Samuel's "Familiarity" with God -- And Ours?

The Gospels of this First Week of Ordinary Time put a focus on repentance and Jesus’s healing of man from evil.   Monday's voiced a call to repentance; Tuesday's  showcased the primacy of the spiritual struggle against evil by exorcism of a possessed man in Capernaum; Wednesday's follows on with some of Jesus’s healing miracles, since man’s is a unified being and his moral sickness will also spill into the [physical realm.  That’s not magical thinking, though it does not admit of some simplistic, one-on-one correspondence: just as we know physical illness can have psychic connections (heart disease in a stressed person is different from an unstressed one), so why are we surprised that the spiritual decay of sin also affects the human race physically?  A basic insight of Judaism and Christianity is that suffering, sickness, and death are all consequences of sin writ large.

         Today, however, let’s turn to the First Readings of the week.  They are intended to introduce the prophet Samuel.  On Monday, we met his mother, Hannah.  Her husband Elkanah (a polygamist) loves her but, despite that love, she can bear him no child.  She so wants a child.  What does she do?  She leaves the matter in God’s hands.  She doesn’t look to “make” a child, like some do today through in vitro fertilization and other artificial baby-making procedures.  She takes her dilemma to God and leaves it in His hands.  Monday’s reading presents her praying fervently at the shrine of Shiloh, where the priest Eli assures her God hears her prayers.  Hannah prays not just for a child but pledges the child to God’s service, a vow she fulfills in the boy’s youth by entrusting him to Eli to be raised in the service of God.  First Samuel speaks of the boy not cutting his hair or imbibing wine.  These were not unique things about him but signs of the “Nazirite Vow,” a sign that a person was specially consecrated to God.  These same attributes apply to John the Baptist, so that – in a real sense – Israel’s first prophet Samuel and its last, John, mirror each other.

Samuel will be God’s prophet to Israel.  It is he who will address the transition of the country from the loose confederation that entered the Holy Land under Joshua and was subsequently governed by those spiritually charismatic leaders known as the “Judges.”  Samuel will consecrate Israel’s first king, Saul, and its greatest one, David.  But first, he must learn whom he works for.

In Wednesday’s First Reading, Samuel hears a call in the night.  The first and second times he hears it, he runs to the priest Eli, to whom he had been entrusted, thinking the older man was summoning him.  Eli, who finally understands God is calling the youth, gives him instructions that apply equally to us: the next time Samuel hears the Voice, say “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.”  The sacred writer puts it well: at that moment, Samuel “was not yet familiar with the Lord” (I Sm 3:7) so Eli teaches him what to do and how to respond.

That we should want to be “familiar” with the Lord.