Re-charge: Samson - strong in his weakness

The Full Monty: Judges 13, 14, 15 and 16 To read if you have time to take-in the whole saga.

The Continental Option: Judges 16:4-22 Read this if you only have time for one, key story.

One Shot Espresso:

Judges 16:30(b) ‘So he killed more people when he died than he had during his entire lifetime.’

J. R. R. Tolkien is known throughout the world as one of the most epic writers of all time. There is something about the way he creates characters which makes them compelling and believable. Who doesn’t love Frodo? American Author Roger Colby recently combed through the letters of the great writer to draw out ‘Tolkien’s five rules for creating complex heroes’. The five rules are:

• Complex heroes must suffer

• Complex heroes are rewarded for suffering

• Complex heroes fail

• Complex heroes have fatal flaws

• Complex heroes are ordinary people

The beauty of Colby’s insightful article is that it could have been written about the Bible. The heroes of scripture are not perfect. They are real. They are complex characters in a complex world seeking to follow God. Nowhere is this more true than in the life of Samson, who is remembered for two outstanding leadership traits: his mind-boggling strength and the mind-boggling foolishness that led to him losing it.

What can we learn from Samson’s roller-coaster life about the relationship between strength and weakness? Here are three lessons you can apply to your own life and growth, and to the lives of those you lead.

Firstly, though we long for simplicity, God is more fully revealed in complexity.  

Human beings love tidy answers. We like to know what’s (always) right from what’s (always) wrong and who’s (definitely) in from who’s (definitely) out. All too often, we associate the name of God with such certainties. But these stories show us that God is present in complexity. Samson’s life is a mixed bag of clarity and confusion; of obedience and error; of triumph and tragedy. And somehow, miraculously, God is with him in it all. Professor Ian Stewart writes, ‘If our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we’d be so simple that we wouldn’t.’

The same is true here. If the God we worship is simple enough for us to contain within our certainties, then by definition he has ceased to be God. Are there areas of your life where the simple answers aren’t working anymore? What might it take for you to find God in the complexity: to trust that he is at work even if you can’t quite see it and don’t quite understand it? A simple faith can be positive: a simplistic faith rarely is. Are you leading young people into an over-simplified view of their world, or can you lead them towards faith in a God unafraid of complexity?

Secondly, being strong in one area doesn’t mean you are not weak in another.

No matter how many oranges you have, you can’t make apple pie with them! Samson is not only physically strong, he is also very clever, outfoxing his enemies with his tricks and riddles. But he has a weakness for women - especially foreign women. It may not be immediately evident from a modern, multicultural perspective why going after foreign women was such an issue, but in Samson’s day it was. One of the clearest instructions God had given to his people was not to marry the women of the land. In the terms in which this text is being presented, we are being told that our hero isn’t just dumb: he is really, really dumb. His weaknesses are every bit as extreme as his strengths. The temptation - and we all face it as leaders – is  to keep focusing on the strengths so as not to have to deal with the weaknesses. This is manageable up to a point - you don’t have to be good at everything - but where your weaknesses are indicative of real character flaws, you do need to face up to them. Samson tried to build his leadership entirely on the basis of his strength. Perhaps he thought that he was so strong that nothing else mattered. But in the end it was his glaring weaknesses that floored him. Are you in danger of using your strength as a shield behind which to hide your weakness? Ask God regularly to ‘examine your heart’, to highlight areas you should be dealing with. And when he speaks, don’t change the subject! Are you a great musician? Perhaps you might like to learn to worship without music. Are you good with words? Learn the power of silence and servanthood. Do you excel at sport? Spend some time with people who don’t - and learn from them. Celebrate your strengths, but let God do business with your weaknesses.

Lastly, your weakness is not the enemy of God’s purposes.

God may be working on key areas of weakness in your life, but here’s the good news: he’s big enough to use you even when you’re weak. The end of Samson’s life is intriguing and extraordinary. His foolishness has cost him his strength, his freedom and his eyesight. He is reduced to a place of humiliation and servitude: a place he would never have come to if it wasn’t for the weakness he has shown. But as he stands in that place, gathering such strength as he can and shaping one last, desperate prayer, he is able to achieve a victory greater than any he had imagined when free. God has not been a passive presence in the complexity of Samson’s life, he has been active: weaving the threads together to achieve his purposes through a potent combination of his servant’s strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes the very thing you are afraid of – poverty, imprisonment, redundancy, loneliness, change, persecution - is the thing God can most use to bring about his greater plan. All the time you are running from death, your maker is plotting resurrection.

It’s hard to miss, of course, the sense of Samson as a pre-figuring of Jesus: the one who by his death will not kill more than in his life but will save more than could be saved by any other means. It was ‘for the joy that was set before him’ that Jesus endured the cross. There was a bigger picture, and he surrendered himself to it. Borrowing from a metaphor made famous by Albert Schweitzer, Tom Wright suggests that it was the calling of Jesus ‘to throw himself on the wheel of world history so that, even though it crushed him, it  might start to turn in the opposite direction.’

This is the picture with which the life of Samson ends. He finally understands that he will best serve God not by being clever or by being strong, but by giving himself - wholly, unreservedly and sacrificially. He surrenders himself, in the complexities of his strengths and his weaknesses, and asks God to do the rest. What more could any of us offer to the God we so want to serve?

TAKE AWAY Two easily-digestible tweet-sized bites

THOUGHT: I am a complex character in the story God is writing. There are strengths that I bring, and weaknesses too. But whatever I bring, God will ultimately win.

PRAYER : Weak as I am God I give myself. Blind as I am I seek you. Chained as I am I sing your freedom. Take the strength I have and use me