David and Jonathan

(We are currently in a series on the life of David at Chelsea Village. As I’ve written before I attempt to write a full manuscript of my sermon before preaching. Throughout this series I’ll be posting some of the sermons I think will be helpful. If you would rather listen to the sermon, you can find it here.)

Last week when we were at the beach a little girl ran up to my seven-year old daughter and said, “My name is Isabella. Do you want to play?” My daughter yells, “sure” and they run off into the water together like they’ve known each other for years. This made me think about the age at which we stop doing that. At a certain point we get afraid of rejection and become suspect of people. While our children are not innocent by any stretch of the imagination, their lack of cynicism is refreshing because their desire for friends remind us we were not created to live life alone.

Think about this for a second. God creates the world and everything in it. Then he places Adam in the garden and says, “it is not good for the man to be alone.” Does this mean God fouled up when he created just Adam? Was God himself not enough for Adam? The early chapters of Genesis teach us God created us to be relational beings. We were made to know people and to be known by people.

We were created for friendship, yet sin has broken these most fundamental relationships. Just to return to our opening illustration, within an hour my daughter told the girl she didn’t want to be friends anymore and when the girl asked to be friends again she responded “well, I will give you one more chance.” One thing we need to realize about our friendships and relationships is that we tend to respond sinfully to be sinned against. We can be tempted to have superficial friendships rather than real ones, we can live consistently angry and cross with people, or other times we are cynical about the possibility of friendship and hide from other people.

Today we want to think about what constitutes true friendship. What is the soil in which good friendships grow? You may think this doesn’t sound very spiritual, but the Bible treats the subject of interpersonal relationships and friendships in many places. For example, you cannot read through the book of Proverbs without running across loads of wisdom concerning friendships written from Solomon to his son. Today we are going to look at one of the better known friendships in the Bible and see the character of true friendship.

We are going to talk about this through the lens of the friendship between David and Saul’s son Jonathan. The Lord rejected Saul as King and had Samuel anoint David as King, but the transfer of power has not been fully realized. The shift has begun though as David defeated Goliath on behalf of the Israelite army while Saul stood on the sidelines and watched. Now Saul knows David and David gets introduced to Saul’s family. Through this David strikes up an amazing friendship with Saul’s son.

As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt. And David went out and was successful wherever Saul sent him, so that Saul set him over the men of war. And this was good in the sight of all the people and also in the sight of Saul’s servants.
1 Samuel 18:1-5

Friends Share a Strong Bond

David spoke to Saul and then David and Jonathan meet. We don’t know the timing, but the writer’s description of their friendship is striking. Their souls were knit together. The picture here is of an intense friendship with their souls intertwined with each other. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David and demonstrates the reality of this covenant by giving him his robe, armor, and weapons. The idea of covenant is rooted in both promise and relationship. This is so much more than a contract. A covenant implies a bond which cannot be broken.

I hate to do this so early in the sermon, but we need to get this out of the way. Some of you were probably uncomfortable with the language about David and Jonathan’s friendship. If you Google “David and Jonathan” the first page is filled with people who argue David and Jonathan were a couple in a committed same-sex relationship. They look at the gifts Jonathan gave David, their care for each other, and David’s declaration at Jonathan’s death that his love was better than the love of women and believe they have conclusive proof for their hypothesis. There are two problems with this outlook and the first has to do with the Bible itself. Does the author of Samuel appear to be the kind of author who hides scandalous facts about David’s life? Of course not, in four weeks we are going to see David involved in adultery and murder. In fact you could argue David breaks the last five commandments in his interactions with Bathsheba and Uriah. We have no reason to believe anything existed here more than a committed friendship. If there had been more I promise you the author would not have hid it.

That brings me to the second reason we should not read anything into their friendship. This line of thinking only began recently. If you read history until the turn of the last century you see strong mail friendships where men spoke affectionately of each other. Men in antiquity frequently spoke of their appreciation for their friends and expressed longing to see them in a way which would make us uncomfortable. This changed because we began to see homosexuality as a fixed orientation and not as an act, so men did not want to be seen as “acting gay.” The examples of this are legion, but I only want to go through a couple. Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft were great friends until Roosevelt became disenchanted with Taft’s presidency and ran against him both in the primaries and on a third party ticket. When they were still friends Roosevelt often signed his letters to Taft, “affectionately yours.” Abraham Lincoln had a good friend named Joshua Speed whom he met when he was twenty-eight and the latter was twenty-two. Lincoln was a capable lawyer but was broke and Speed owned a shop. Lincoln asked how much it would cost to bed at Speed’s place and Speed allowed Lincoln to share his bed. None of Lincoln’s contemporaries accused him of anything more than needing a warm place to sleep over his friendship with Speed. They remained close friends, sharing their fears about marriage and continuing to write to each other until Lincoln’s death.

Part of the reason we read so much into this passage is because we live in a culture which is saturated with sexuality. We cannot divorce sexuality and almost anything that exists in our culture. It’s why I once met someone who found out I was a pastor and immediately asked me about homosexuality. We have so saturated ourselves with sexuality that we cannot even bring up the subject of God without a discussion about sexuality following closely on its heels. Other than prayer, God’s word, and purposely cutting off so much of the junk we take in I do not know of another way to wean ourselves away from the pervasiveness of sexuality.

The idea of covenant holding their friendship together is an important one for Christians to consider because Christians live in covenant together. We have the strongest bond two people could possibly share- we are the children of God through faith in Jesus Christ who lived, died, and was raised from the dead to bring us back to God. We are brothers and sisters. Think about the language used to describe the church- a family, a building, and a body. Do you see the interconnectedness in each of those metaphors? If the church is a temple, then we are bricks in it. If the church is a body, we are its members. If the church is a family, we have a place at the table. So therefore Christians have every reason to pursue real and vital friendships because we share so much in common. C.S. Lewis said friendship begins when one person says to another, “what? You too? I thought no one but myself.”

Friends Possess Great Affection for Each Other

The other thing we should find striking about David and Jonathan’s friendship is their strong love for each other. Jonathan loves David as he loves his own soul. Then we see the covenant made between them with the explanation that Jonathan loves David as his own soul. Why do you repeat something? You want to emphasize it. So we see here Jonathan’s deep love David and we will talk about some ways we see David return this love later.

One of the foundations of a strong friendship is shared affection and love for one another. We don’t think about this often do we? Honestly we don’t spend much time thinking about friendship in general do we? The truth is that we often think about people being impressed by us more than we think about people knowing us. We are all so image conscious that we think more about the impression we are making than we do about making genuine friends. The result has been that we care more about making fans than we do having friends.

Unfortunately social media fuels this doesn’t it? This does not mean social media is bad in and of itself, but we do have to be aware of the dangers don’t we. Left unchecked, we can carefully craft an image using social media and then not allow people to get to close to us because it would ruin the image. Then you build your identity on the number of people who are impressed by you and respond to what you have created. Here’s the problem, you can either be impressive or you can have people know you. If people get to know us, they will know we aren’t that impressive. They will see the rough edges and the ugly; but we will be known and loved. This is the beauty of genuine friendship; it sees the ugly and stays.

This is why the root of all genuine friendship is God’s love toward us. God’s love toward us has nothing to do with our being impressive enough for him to love. When we read the Bible we see quite the opposite don’t we. “But God demonstrated his own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” God showed his love in giving us the greatest gift we could receive when we were not impressive. In fact he knows us deeper than we could be known and loves more than we could ever be loved. What blows me away about God is he says to us, “I know everything about you and I love you deeply.”

This models genuine friendship for us. We are too quick to run from friendships, but since we are in covenant with each other we can’t can we? This encourages us to be friends to the friendless and may find out they wind up being the best friends we have ever had. Stop choosing your friends based on who can bring you the most prestige. Didn’t that start for us when we were young? We chose friends based on how they would effect our social status. Now sometimes we’re tempted to choose friends whose children whose will help our children’s social status. Or, we fall for the idea we should only surround ourselves with great people so their greatness will rub off on us.

This idea has even infected Christianity. Listen to this from the person who is probably America’s most well-known preacher. “Don’t waste your valuable time on people that are not adding to your growth. Your destiny is too important.” If you begin to believe this you will never be a friend to hurting people. When you genuinely love people you will take them where they are. You will love them even when it isn’t an easy thing to do. You won’t run for the exits when they are honest about where they are hurting but instead you will run toward them.

By the way, I think we see good news for single Christians in this passage. So often we treat our single friends as if they are lacking something in life, but here we see two men with a vibrant, fulfilling friendship. David will eventually say Jonathan’s love was better than the love of women. He speaks here of the constancy and commitment of Jonathan’s friendship to him. Of the relationships in his life, this was the strongest and most fulfilling. So single Christians are not left to wander alone. Friendships can be strong, fulfilling, and joy-giving.

Friends Sacrifice for Each Other

Jonathan stripping off his armor and weapons says a lot about how Jonathan thinks things are going to go with David. He gives him that which is his and in doing so acknowledges David will ultimately be king. After this David marries Saul’s daughter and immediately falls out of favor with Saul though no fault of his own. The people celebrate David’s prowess as a warrior compared to Saul. Saul wants to kill David but Michal protests him. Jonathan did not know about the plots to kill David until David tells him. Then David involves Jonathan in a risky plan to determine how badly Saul wants to kill him. David will hide in a field for three days and Jonathan is to say he let David go home for a sacrifice. Only Jonathan asks David not harm him or his household when he becomes King. David swore to Jonathan he would not by his love for him and again the writer reiterates their love for each other. Jonathan will signal to David by going into a field and shooting arrows. If David is in the clear he will tell the boy running after the arrows that they are on this side of him. If Saul still determines to put David to death Jonathan will say to the boy “look the arrows are beyond you.”

The first night David was absent Saul thought to himself David must be unclean. The next night he got curious and asked where David was. Jonathan told him David had gone to the feast and he told him it was alright, so Saul responds by insulting his son. He then calls for David to be put to death. When Jonathan asks why David is worthy of death Saul responded by throwing a spear at Jonathan. At this point Jonathan makes the astute observation, “So Jonathan knew that his father was determined to put David to death.” Jonathan went into the field the next morning and shot his arrows. He called out to the boy and told him the arrows were beyond him. Then they gathered the arrows and sent the boy back to the city. Jonathan and David share a tearful farewell and David fled from Saul.

Jonathan shows us here how friendship takes sacrifice. In fact Jonathan exemplifies everything we have said about friendship in this passage. He is loyal to his bond to David by protecting him from his father even though David’s death means Jonathan will get to be King. At the same time he does not join David in trying to kill his father. He was keenly aware of his convenantal obligations to his father and fought along side him until the day they were both killed in battle.

Friendship necessarily entails sacrifice. We harm our friendships because we tend to be self-centered and have a difficult time putting aside our own preferences for the sake of others. Then don’t we tend to run the second our friendships begin to get hard? I think the major reason we do this is because we see ourselves as the center of the world. Over the past two weeks I was reading a book on Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft. One thing that struck me was the way Taft spoke of his impending marriage to Nellie. He spoke of how he wanted to make her happy. This came up on several occasions. This was not a sarcastic, “oh I hope she’ll be happy,” instead he expressed a genuine desire to work hard for her to find joy in their marriage. Now, contrast this with what we often say about marriage, “I’m not happy right now.” Well, do you know what makes for a miserable marriage- two people who each think the other should be working harder to make me happy. If you have two people being selfish you are going to have trouble. If you have two people looking out for each other you are going to have something much better. The same thing is true in friendship.

Friendship involves sacrifice because there are things that make friendship flourish which are difficult. The first is that it’s work. My friend Richard Bailey summarized this well in project he is working on. “Friendship, and this is a message that contemporary evangelicalism and its celebrity culture needs to hear, isn’t always (or even regularly) glamorous. Really, it’s more Ike shoveling out one’s composting privy. When it comes to friendship, Berry is correct: “a great deal that’s necessary and satisfying to know is not pleasant to learn. Friends support each other—physically if needed. Encourage each other. Laugh with and at each other. But they do more. They do other things. They discourage each other. They cry over and with each other. They critique each other.” Friendship is work isn’t it? We must work to get to know people, work to spend time with them, work to bear with them, and work to forgive. Oh but doesn’t that lead to such joy down the road?

Another place where friendship takes sacrifice is in the area of time. Friendships are nurtured when people spend time together without the press of urgent business. Unfortunately we are building our lives in such a way that we shut other people out. Either we schedule to the hilt and have no time or we treat home like a fortress and shut the rest of the world out. Jesus called us to love our neighbors as ourselves and we must rearrange our lives according to his priorities. What do you need to do to make time for people? I think one of the best ways to accomplish this is over meals. You are going to be eating 21 times a week anyway right? Take a few of those meals and use them to develop friendships.

Also can I appeal to you to sacrifice technology for the sake of friendship? How often are we with people and tempted to be looking at our phones or texting people? We end up ignoring the people we are with in order to communicate with the people who aren’t with us. We unthinkingly adopt the newest technologies and embrace trends without thinking about their impacts on friendship and Christian community. One of my favorite writers is a man from Kentucky named Wendell Berry. Berry writes frequently about farming, community, the environment, and the intersection of these issues. Through both his writings and his novels, he shows how supposedly well-meaning technology can destroy community. Berry does not use a computer even though he is a prolific writer. When asked about this he said, “”I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. (Luddite is a term most believe came from a young man named Ned Ludd. He destroyed two stocking frames in 1779 and his name was given to those who destroyed machines that were believed to take away jobs at the beginning of the industrial revolution.) I am not ‘against technology’ so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community. I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.” I realize words like destroy may be harsh, but we do have to admit technology can have an unhealthy impact on community can’t we? I am not advocating that you throw your phone in your toilet or delete all of your social media accounts, but know when they are appropriate and not appropriate. If your friends are sitting around you and engaged in conversation, maybe for the sake of the conversation your phone can stay in your pocket. Prioritize face to face.

Much of this comes from understanding a real sense of place. In his sermon in Athens, Paul said God determined the times and places in which we live. You live where you live and when you live by God’s design. These are the people you have been placed around to live life. Plant deep roots and thrive here! Look at where you work, where you live, where you recreate, and who you see on a regular basis. These are the people God has given you to know. Work to know the people around you. Simply be friendly and introduce yourself. Remember people’s names. (Write them down if you have to. This makes a huge difference to people when you remember them.) Do stuff outside in your yard instead of piling up in front of the TV. Ask people questions about themselves and ask follow ups. Listen to what they say instead of thinking of what you are going to say next. The next time you see them ask about something they may have told you. This builds friends, creates community, and gives us opportunities to bless people for the sake of the Gospel. In addition you never know how a person may bless you in return.

See here is the beautiful thing about friendship. Circles of friends can expand. So if I can be honest about something this morning, you often see people point to groups of close friends and say “that’s a clique.” Well, maybe or maybe not. It might just be a group of close knit friends. Now it is not healthy if that group of friends does not know who to communicate with or include people from outside; but what you may find is that group is flexible and able to incorporate new people. A great example of this comes from the show How I Met Your Mother. The whole show is supposedly about how Ted met his future wife and mother of his children, but it is really the story of his friends and really his love for his friend Robin. For nine seasons, everyone outside this group who might wander in is expendable. Even the mother, who you wait eight seasons to meet, has been dead for six years when Ted starts telling the story to his kids. There was their five friends and everyone else played a bit role. Our friendships cannot be this way. Our friendships must be close while also being hospitable towards those outside your circle.

So if you have close friendships, look around for those who do not. Welcome them. If you do not have close friendships, put yourself out there, but do not expect this to happen overnight and don’t fixate on just one person. Get to know as many people as possible. Come to a community group. Come to men’s or women’s Bible study. Invite someone to workout with you or along for a play date with the kids. If your family is going to eat out on Friday night see who could meet you.

Can I say something about this to men in particular? We tend to forget about the importance of friendships because in our minds I’ve just got to handle everything myself. Men, if Adam didn’t need to be alone in the garden and if Jesus surrounded himself with twelve men he called “friends,” may I suggest that you need friends too? I’m not talking about sitting around and talking about your feelings while you sip skinny lattes. I’m talking about friends you watch games with, work on projects with, laugh at, and call when you find yourself in a tight. You do need men around you who know your weaknesses and temptations, who know where you struggle, and who can celebrate with you over big wins in life. I’m also not talking about surrounding yourself with a cadre of superficial buddies either; I’m talking about real, genuine friendships. Men you need them.

If you want to know how to grow as a friend I want to make a particular appeal to you. Read the Proverbs. Read one chapter a day. Mark what Solomon says about friends and about how you treat people. We see from Proverbs how friends stick closer than a brother. We learn that friends have to say tough things to each other. “As iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.” “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” Then read what the New Testament says in the “one another” passages. See how we love and forgive each other. Learn how to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

The beauty of the sacrifice of friendship is the joy it leads to. Jesus said the person who loses his life will find it and the one who saves his life will lose it. These are the upside down values of God’s Kingdom. We find genuine joy by having less of our lives revolve around ourselves. When we pour ourselves out for other people it helps us grow and it helps us bring us genuine joy. The world says focus exclusively on yourself, but Jesus reminds us life is lived wrongly if we live it for ourselves.

If we’re honest haven’t we all exposed a little bit today where we fail in our friendships? We all suffer from selfishness and thoughtlessness towards others which should point us all to the best friend any of could ever experience. Remember how we said friendship is based on covenant, love, and sacrifice? Jesus said, “greater love has no one than this that someone would lay down his life for a friend.” He could say this was the mark of a true friend because this is exactly what he was about to do for his disciples and for us. Jesus, because of covenant love sacrificed himself for us to bring us back to God. Because of his death and resurrection, we can be reconciled to God and know him. Then this knowledge propels us out to know others and be known.

Related Posts:
“David and Goliath”
“Samuel and Saul

For Further Reading:
1 Samuel: Looking to the Heart by Dale Ralph Davis
The Art of Neighboring by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon