An essay on ministry taken from recent notes for a ‘solemn charge’ I gave our pastoral team (together with their spouses) at All Saints Honolulu, a church-plant that enters its fifth year.
I.
After receiving the sword of Goliath from Ahimelech at Nob, and after fleeing first to and then from Gath, David arrives at the grotto of Adullam and establishes a base of operations. Things seem set for a kind of tribal vendetta; he is joined, as is only natural perhaps, by his kin: “And when his brothers and all his father’s house heard it, they went down there to him” (1 Samuel 22:1b).
This whole trajectory should signal an alarm if we are attentive. It was to a cave (מְעָרָה) that Lot and his daughters fled after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:30), and what happens there is deception, drunkenness, and incest—things which “should not be done in Israel.” And it was to the cave at Makkedah that the five defeated kings of the Amorites fled in order to escape the judgement of Joshua’s army after they had unjustly attacked Gibeon (Joshua 10:16–26). Those five kings were blood relatives, though perhaps distant; they were the ruling sons of noble Amorite houses.
Even when caves do not denote sin or failure, as in the above stories, they are frequently (especially in Genesis) tombs—places of death. It is a mearah in Machpelah that Abaraham purchased to bury Sarah (23). It is there that Isaac and Ishamel lay their father when he too passes away (25:7–10), and there that Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah are buried (49:29–31). Caves are places for the dead.
Caves appear again in Israel’s story in the days of the judges, when they turn from Yahweh and do what is evil in his sight. The Lord gives them into the hand of the Midianites who take their homes and fields, leaving the Israelites to make “for themselves hiding places that were in the mountains, caves, and strongholds” (Judges 6:2). And it is to caves that the men of Israel again flee when they are overcome by the Philistines in the early regency of Saul (1 Sam 13:6).
“No, David,” we might want to cry out with grave (*pun!*) concern: “not to a cave, you fool! Caves are where people go who are dead—or very soon will be!” Holing up in a cave with one’s blood kin to escape dire straits has rarely resulted in redemption in all the Bible which has come before David’s story. Caves are dying places, places for the dead, places marked out for those on whom the contagion of the curse has fallen; they go deep into the ground which has been cursed by the fall of our first father, Adam, awaiting the Day of the Lord.
But that is not what happened. David’s story does not end like Lot’s or the Amoritish Regents’. Life does not depart from him when he enters the cave. Instead, life flourishes. It’s an inversion of the Joseph story. The brothers join him in the pit who has been cast into it. They have fled to this place not because they have despaired in God’s promises but because they believe He will be faithful to keep them.
II.
Others gather to David also: “Every man in distress and every man who was debt-bitten and every man who was of bitter-soul gathered to him, and he became their commander. Now there were about four hundred men with him” (1 Samuel 22:2).
Life takes an interesting shape for this little emerging “Israel within Israel.” David does not assemble an “A-Team” drawn from the hotshots of Saul’s host. Those mighty gibborim we read of later (2 Samuel 23:8–39; 1 Chronicles 11:10–47) begin their careers here, in this place, as failures and outcasts, huddling in a cavern around a boyish fugitive strumming a lyre. The three descriptions given of them are illuminating:
- “Distress” recalls the curses of Deuteronomy 28 and the prophecies of Jeremiah 19 where Israel is warned that if they forsake the Lord they will become like those who consume their own children in the distress of siege warfare’s privations. This is not a throw-away descriptor but one that names the way in which those who gathered to David are members of an Israel who has suffered mightily, out of measure, in the way of Death. “Distress” names a mode of life in which the final judgement takes the form of familia-phagy—the final stage in a system of political and social cannibalism where one’s own flourishing is the justification for the consumption of one’s neighbor. In coming to David, they make a turning from that way and to the way of Life. Something strange about the Kid from Bethlehem (the Judahite adolescents carnifex) in the belly of the pit offers them redemption from the distress which have come upon them.
- “Debt-bitten” is how I have rendered the Hebrew nasha (נָשָׁא). The phrase not only names those who are under an oath or under a debt, but who have found themselves in that situation through circumstances in which someone else’s advantage had been levelled against them. These are those who have been beguiled into their state of usury and indenture. This is the phrase employed by Nehemiah when he confronts the nobility of Israel for making debt-slaves of the newly returned exiles (5:7). Closely related to other words for usury and debt, such as neshek (נֶשֶׁךְ) and nashak (נָשַׁךְ), they form a semantic domain of meaning, triangulating the contours of a person who has been “bitten” (cf. Numbers 21:6–9, ha-nashuk) into bondage and whose life is drained away by the one whose teeth made the sucking socioeconomic wound.
- “Bitter-soul” is a startling compound, mar-nephesh. In the beginning God makes Adam, like the other beasts, a “living soul,” a nephesh khayah (נֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה, cf. Genesis 1:20–30, and 2:19 of the animals, 2:7 of Adam), the noun “soul” being modified by the word “living.” What kind of soul does God make Adam? A living one. Those who draw near to David are, instead, those who have been de-vivified and disenfranchised. They exist in a state which Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life”; namely, a being whose existence is acknowledged only as a matter of incidental and material fact and whose significance in social and political life can be estimated in their sheer utility for the powerful (Agamben’s original Italian phrase is vita nuda). They are those the Scriptures qualify as “bitter,” the same word used for the waters at Marah (Exodus 15:22–16:35) and for Naomi when she loses two sons, her bridegroom, and one daughter-in-law (Ruth 1:20).
David is a new prince in Israel, a life-giving king, who turns the place of death into the secret well of life within a kingdom that is crumbling. He is a son of Adam who rules from a cavern. He gives provision for those who are in close-to-cannibal distress. There’s no little irony here: being in exile with David, living under a kind of long siege from Saul’s hunters, outlawry and bedlam with the wily Bethlehemite is more life-giving and less distressing than a seat of honor at Saul’s table (cf. 1 Samuel 20:33).
David’s “kingdom-within-a-kingdom” is a reign of liberation. He smashes the yoke of oppression for those who are death-bitten. The banner of the house of Judah does to those whose life is being drained away by serpentine oppressors what Moses’ bronze snake did for the Israelites in the wilderness (Numbers 21:4–9).
David does what the prophets of God, Moses and Elisha, do for God’s people on multiple occasions: they make marah things, deadly bitter things, sweet and full of life (cf. 15:25; 2 Kings 2:19–22; 4:38–40). David in the deep places of Adullam restores the dignity and glory of those who have been reduced to “bare life.”
This is how God builds the Davidic community: in a cave with rascals.
III.
When Jesus, the true David, arrives on the scene he follows his forefather’s pattern. He too rules from exile, constantly chased and hounded. He has no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). He too goes down into a cave, a death place, a tomb in the heart of the world (12:40). To him will gather the outcasts, the sick, the lame, the weak. It is of the community of the Final David that Paul can say not many were wise, nor powerful, nor high-born. Instead, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).
Jesus turns the forgotten places like Nazareth (“what good can come from Nazareth?,” John 1:46), the sociopolitical equivalents of funerary caverns, into interstitial capitols in seasons when all the capitals of the earth seem to be in tumult and the centers of power shift.
You too, brothers and sisters, have followed Jesus to this Adullam. You were once the distressed, the debt-bitten, the bitter-souled. You found the Christ-child in a cave (as the archeologists tell us) in the dead winter of Herod’s dying regime. You were baptized into that kingdom of Jesus, you have been equipped and armed by the Spirit and invested with gifts and authority.
IV.
But, more particularly, I know this team. I know your stories. I know what you have suffered and the ways in which you have been distressed and sold cheaply. Our ministry team is a rascal bunch, our prior indentures and wounds (both self-inflicted and other-inflicted) are our curricula vitae. God has gathered us to this cave in the belly of Oahu for the mission of his Kingdom. We, like that rag-tag band in Adullam, have come to hear the sound of a Lion roaring in Judah.
There is a pastoral application here that I think is appropriate for the season into which God has called us: All Saints Honolulu is a cave into which the broken have come to find a king. Jesus is our David, here is our Adullam. God has brought into our fellowship a rag-tag congregation, and it is our charge as their pastors to see them glorified, redeemed, and resurrected into who Christ has called them to be.
Those he gathers here are like those who came to David, a strange and potentially combustive admixture of family, high school friends, the distressed, the bitter-souled. “Not-fitting-in” seems to be the very element of unity among us. Ift is not for us to bemoan the condition of those who enter the king’s service here in the cave. It is for us, however, to labor with the Lord to see them fitted-out, trained, and equipped for the life of the kingdom; to turn the scallywags of Saul’s regime here into Mighty Men and Women of Valor.
It is easy to get sidetracked in our Adullam season: “When will we have a building of our own?” “When can we afford a full-time children’s minister?” “When can we plant a church on the [insert side] of the island?” “When will our youth group grow beyond this or that numerical metric?” But let us not do so. We, along with young David and pre-Resurrection Peter, have been given the keys of the Kingdom. The taking of Jebus, I am convinced, began there in Adullam with songs and psalms sung by rascals with arrest warrants hanging over their heads.
Let us therefore take as our rallying cry for this season the motto of the early Moravians Vicit Agnus noster, eum sequamur and make merry in our Sherwood forest as we learn to sing by heart the songs of the Prince of Peace.
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.