Judges: A beautiful flower in the Samson story- his mother

So we've established that Samson is the weightlifting brainless thug who swings constantly from rage to lust and back to rage again and manages to kill a lot of Philistines (Israel's main enemy at the time) in the process, but only because God was weaving whatever Samson did into a nice tapestry that worked to good for God's people in spite of Samson himself.

Samson's story might be where I first started pondering birth narratives and who gets them. With people like Isaac, Moses, Samuel, John the baptist, Jesus, you have leaders who work with God to achieve His master plan. They're all good guys who do what they were meant to do-they find their purpose and stick with it. Samson seems to be the only one who gets a birth narrative but does not pan out.

And it's not just any birth narrative--he gets an entire chapter devoted to his birth announcement, and it is even more dramatic than the visitation to Mary the mother of Jesus! And Samson was really a creep. But he was a creep called by God. His story really reveals an interesting facet of the truth that the calling of God is without repentance. God never revokes His call on Samson's life even though Samson allows himself to be ruled completely by his liver-his lusts, following whatever his passions dictate, without as much moral integrity as a decent man or woman has in their little finger.

Unfazed by this, God ultimately weaves everything into good for His people and makes Samson a deliverer of Israel in spite of himself (but notably, showing him to be far more valuable to Israel in his death than in his whole life of heroic exploits). Samson does actually pray once or twice, though even then, it’s all about his personal quest for vengeance, his own passions. And we may never know what God would have done through Samson if he had yielded his heart completely to the Spirit of God. But Samson is not the flower I have for you today.

The real story of godliness in the Samson narratives rests in the character of his parents. More particularly, and more interesting for all my God fearing girlfriends (thank you, Martina McBride, for this phrase), the real heroine in the Samson narrative is Samson’s mother, the wife of Manoah, who is never even NAMED. It is to this godly woman that the Angel of the Lord appears and announces Samson’s impending birth, her history of barrenness notwithstanding.

Manoah, not around for the first visitation, asks the Lord to send the angel again, allegedly “so that they can get more details about how to raise the child.” The Angel of the Lord does appear again, but does he appear to Manoah out in the field? NO. He appears to the unsung godly woman who has to go out and track down her husband and bring him into (what turns out to be) the presence of the Lord. Moreover, please note, there was not even one more detail added in the second visitation than there was in the first visit to the lowly nameless woman about how to raise Samson as a Nazirite.

Of course, the most riveting point of interest for me in this story, with my ongoing captivation with fire imagery in scripture, is what happens in the offering they make to the Lord. Judges 13:15 Manoah said to the angel of the LORD, We would like you to stay until we prepare a young goat for you. The angel of the LORD replied, Even though you detain me, I will not eat any of your food. But if you prepare a burnt offering, offer it to the LORD. (Manoah did not realize that it was the Angel of the LORD).

Manoah asks the Angel of the Lord what H/his name is, because, he says, he wants to know it so that he can honor the visitor when H/his word comes true. You might think, if you happen to be tuned in to interactional norms and gender differences, that there are some things that women just know not to ask. But Manoah rushes in where angels—well, angels and women—fear to tread. And he is probably embarrassed a tad that he doesn’t get an answer. He is bluntly told that it is beyond his understanding and is asked why he asked. The key point here is that Manoah doesn't know exactly who he's talking to right now but if he is talking to an angel, and not the Lord Himself, what he is proposing is idolatry. So the Angel dude puts the kibosh on that right away. Whatever you offer, you offer to the Lord.

Then Manoah takes a young goat, together with the grain offering, and sacrifices it on a rock to the Lord. And then the Lord does an Amazing thing while Manoah and his wife watch:
20 As the flame blazed up from the altar towards heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fall with their faces to the ground. 21When the angel of the Lord did not show himself again to Manoah and his wife, Manoah realized that it was the angel of the Lord.

This is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the Spirit of God responding to and with fire in His pleasure/acceptance of worship in Scripture. Tucked away in a story about a guy people don’t want their sons to grow up to be like. But a guy who was raised by some godly parents in the midst of the period of the judges when people lived like hellions, each doing as “he found fit,” complete corporate amnesia about those Ten Commandments and several books of laws that had been given to detail what God found fit.

The next thing you notice that is really lovely here is that the lovely nameless woman is the voice of reason in her family. Not shocking to those of us who come from families in which a woman is often the voice of reason, but throughout history it has been a literary standard that men are the voice of reason, and women their emotional counterparts. This is really visible in the Elizabethan literature where men are at the top of the hierarchy of beings because they are, allegedly, ruled by reason.

Manoah, however, gets overcome and decides they are going to die when he realizes they have seen God. 13:22 We are doomed to die! We have seen God! His wife coolly explains that if they died, Samson could not be born, thus defeating the purpose of the whole visitation and announcement.

Then she has the baby and names him Samson and does her best to raise him according to the rules the Angel had stipulated. Throughout the rest of the Samson narratives though, you find Samson sinning, but always behind his parents’ backs—he feeds them honey from a dead animal which was a huge violation of kosher dining etiquette (i.e., it was a big fat sin), but does not tell them where it comes from. And when he insists on marrying a Philistine, his parents protest and try to get him to marry a nice Jewish girl instead. But Samson is always going to do his own thing. To his eventual destruction.

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to this nameless flower in the Samson narratives (which start in chapter 13) who displays more of the splendor of God than her named male counterparts. Sometimes we miss the really tasty bits of scripture that seem backgrounded to the more dramatic actions and characters. Some wonderfully beautiful flowers are hidden in those out of the way corners of the Old Testament woods, off the main path, but very worth tracking down.