The Listening Heart

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — 1 Kings 3:5-12

At Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask what I should give you" [1 Kings 3:5].

Some eight or ten years ago, when Jane and I were an active part of Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church here in Durham, I was asked to co-lead a small evening program focusing on the richness of the Old Testament, specifically on how much can turn on a translator’s choice of a single word. Each of us had chosen a passage to illustrate what sometimes gets gained or lost depending on which English Bible happens to be on your lap. I’d chosen 1 Kings 3, Solomon’s dream at Gibeon, because of two words tucked into verse 9 that most readers never notice are even in question.

In that well-known passage, Solomon asks God for lev shomea. The ESV and NRSV both render the Hebrew as "an understanding mind.” That’s reasonable enough, since the chapter goes on to show Solomon discerning the truth in a dispute between two women over an infant, and “mind” signals to a Western reader that something cognitive is being requested. But, according to my OT commentaries, lev is the word Hebrew uses for “heart” throughout the Old Testament, and the Hebrew heart was never split off from the intellect the way ours has become. In OT times, Lev was the center of the whole person. It was his or her will, conscience, and thought as much as it was feeling, with no dividing wall between them.

Moreover, shomea comes from the same root as the Shema, Israel’s great confession: “Hear, O Israel.” In Israel’s scriptures, hearing God repeatedly carries the sense of attending and responding, even obeying. Thus, Solomon was asking for a self capable of really listening to God, and to whoever stood in front of him needing to be heard.

We know that by the time Solomon reaches Gibeon, he has already inherited a throne that came to him by anything but a clean path. David’s reign carried divine promise, but also violence, a fractured family, and a court full of men maneuvering for what came next. Solomon’s own hold on the crown had required the removal of rivals who wanted it too. He arrives at Gibeon a young king with more power than he has yet learned what to do with, and God asks him the question every gift depends on: “Ask what I should give you.”

Solomon’s answer begins with a confession. “I am only a little child,” he tells God. “I do not know how to go out or come in.” This isn’t, of course, quite true. He is, after all, already king, already exercising the office. He senses, however, that it is true in every way that matters. Solomon knows the difference between occupying a throne and being equal to it, and he says so before he asks for anything at all.

Give your servant, therefore, a listening heart [3:9].

A listening heart is an unusual thing for a king to want, because power tends to move a person in the opposite direction. The more authority someone holds, the less urgent it can feel to listen. When you have power, others start anticipating what you wants to hear. They often just confirm what they think you want to hear. In the dispute that follows, Solomon’s listening heart will show itself in exactly this way. He will discern the true mother by recognizing the sort of love that is willing to surrender its claim rather than see the child harmed.

Solomon’s prayer carries a second recognition. He speaks of the people as “your people,” i.e., God’s people, not his own. Showing wisdom already, he recognizes that the throne has been lent to him for the sake of people who remain someone else’s.

God is pleased with the request precisely for what it declines. Instead of self-preservation, accumulation, and the elimination of those who might stand in his way, Solomon prays for the capacity to serve his people well.

It would be a tidier story if it ended there. It doesn’t, of course. The same young king who asks for a listening heart at Gibeon will, in the chapters that follow, accumulate all the things by which kings secure and display their power. He will have wives by the hundreds, horses, gold, forced labor to build what he wants. And in time, the kingdom that looks glorious from inside the palace will begin cracking under the weight of what the palace required, and it will not hold together long past his death. The man who prayed for ears to hear his people will, eventually, stop hearing them.

I don’t think that makes Solomon’s prayer at Gibeon insincere. I think he meant every word. But, as is the case with many in power, he simply stopped living inside it. Listening hearts must be practiced, session after session, decision after decision. Without conscious effort, it can be quietly set down, the way most things we mean to keep doing eventually get set down, not through a single refusal, but through years of smaller ones.

Most of us will never be called upon to govern a people or a kingdom. But we are all entrusted with someone. It may be a child, a patient, a member, a neighbor whose voice is easy enough to talk over. The 1 Kings 3 passage doesn’t so much confront us with whether we’d ask for wisdom if God appeared to us as He did to Solomon. Rather, I think it’s whether we’re still asking for it now, this year, within our current circumstances and surroundings.

I think about that evening at Trinity Avenue sometimes. I don’t remember much of what I said. What I do remember is standing up to make a point about the Hebrew understanding of mind and heart, and walking out having been asked a question I hadn’t prepared for. I had gone there prepared to explain what listening meant. I was less prepared to recognize how much more practiced I was at explaining listening than at listening.

Solomon got his answer that same night, in a dream, before he’d done anything to earn it. God didn’t wait for him to prove himself capable of the listening he’d asked for. The gift came first, offered to a man who had just finished admitting he didn’t know how to go out or come in.

I think that’s the only place any of this can start. Not with a heart already practiced at listening, but with the plain admission that we’ve stopped, or never quite learned, or have gotten too used to being the one who’s supposed to talk. The prayer is available before the practice is. It was for Solomon. I suspect that it is for us as well.

Ask what I should give you.

I wonder what any of us would say, if we let ourselves truly hear the question before we answered it, and whether we’re still listening for it now, today.