Samson's Women

Mardi Gras!

Because I can't get this whole thing out of my head, I am going to go ahead and admit: I have become somewhat obsessed with the Samson and Delilah story. I think perhaps because it's so much more than what it's always presented as: a great man who's one flaw is his terrible taste in women (there are actually THREE Philistine women Samson goes for that end up landing him in trouble - although not as much trouble as Samson's first wife ends up in - OUCH).

However, what it's really about, and the Bible is very clear on this, is how God planned all of that. Samson's parents are worried when they first hear that he wants to marry a Philistine woman, and the Bible says it's because they don't know that it's His plan to have Samson start the uprising against the Philistines on her behalf (they burn her at the stake in a misguided attempt to "appease" Samson for remarrying her to someone else when he wonders off in anger after their honeymoon).

But really, it's Delilah that I see at the heart of the reason why the Samson story is actually important. As I started working on her monologues, I found it very interesting thinking what Samson's kind of faith and devotion and abstinence (from hair cutting of all things) must look like from the outside. Samson seems like he was something of a bear of a man who could love more than most. And the point of his story is not that if he hadn't married that tramp he would have led Israel to freedom, it's that God never really left him. His birth was prophesied, and his parents were given instructions (once his father shut up and believed his mother) not to cut his hair. And even Samson seems to have thought that meant that God would leave him if ever he violated that command.

But God didn't. When Samson was blinded and put on display, as if he were defeated, as if God's gifts to him were no more than a magic spell that had a countercharm, God helped him pull the pillars down. Perhaps the loss of that kind of easy sign of morality - like all the trappings of religion that have the outward face of difficulty but are actually so much easier than just being a good person - takes away the power to do God's work as if it were nothing. But it does not remove God's grace from you.

Samson pushing at the pillars, struggling for the first time in his life to do God's will, was even more so a wonder among men in that moment. By losing his outward signal of purity, he was able to learn that his purity of spirit could not be broken as if like a magic spell. God is not the strict totalitarian we so often imagine. All He wants is for us to come to Him. All He wants is for us to do His will. And He will always assist in that goal.