The LORD Looks on the Heart

Fourth Sunday in Lent — 1 Samuel 16:1–13

“How long will you grieve over Saul?”

— 1 Samuel 16:1

In March 2017, our youngest grandchild at the time, Everett — son of Blair and Sarah — was baptized at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was a significant day within the Robinson clan. Pastor Katie had kindly asked me to assist with worship, so I would serve as Lector, offer the historic questions of faith to Blair and Sarah, and offer the baptismal prayer over the water.

I planned to arrive a few minutes past ten. On my way into town, I decided to grab a quick drive-thru breakfast — coffee and a biscuit — and pulled into the McDonald’s on Miami Boulevard. As I pulled up to the drive-thru line, I noticed three or four cars ahead of me. Not too bad.

A minute later, still several car lengths from the microphone, I lowered my window. I was suddenly bombarded by booming music from the car ahead — a young man in his early twenties, all four windows down, blasting music as if there were no tomorrow. I, of course, had been righteously listening to WCPE’s Sacred Music program. His noise now drowned out my Bach.

I seethed.

“How inconsiderate,” I thought, “to inflict your music on everyone within a half-block radius.” I pushed my own window down and turned up my sacred melody — a futile gesture, as it turned out. Both cars seemed to throb to the beat of his music, my Bach utterly swallowed.

I gave my order to the young woman at the microphone — crassly I’m afraid — and the line inched forward until it was my turn at the pay window. The cashier slid it open with a cheerful “Hi!”

I think I probably sneered.

She nodded toward the car ahead. “See that guy in front of you?”

“Yeah,” I said — thinking that not only had I seen him, I had heard him for the better part of ten minutes, and I was not pleased.

“He paid it forward; he got your breakfast. Have a great day!”

The boomerang of my judgment flew back and hit me squarely in the chest.

The LORD does not see as mortals see. They look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.

I was ashamed of what had been in my heart.

I had been on my way to assist at a baptism. I had been listening to sacred music. I had been, in my own estimation, the righteous one in that drive-thru line.

The prophet Samuel would have understood.

In 1 Samuel 16, God sends Samuel to Bethlehem — to the house of a man named Jesse, with instructions to anoint one of his sons as the next king of Israel. But Samuel carries something with him that God has already noticed: grief. “How long will you grieve over Saul?” the Lord asks him at the outset. It is not a gentle question.

Samuel had opposed kingship from the beginning. He had warned the people what kings do when they get their hands on power. And yet, somewhere along the way, he had become attached — to Saul, to the institution he had resisted, to a particular image of what a king should look like. When Saul failed, Samuel grieved as one grieves the dead. The Hebrew verb used here is the same one used when Jacob believes Joseph has died — a mourning that is total, that has already closed the door on the future.

God had moved on. Samuel had not.

So God sends Samuel to Bethlehem — obediently, if not without fear. He had asked God plainly: If Saul hears of this, he will kill me. God offers him a ruse, a cover story, a sacrificial meal. Go through the motions of an ordinary visit, God says. I’ll show you what to do when you get there.

It is worth pausing on that. God doesn’t wait for Samuel’s grief to resolve before sending him. God doesn’t require the prophet to arrive in Bethlehem fully healed and clear-eyed. He goes with his grief still on him, his fear still with him, his Saul-shaped expectations still intact — as we will see.

Jesse brings out his sons, one by one. The eldest, Eliab, comes first — and something in his bearing, his stature, his presence makes Samuel certain. Surely this is the one. The text doesn’t tell us exactly what Eliab looked like, but we know what Samuel was seeing: Saul. He was seeing the template. Tall, impressive, the firstborn — everything a king was supposed to be.

The Lord says no.

Six more sons pass before Samuel. Six more times, the answer is no. One could imagine the prophet’s bewilderment deepening with each rejection — his internal model of kingship failing him, son by son, until Jesse has no one left to offer.

“Are all your sons here?” Samuel asks.

There remains the youngest, Jesse says — almost as an afterthought. He is out keeping the sheep.

He wasn’t even summoned. The future king of Israel was not in the room. He was in the field, doing the ordinary work of an ordinary day, while the prophet of God sat waiting at his father’s table.

And it is precisely here, in the space between Samuel’s confusion and David’s arrival, that God speaks the word the whole episode has been building toward:

The LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.

Samuel needed to hear it not because he was wicked, but because he was human — attached, grieving, afraid, doing his level best with eyes that could only see what they had been trained to see. His grief over Saul had bent his vision toward a template God had already moved past. Seven sons later, he was still looking for the wrong man.

When David finally arrives — ruddy, bright-eyed, smelling of the fields — the Spirit of the Lord rushes upon him.

The one no one thought to call.

I thought about Samuel that cold March morning, sitting in my car in the McDonald’s drive-thru, my Bach swallowed by a stranger’s music, my judgment already rendered.

I had been on my way to something holy. I had been carrying, without knowing it, the same equipment Samuel carried into Bethlehem — eyes trained by experience and expectation, a template already in place, a verdict already forming before the evidence was in.

The young man in front of me had beautiful eyes too, I suspect. I never saw his face.

What I received instead was a breakfast biscuit and coffee, paid for by someone I had already written off — and a boomerang that caught me squarely in the chest.

The LORD looks on the heart.

I arrived at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church a few minutes later, shaken and grateful, to assist Katie as she poured water over the head of a child who had done nothing yet to earn anyone’s approval — and to declare, with the whole congregation, that he was claimed anyway. Loved before he could perform. Named before he knew his own name.

Which is, perhaps, what God has been trying to tell Samuel all along.

And us.