So, since we have, by popular demand, extended this Sunday School Stories series, I had people say that they liked it, so we figured we’d put it through the end of September, I unfortunately ran out of Sunday School Stories. We hit a lot of the big ones already. You know, we got the Noah’s Ark story, David and Goliath, all that stuff. And I realized, you know, we tend to hear a lot of the big gospel Sunday school stories pretty regularly anyway.
Like you’re probably going to hear the Good Samaritan sometime this year. You’re going to hear about Zacchaeus in the tree. So I asked Stormy for a recommendation. I said, what do we got left? A deeper dive story, one that you haven’t probably heard as often, but one that’s familiar.
And her first thought was Samson and Delilah. And that’s an excellent choice because, indeed, I haven’t thought that much about this story since I was in vacation Bible school, except in the context of that song, Hallelujah, that is very popular. And offhand, I had to think a bit before even remembering which book of the Bible it was in. And.
Like, I don’t think about Samson very often. I think that’s good here because I’m able to dive into this story without much in the way of preconceived notions about it. Maybe you are too. I highly doubt anyone’s preached about this in a long time.
So Samson, as a character, as we read this story, is almost more Greek or Roman mythology in flavor than what we tend to associate with the Bible. This is a very different guy than Abraham or Moses. And in fact, biblical scholars have pointed out that While Judges was being written, this portion of Judges was being written, the Greek myth of Hercules was floating around the Mediterranean. And it’s very possible that the authors could have taken some flavor, some inspiration from the Greeks here.
That happens a lot in scripture. You can see stories from these cultures next to each other influencing the way they tell their stories. Now, uncommonly for scripture, but similarly to Hercules, Samson has what we might call superpowers, right? He’s got superhuman strength, not unlike the Hulk or Superman or something. And like Superman, he has his own hidden kryptonite, except his grows on his head.
And lots of interesting stuff is happening here. But you know, as I think back to what I’ve heard about Samson and Delilah, when I’ve heard this story before, what’s striking to me is I don’t remember anyone ever telling me why it matters. What does this mean for us? You know, Samson’s cool, he’s interesting, sure. But so what? Is he more than just kind of this biblical boom-pow, you know, action hero? And the answer is yes.
Because this story’s got a whole lot more going on than just an action tale. Yes. So we’re most familiar with Samson from this final story that we heard this morning. That represents the very end of his life.
It ends with his death, right? But Samson has this grand heritage, this saga of his whole life that goes across a few chapters. So the previous three chapters, we read the beginning of one about his birth, but there’s all these larger-than-life stories about Samson. So his conception is very interesting. Right? He’s born to a man named Manoah and his wife, and the scene, obviously, as you heard it, sounds a lot like Jesus’ conception.
Manoah’s wife is infertile, but a messenger from God visits her in the night and assures her that she’s going to conceive a son. Very familiar. And whenever she does, she’s to dedicate him as a Nazarite. And what a Nazarite is, is kind of like a monk, not a priest, but a monk, a man whose whole life is consecrated to God’s service.
So from the morning, from the moment that he’s born, he’s going to be in service to God. Samuel was like this in the book of 1 Samuel. He is given by his mother to the temple from the beginning. It’s a frequent way that people serve.
Okay. And so his mother is never supposed to touch any alcohol while she’s pregnant, no unclean food, and whenever he’s born, his hair is never to be shaved, which is the primary way that Nazarites are set apart as different. This is very common for monks right now, right? Hindu monks, or Buddhist monks rather, will have their whole heads shaved bald. Medieval European monks, they’d shave the middle part so they’d have that goofy ring of hair around the outside.
Nazarites just never shave. And then the messenger promises Samson is going to be the one who begins to save his people from the Philistines who are dominating them at the time. Samson has been set apart by God. He’s been chosen as this special instrument in the service of God’s people.
So as he grows up to be an adult, he is made judge over Israel. In the book of Judges, the rulers of Israel are called judges. And what that is is before they had a king, this is kind of a decentralized, weak form of ruler. They would usually just sit out.
They’d hear cases. They would decide between people to try to just keep some order. So Samson becomes a judge. And in the meantime, he engages in all of these heroic acts.
Again, these larger-than-life tales. Okay. He’s occasionally basically possessed by the Spirit of God, which gives him all this crazy power. He goes into Hulk smash mode.
And we see in the previous couple chapters, he tears a lion in half with his bare hands. He burns all the Philistines grain fields by tying torches to the tails of 300 foxes that he caught by hand and sets them running through the farm. So all the grain burns down. And then he kills in a fit of rage, a thousand Philistines with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey.
But despite this superhuman ability, this task that he was given from birth, we can kind of see, maybe you hear this, that Samson is a loose cannon from the start. Nazarites have three important vows. They’re supposed to keep their whole lives by virtue of their position. Never drink alcohol.
Never touch a dead body, animal or person. And never cut their hair. And long before ever meeting Delilah, Samson, Samson has already broken these first two vows. The story gives us all these hints that Samson goes to these wine festivals, all kinds of stuff there.
And then whenever he rips the lion in half and then he goes and messes it. So he’s violated the dead body commandment. And so he’s just incredibly impulsive. He can’t keep hold of even these three things.
And despite being the one who’s called to begin liberation of his people from the Philistines, he falls in love with this Philistine woman, demanding her as his wife. This is before Delilah. And long story short, whenever he finds this Philistine woman he wants to marry, it ends up causing all kinds of violent unrest between Israel and the Philistines because her father marries her off to someone else. And so he just explodes in this rage.
And in the meantime, between this failed marriage and meeting Delilah, Samson sleeps with a Philistine prostitute. The man is just not a good leader. He’s a terrible Nazarite. Again, three vows, and he can’t do them.
And to be clear, it’s not like he’s doing a lot of repentance or self-examination after each one of these blunders. He’s controlled by whatever desire strikes his mind that morning, and his strength gives him the ability to do it. He sees it. He wants it.
He gets it. He wants a wife. He takes her. He feels like he’s been insulted or he’s been wronged by somebody.
Well, he’s going to go berserk and murder a thousand Philistines in revenge. Judges tells us he stacked their bodies like firewood. And he’s sort of like King David in that way in his peak years. David was impulsive.
David was power drunk. Right. But Samson is much dumber. Samson is no poet.
Samson wasn’t going to be writing psalms about his experience. We don’t see any evidence of introspection on Samson’s part. He just rumbles through life. And then we get to Delilah.
And it’s unclear whether Delilah is a Philistine or an Israelite. She lives in the historic valley, which is kind of in between. People always assume she’s a Philistine, but we don’t know. But anyway, Samson falls in love with her, again, unthinkingly, much like with his poor Philistine wife.
And Delilah is immediately recruited by the Philistines as like some Cold War Soviet double agent. She’s supposed to spy on Samson for the Philistines and determine his secrets. Her assignment is to find the source of his strength so they can defeat and kill him, and in return she’ll be given this enormous amount of silver. And you gotta love her strategy here.
Her strategy is simply to ask Samson, Please tell me what gives you such great strength and how you can be tied up and made weak? If Samson weren’t a complete idiot, she might be a little bit concerned about this question. This is about the most suspicious way you could possibly ask him this question. And Samson could have called her off at this point, seeing there was something fishy, and found some other beautiful woman, clearly not a problem for him, fell in love with someone else. But he is blinded by lust or love, whatever.
Neither of which is any excuse to set aside wisdom. And he plays her game. And he’s cautious enough, at least at first, not to tell her his secret of why he’s so strong. And it’s such a weird situation.
He seems completely aware that she’s got ulterior motives. But he continues on with her anyway. And she’s deceptive. He obviously knows that or he wouldn’t have lied.
And it’s just this completely inadequate response to what is obviously a threat to his life. He’s in danger, but he’s still playing with fire here. And presumably that’s because he thinks he can work his way through this with his own strength, his own cleverness, which we clearly know that he shouldn’t rely on that. If he checked in with God once in a while, he might get a wiser plan, but he doesn’t.
And instead, Samson and Delilah go back and forth three times. And each time, Samson makes up this fake answer about how to defeat him. She does whatever he describes by tying him up in various ways. And then she sets up a Philistine ambush.
It sounds like the Philistines, she literally lets them into the house to come get him. And every time, because he lied about the source of his strength, he easily escapes their grasp. And finally, Delilah has had enough. Now, if you really love me, Samson, you’ll tell me.
You’ll stop making a fool of me by lying. And she nags him for days and days and days until Judges tells us, this is the quote here, he became worn out to the point of death. He’s the strongest man in the world, but Delilah nagging him for a few days, he can’t take it. And I think this is supposed to be funny, by the way.
This story is a comedy in a lot of ways. And you just picture this woman nagging Hercules day after day until he finally says, fine woman, I’ll tell you if you leave me alone. And he reveals a secret. You know, it’s his hair.
And now we need to understand this more deeply than the simplified way it’s told in Vacation Bible School. It is not, again, it is not the hair itself that is the source of Samson’s strength. It’s that his hair is uncut because he’s a Nazirite. It’s not just the hair.
It’s because he is a Nazirite, one who’s consecrated into the service of God. His relationship with God is the source of his strength. His hair is just the symbol of that strength, the sign. The same way baptism, the communion elements, are outward signs of something that’s happening inside, that’s what his hair is.
But this time, whenever he’s told Delilah about his hair, she knows that she has him. And the Philistines, they pay her in advance. They know that this is it. She gets all this silver.
She’s ready. And she persuades Samson into taking a nap in her lap. And while he’s sleeping, she calls in a man to come shave his head. And Delilah wakes him up when this is all done, telling him once more the Philistines have come, and for whatever reason, he assumes that once again he can easily escape.
He says, I’ll do it again. We see this vivid evidence of his foolishness. He knows perfectly well that his strength resides in the covenant his hair represents. And he knows that he’s told Delilah that.
He knows that Delilah has betrayed him to the Philistines three times already. But he’s still convinced that he’s going to get out. He’s going to be fine. And of course, the Philistines do capture him.
They gouge out both of his eyes to cripple the possibility of him resisting. I think that’s a sign, too, that he’s already spiritually blind, but now his eyeballs are gone. And they put him in prison in the Philistine capital of Gaza. Same one.
And while he’s there, he’s forced like an ox to power the stones of a grain mill. You know, like whenever they used to have a donkey walking around in a circle to turn the flour mill, that’s what they make Samson do. And whenever he gets in there, his hair starts to grow back. He’s in prison.
His hair grows back. And his life ends as impulsively as he lived it. Some biblical scholars in the post 9-11 era have pointed out that Samson basically goes out as this ancient version of a suicide bomber. He brings down the Philistine temple around him with thousands upon thousands of the Philistines and their rulers wounded or killed with that demolition as the temple collapses.
Okay. And this is not a good thing. I don’t think this piece of the story is supposed to be like, one cool last thing Samson did. That’s not the case here.
I don’t think the writer of Judges wants us to think that Samson is a hero. Notice this here. Samson asks God before he pushes down these pillars to empower him for this one final act of revenge. But God doesn’t answer.
God does answer Samson sometimes. In the previous couple chapters, Samson would pray for something and God would respond. But God doesn’t answer here. And I wonder if maybe we should be understanding that at this point, Samson’s connection with God is broken.
He’s just tossed it out the window. The strength residing from his gift remains, but he’s disconnected. And so Samson, who’s done whatever he’s wanted his whole life, not caring whether he harms other people, himself, his nation, God, He’s left by God to his own devices at the end. And naturally, what would Samson do but use his freedom to kill people, to enact vengeance, to complete this process of self-destruction that he’s lived his whole life doing? And he is just intensely tragic, right? He’s called from before he’s even born to this big time, illustrious role.
He’s supposed to serve as this messianic figure for his people. He’s supposed to be like a Moses. He’s supposed to be leading his people into freedom, getting that started, getting the Philistines from off their back. And in some ways he does, but mainly just as collateral damage by killing as many people as he can in the process.
Samson is a fool. He’s reckless. He’s been personally selected, empowered by God for this really wonderful task for his people. but he seems to totally forget why he was given all this strength to begin with.
He forgets that his power comes from his covenant with God, and he just neglects that covenant over and over and over again. He’s consecrated to God from birth. His power derives from God’s Spirit, but he lives a life that’s just hilariously out of touch with what he was supposed to be. And he expects that God is going to hold up God’s side of the bargain no matter what, while he can’t be bothered to fulfill his most basic vows.
Samson, I’m giving you all the strength in the world, and you can’t even not drink wine or touch a corpse. Yes. the Lord and Israel, the nation that he’s supposed to be responsible to, just never ever figure into his thought process. He never stops and thinks, well, what about God? What about my people? His position, his power, the gifts that God has given him, they’re for him.
And he’s fully aware that the source of his power is his relationship with God, but his lust, his need for vengeance, his self-centeredness make him stupid and irresponsible about it. In what way is this true for you? Think about that. Samson’s issue here is predominantly lust. That’s clearly his problem.
Every destructive decision that he makes is because of his desire for some different woman. But this kind of deadly sin, as the Catholic Church puts it, can be anything. Maybe yours is pride. Maybe yours is greed, anger, jealousy, a desire for vengeance, the need to control or to be liked.
Maybe it’s something else. We all got our own thing, at least one of them. And it’s very easy for these things to grow, to take over, particularly if we enjoy them, which we do. That’s the whole point.
And then we forget our covenant with God. Think about this. Through Scripture, God punishes people for their sin. We know that.
We see that all the time. But it’s also important to notice that, especially throughout the Old Testament in the prophets, many times their own sin punishes them just fine and God doesn’t have to step in. God doesn’t have to intervene to punish people. You commit sins in the right way, the wrong way, it’ll get you.
And again, notice that God is just completely silent in this story of Samson and Delilah. God doesn’t speak in the whole part that we read. Samson is doing his own thing. God is not involved anymore.
Samson is not talking to God. Samson and Samson alone bring down that temple. on his own head, taking thousands of innocent people with him. God lets him have it his way.
And Israel continues to spiral into greater and greater crisis. The book of Judges just gets darker and darker and darker through the rest of it. He could have turned things around, but it gets worse. Now, none of us have God-given superpowers like Samson.
Maybe you do. I don’t know. But all of us have this relationship as Christians that John Wesley, in his commentary on this chapter, called being spiritual Nazarites. Wesley says that each of us as Christians are spiritual Nazarites.
We’re people who are set apart for a covenant relationship with God through Jesus, and We’re called to use the power, the gifts that God gives us through us for God’s work. And this is where Samson fell the most short. Again, his hair grows back when he’s in prison. His strength comes back.
The outward sign of his consecration, this covenant, it was restored. And then this final feat of strength, he pushes the temple pillars down and he goes out in this blaze of destruction. And his last act, right, despite calling to be a wise judge over his people is this vengeance. Um.
.. And again, we hear that God has been silent through it all. And now, as he prays once more, God is silent again, not giving an answer.
And the covenant between God and Samson has been severed. But the physical gift remains. He still has that gift he was born with of strength, symbolized by his hair. And this tells us something crucial about our relationship with God.
the gifts that God gave us can carry on, even whenever we become detached from the God that gave them to us. We can be like Samson, who is visibly a Nazarite. We can move through the motions of our faith, despite having let the spiritual aspect of our relationship with God wither. We can preach.
We can engage in mission in our community. We can teach. We can attend worship. We can give all these Christian things.
We can keep doing those things. But if our hearts have drifted from God to ourselves, something has changed. Samson is still strong. We would still have those gifts.
But he was going at it alone. We’d be going at it alone. This gift that God had given him for liberation became a tool of vengeance. Samson expected God to show up no matter what, even as he couldn’t be bothered to fulfill his vows to God.
And this issue… of separating our gifts from the reason that we’re given them is a danger for all of us that we could all have.
We can forget that the source of our power isn’t our long hair or our talents or our titles, our respect, the influence we’ve gained through our lives, through the resources we’ve accumulated. None of those are where our power comes from. The power that matters is in our relationship. with God, our ongoing faithfulness to the covenant that we made when we were baptized.
And the story of Samson is just so painful because he’s called to something so good. He’s called to be this messianic hero, but instead wastes his gifts as this self-serving fool. He never understood the freedom he was meant to bring his people had to first begin with his commitment to the God whose nature is freedom and grace and justice. And as spiritual Nazarites, that’s true for us, we are set apart to be instruments of God.
of liberation, of justice, of peace. And that means actively embodying that love in the world, that we do what the general rules of the United Methodist Church say, do no harm, do good, attend upon the ordinances of God. If Samson had done those three things, can you imagine? And so the question for us is never really, do I have the strength to do this thing or that thing? The question is, am I still in the relationship that is the source of that strength? Are we letting our own self-centeredness, our pride, our need for vengeance or control grow until we’re blind, until we’re serving someone else entirely? the power that God has given us to be heroes like Samson, each in our own way, comes from a life in God’s presence, living with God, using God’s gifts for God’s kingdom. May it be so.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.