1 Kings 21

Sin saddens.  

Sin is more than sadness and does far more than manufacture and multiply sadness.  But as we have spent time these last weeks in the story of Babel’s Tower, David’s terrible affair with Bathsheba, and, this week, with an entitled, greedy and insecure king, it is hard to avoid feeling overwhelmingly sad as we read each one.

This will be the third and final week of our Fractured series.  1 Kings 21 presents us with a king, Ahab, who wants what he wants; a queen, Jezebel, who is happy do most anything to help him get it; village elders who are willing to play along; and a man named Naboth, whose only problem was happening to own a vineyard that Ahab decides he wants (needs, must have!) for a vegetable garden.

We view land as a commodity, an inert “thing” to be parceled, subdivided, bought and sold.  Land has no “meaning,” it’s mere “space” or “ground.”  For ancient Israel –for Naboth – land was an inheritance, a treasure held in common by a family or clan.  Land is a gift from the God who owns all because he created all, to the humans called to steward what God has entrusted into fruitfulness. Naboth speaks just one line in the passage, “The LORD forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers!” (verse 3)

Ahab wants a garden, and makes Naboth an attractive, even generous offer, which Naboth refuses. Ahab sulks, Jezebel schemes, Naboth’s local elders fail him and their community, Naboth is maliciously maligned, unjustly sentenced and summarily executed.  Ahab gets his garden.

It is too easy to read these stories as about “other people.”  We’re not kings, or city-planners or tower-builders, we’ve never conspired to commit murder, we don’t just grab what we want …  

One of the giants of twentieth century literature was the Russian novelist Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn.  He wrote that “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” 

The terribly sad story of Naboth’s vineyard ends on one tiny bridgehead of good, as one of the worst kings in a long and sad history of bad kings discovers within himself, and no doubt to his great surprise, a bridgehead named repentance and the hope of a better word that might be spoken over a deeply and seemingly irreparably fractured life.

Ever desired something you knew you shouldn’t have, but went for it anyway?  How, where, do you find yourself in this story? How can you pray what you are seeing about the line between good and evil running through your own heart?