custard!?" she fairly shrieked. "Honestly, my liege! Cheer up. I will take care of this for you." And she does. In a plot that was beautiful for its subtle simplicity, Jezebel manages to get Naboth stoned to death based on the flimsiest of false charges hurled at him by some local scoundrels.

The irony, of course, is that the one person in this story who displays genuine piety before God is killed on a charge of blasphemy! Meanwhile, Ahab and Jezebel, who between them could not generate 25 watts of spiritual earnestness (unless you count their dabbling in the cult of Baal) cloak themselves in a garment of religiosity by supposedly putting down the blasphemers in Israel. All in all, what we have in I Kings 21 is a moral inversion--this is what the world looks like when people live upside-down. Everything is out-of-whack.

Of course, because there is a God in heaven whose name is Yahweh, they don't get away with it, not finally. Elijah receives news of this sordid and sad story and so pays Ahab a visit on the same day that Ahab is strolling through his ill-gotten-gain. Elijah finds Ahab carrying a fistful of little wooden stakes with pictures of cucumbers and carrots at the top as he plans out his garden. Ahab is feeling unusually full of himself that day and so greets the prophet, "Elijah, you old royal pain-in-the-neck, you! What brings you this way?" Elijah replies, "Oh, nothing in particular except to inform you that by divine decree, you and your wife are dog food." Amazingly, Ahab (who, despite his bluster, is just a walking Milquetoast) gets frightened enough as to offer up just enough repentance that God delays the punishment. But Ahab and Jezebel will suffer for their wanton wrecking of shalom.

And make no mistake: nothing less than shalom is at the heart of this story. But then, viewed from the right angle, shalom is at the heart of all our stories every single day. On this first Sunday in Lent, we see again that the essence of sin is the unraveling of shalom. Shalom as God intended it in the beginning is far more than "peace" as we typically define it. Shalom is not simply an absence of conflict--in fact, a lack of conflict is just the ground floor of shalom. Positively speaking, shalom involves a vast network of interlocking and mutually edifying relationships. Shalom happens when every person and every creature takes care to build up every other person and creature.

Scientists now tell us that the universe is quantum in nature. Way down in the infinitesimally small reaches of the microscopic universe, it turns out that reality is like a vast spider web. Everything is ultimately connected to everything else. So if something causes the web to quiver even way up on some far corner, eventually reverberations of that resonate through the whole fabric of existence. Each thing affects all other things. For instance, when we think of the December 26 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, we think of an event far away from here. But the earthquake, and subsequent wave that resulted, actually affected the whole planet. Sensitive instruments even here in the Midwest picked up the vibrations and it turns out that the entire Earth shuddered and so tilted a bit on its axis.

Shalom recognizes that God created this cosmos as a unity. Hence, we affect those around us either for good or for ill. We either enhance the life of our neighbors or we detract from it. There are a thousand ways short of actual murder to diminish life. A story such as the one told in the film Jean de Florette is designed to remind us that the very envious, greed-driven attitudes that can lead us to mistreat or lie to a neighbor always lead to death--perhaps it is not always a literal death as with Jean, but we can make life a living death even so. You don't have to stop someone's heart to kill him.

So a key way to keep shalom before us is to keep the reality of other people before us. A commentary I read on I Kings pointed out something very clever: chapter 21 contains 28 verses. Yet within the span of those 28 verses, the name of Naboth comes up twenty times. It comes up eighteen times in the first 16 verses--that's more than once per verse! Why? Because the author of this chapter is being very poignant: Naboth was a real person with a name. He was not a pawn, the way Jezebel and Ahab treated him. Naboth was not a mere symbol for something else, he was not some impersonal obstacle to be surmounted. This was a real man with a name, with a family who loved him. And, as a devout person, he was a man whose name was cherished by God as well. Life is always personal.

In the modern world, though, this becomes increasingly difficult to keep in mind. In the wider society, issues involving life are increasingly difficult to personalize. We hear about stem cell lines and embryos, abortions and morning-after pills but so much of that is faceless and anonymous, which could make it easy to keep it in a category separate from human life. Yes, there are fierce debates as to what involves actual persons and what does not, and we need to parse such issues ethically and thoughtfully and prayerfully. For the most part, though, in the wider scheme of that interconnected universe we just talked about, we keep on taking human life seriously, we treat it delicately most certainly when we can put a name to such life but even when we can't put a name to it.

Even so we face confusing choices involving medical and research techniques. After all, some such research may extend and enhance the lives of our neighbors (and that much seems to go along with Lord's Day 40) and yet some of the avenues through which potential cures come involve life in ways that properly cause us grave concern. Then there are matters of war and peace. In a dangerous world where terrorists have shown no hesitation in taking the lives of innocent people whose names they do not know, we in turn face difficult responses that will affect people whose names we don't know but who are precious in God's sight and so who must not disappear behind anonymous labels such as "collateral damage." Again, anytime we sense that people are being labeled or categorized in ways that make them appear to be less than real persons, we need to be very concerned.

Many issues are difficult and fraught with crosscurrents that can be hard to parse. But despite that, we stand with our God on the side of promoting and protecting life in all its forms and dimensions. We stand on the side of our God in wanting to make life better for those around us, and there are so many ways by which to do that. The Catechism goes so far as to apply this to even looks and gestures. How or to what extent we nourish the lives of the people around us involves even dirty looks and rude hand gestures; it involves racial slurs and nasty notes; it involves derisive laughter and a sneering mouth. Because there is virtually no end to the ways by which we can kill each other's spirits (not to mention literally snuff out a precious life), there is likewise virtually no end to the ways we need to make sure that we avoid that which is deadening so that we can create the space needed to pursue the words, the looks, the gestures, the actions that are life-enhancing.

"It's a terrible thing to kill a man," Clint Eastwood's character said in the startling movie Unforgiven. "You take all he ever had, all he has, and all he could ever have." Indeed, murder in all its forms affects the past, the present, and the future. What had once been good is lost. What is presently good is wiped out. And whatever future goodness someone might have contributed to the world is prevented.

God made a covenant with Israel designed to make life flourish. Naboth knew of that covenant and honored it. Ahab and Jezebel knew nothing of God's designs for this world and so wantonly tore down so as to build up only their own sorry selves. But that's always the way of it. From the time of Cain and Abel forward, we humans make a hash out of the gift of life. That's why, in an event as arresting as it was absolutely unexpected, God finally fulfilled his covenant desire for life through nothing less than the death of his Beloved Son. In the greatest paradox we will ever know, life returned through death. This Lenten Season is a six-week opportunity to probe the depths of that mystery again--a mystery that demonstrates God's fierce determination to let life, not death, have the last, best word.

There is a sequel to the movie Jean de Florette. In the movie Manon de Source or Manon of the Spring, Jean's daughter, Manon, discovers years later the treachery of the neighbors, the deceit that led to her father's untimely death. So she dedicates herself to bringing these men to justice, having them convicted of a fraud whose real name was murder. Such justice cannot bring back the dead but it does help everyone to stand again on the side of life.

In the Bible there is likewise a kind of sequel to this unhappy story of Naboth and Ahab's hoped-for garden. This other story takes place in another garden where one morning long ago a man burst the bands of death to walk alive out of a tomb. And that man now tenderly raises up all of this world's Naboths, ushering them into a glorious kingdom where life triumphs forevermore. Amen.