Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 11 Year 1)
Today’s assigned readings:
1 Samuel 23:7-18, Romans 11:33-12:2, Matthew 25:14-30
Jonathan said to David, “Do not be afraid; for the hand of my father Saul shall not find you; you shall be king over Israel, and I shall be second to you; my father Saul also knows that this is so.” Then the two of them made a covenant before the Lord; David remained at Horesh, and Jonathan went home.
1 Samuel 23:17-18
David and Jonathan are often viewed as an archetype of a gay male relationship. Let me say up front: David and Jonathan were not gay as we understand that term today for certainly they were both married. But the terms of their relationship, as recorded in Samuel, are endearing, tender and loving. It is so evident, in fact, that long before I had come to terms with my sexuality, this story moved me. I recognised, clearly, the intense friendship between them and intuited that it was a model I wanted to follow. When asked about my relationship to my closest friend in High School, I explained us in terms of David and Jonathan.
There may, certainly, be other reasons for the David and Jonathan story: it may be a way of propaganda, explaining that the Davidic line had the full support of Saul’s son, or else was grafted in to Saul’s line not only by marriage. It may have been a way to embarrass those who supported Saul: look, David was supported by Jonathan. Or it may be (at a great and huge stretch) a riff on the common mythological story of how best friends can become curses for each other. Many of the male friendships of within the Mediterranean mythologies end with the (usually unwilling) destruction of one party by the other. Finally, some see David’s later comment that Jonathan’s love for him was “sweet surpassing the love of women” (2 Samuael 1:26) to be a comment on patriarchy - on how useless women were to that culture.
All of these readings are possible, to one degree or another, with or without the gay subtext, or perhaps some mode of weaving several of these meanings together. The same possibilities and meanings are equally true of the other friendship stories from the cultural period/area: Heracles, Alexander, Zeus, Gilgamesh, Achilles…
The Jewish tradition holds the love of David and Jonathan up as an example for all love:
The Talmud teaches that “Any love that depends upon something else, when that something else disappears, the love disappears; but if it does not depend upon something else, it will never disappear. What is an example of love that depends upon something else? The love of Amnon and Tamar. And what is the love that does not depend upon something else? An example is the love of David and Jonathan.” (Pirke Avot 5:19)
But my own personal resonance is with the love story and, as I said, it has always been so for me since I was 16 or 17. The love of the older, more experience warrior Jonathan for the young, brash, beautiful and blessed-by-God David speaks in my heart as a model for love that is missing from my own life as well as from much of our world, ironically for the very reason it’s needed: if we sexualise David and Jonathan and offer it as the only possible reading, then we remove it from the realms of others who might need it. For I think this is needed in our culture.
I was having a bad week, not because of anything bad that was going on, however. In fact, quite the opposite: I was having a very good week of things. I’ve hatched a pretty good plot with some close friends that should make for some wonderful times next weekend (as we have our local Bele Chere festival, “the largest festival in the South). I’ve gotten a raise at work. I’ve had some good things happen between myself and the clients at work: what we’d call “breakthroughs” in therapy. Not a bad week to complain about, but my head was totally in the wrong space to be thankful for any of these. To put it simply, I told my boyfriend very late Thursday night/Friday morning, “I’m tired of being the responsible one.” I’m tired of being the go-to guy for just about everything in just about every aspect of my life: home, work, whatever. This is not just a current problem as it’s been that way forever with the exception of most of my time in San Francisco where I was, largely, responsible for my own actions but rarely those of others. But for 13 years in NYC or and 4 here… and for much of my time growing up it’s been a huge weight on my shoulders. I’m the good kid and the good luck charm.
I was the kid that parents would make sure was hanging out with their kids. As one parent put it - after he son was arrested while I was hanging out with him: If Huw was in the car, nothing happened and this was all a misunderstanding. That carried forward in to college. I was the one that managed to take care of things and hold them together: not in a project, plan and do sort of way, but rather in some other, um… “homemaker” kind a of way. There’s a reason I got put in charge of the annual Thanksgiving Feast at my fraternity house: and a reason that I could pull off roasting 15 turkeys to perfection. And a reason that 30+ guys, their girlfriends and sundry others would follow my lead. I’m the one that landlords prefer to talk to when they call in a group-rental situation. I’m the one that gets “Drafted” to be lead clerk or shift lead. This skill moved into almost all my living and working situations in the last two decades… all of the ones where there were younger, heterosexual males involved. Somehow I always ended up being the older mentor, loving, housekeeping, holding things together… quietly involved from behind the scenes.
And this week I just got tired of it. Why the !@#$ should I always be the one?
The image of Jonathan’s love for David comes forward in the readings not in a sexual sense, but in another way: as a model of responsible mentoring of youth, a loving way to see experience pass to a younger generation. In a conversation, my boyfriend helped me to see that somehow it is what older, single (gay?) men have often done: from the image of pedagogy in ancient Greece down to the unmarried Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s Godfather, the position of a mentor at turns wisely restraining and lovingly releasing… (To be honest, I had trouble not reading a sexual subtext into the most-recent Harry Potter movie.) As if to back this up, the entire time I was in San Francisco, all my male friends had beautiful houses, took care of each other and seemed quite wise in ways of love and support: in fact, in most cases I was learning from them. But, equally, I had no one to take care of…
(Forgive me, I’m in no way able to comment on how women, gay or straight, play into this model. I know only that Ruth and Naomi are sometimes invoked in the same breath as Jonathan and David and also that, according to Frederica Matthewes Green, a conservative Christian writer, women often end up playing the mentor and domesticating role to straight men. Given the distance between parents house and marriage perhaps gay male roomies, in our culture, form a educational bridge between Mom and Wife?)
The irony is that in reclaiming these stories as positive gay images, they have been lost to straight boys. It’s hard to tell someone that they are loved when the only image of love they have is sex. As an example, people usually suspect something about me and who-ever I’m housing with. (This was once the topic of a letter to the editor of Rolling Stone. The writer suggested the only reason I was in a fraternity was to have sex with the 18 guy I lived with!) And likewise, when people sexualise the story of David and Jonathan and, in the way of our culture, the sex becomes the only important thing.
*shrug*
I’m OK if David and Jonathan were lovers. I’m OK if they were not. But I think there is a model there of love and wisdom passed from the older to the younger from which all of us - gay or straight - can draw. We can “love for virtue” as Maimonides said: love for the good of the other, the love that does not “depend on something else.”