The story of two Nazarenes.
The Eyes of Samson are Upon You
Repeatedly through the story of Samson, we are invited to care about what Samson is looking at. The very first thing, in fact, that Samson is recording doing is going out of his way to look:
Samson went down to Timnah and saw there a young Philistine woman. 2 When he returned, he said to his father and mother, “I have seen a Philistine woman in Timnah; now get her for me as my wife.” 3 His father and mother replied, “Isn’t there an acceptable woman among your relatives or among all our people? Must you go to the uncircumcised Philistines to get a wife?”
Too much out of nothing? Let us continue. Soon after this vision, Samson decides to travel with his parents to Timnah to marry her. The family is attacked by a lion, which Samson quickly dispatches. Returning later, he gazes upon this lion corpse, which for some reason has turned into an ideal place for bees to roost.
8 Some time later, when he went back to marry her, he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass, and in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey. 9 He scooped out the honey with his hands and ate as he went along. When he rejoined his parents, he gave them some, and they too ate it. But he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the lion’s carcass.
It seems apparent from the narration that Samson is going out of his way to look, and like before, going out of your way (whether deep into Philistine territory or off the beaten path) is coupled with looking, and that out-of-the-way looking leads to trouble. In this case, it’s involving his dear parents in his conscious decision to not behave like a Nazirite and mess with dead things. The story spirals from there, with looking replaced by burning of fields and people and houses, and before we know it, there’s Samson in a field with a jawbone and 1,000 dead Philistines.
The very next story, Judges 16, tells us of another out-of-the-way looking, and another catastrophe, one which ironically becomes a severe kind of mercy. Samson is once again out of his way in Gaza, where he sees first a prostitute, and then Delilah, and before long, Samson is shorn like a sheep, with his captors taking from him the thing which had led him there: his eyes1.
Arguably, it is only after losing his eyes that Samson begins to see, for it is only after he enters prison, blinded, that we see Samson praying. His hair grows back, and in his last moment, Samson destroys the Philistine temple, still blinded, and still thinking about his eyes:
28 Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.”
It is unclear what to make of Samson at the end, for it may be the case that it is only at the end that he grasps what it is to be a Nazirite, that he finally lives into his calling. But in the end, Samson still does not understand that it is only through having lost his sight that he can see something better: God’s own faithfulness to him.
Jesus, the New and Better….Samson?
When Jesus tells his disciples that “it is better if your eye offends you to pluck out your eye”, it’s hard to imagine who Jesus might have had in mind from the Old Testament other than Samson. It’s a very oddly specific allusion.
Commentators have noticed the parallels which seem pretty uncanny in the deaths of Jesus and Samson. Two men, both born after their mothers were visited by angels, are paraded in humiliation before their captors (foreign captors no less) after having been betrayed by intimate associates. These two men then proceed to stretch out their hands and overturn the powers of evil in the world.
If Samson is indeed the antitype here, then there is something about not just the eyes, but the uses of one’s calling that we should pay attention to. It seems obvious to note that the contrast between two Nazarenes—one who used his strength for submission, and one who was strong enough to submit, one who steals other men’s clothing (Judges 14:19) and one who removes his own clothes to serve.
As Jesus approaches his disciples to confirm for them his love for them, we see another Nazarene—God in the flesh—willing to serve rather than be served. The mirror is nearly complete. But just prior to this washing of feet, Jesus reminds us that being able to see this difference is a gift, a matter of believing what was right before their eyes. They had ignored the light, and as such, had become unable to see, inheriting the mantle of Samson:
Even after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. 38 This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet:
“Lord, who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”[h]39 For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere:
40 “He has blinded their eyes
and hardened their hearts,
so they can neither see with their eyes,
nor understand with their hearts,
nor turn—and I would heal them.”[i]
The disciples, having followed, do not yet see, but they have not misused their eyes and gone blind, either. That they do not see yet is only because what they need to see has not yet arrived: Jesus has not yet been crucified, and so, in a true sense, the vision the eyes are made for has not yet appeared.
The ones who should have recognized above before the disciples did not, and so, their eyes lost their purpose: if we are looking at the Samson-Jesus connection, then in the passage above, God takes on the narrative role of the Philistines, depriving the chosen people of their wasted eyes. But like the Philistines, perhaps it is the case here as well that the blinding of the eyes has a healing effect: having lost their sight, perhaps they might have the clarity to finally see.
What Samson saw was in some ways what he was looking for, with the expected costs of all that he had. His eyes were lost, and it was his eyes that he mourned. But though the disciples do not understand, they see, though they see a mystery. It is a vision which they do not fully understand but are bound to anyway, a mystery which they must repeat, rehearse, retell, and finally imitate in order to grasp.
The Punishing Vision, The Blinding Truth
It is a consistent motif within Scripture that what is worth seeing is frequently that which is worth seeking out, and then when you find it, it may very well strike you blind: Saul, Elymas, Samson all knew this negatively, that it is through losing one’s eyes that one finds see the truth. But there is another tradition here as well: that in seeking what is worth finding, you see what others might not, and be condemned to see it alone: Stephen before his death, John in his visions, the prophets in their ecstasies.
Seeing is not without its consequences, most of all, loneliness and then the final loneliness of death. The prophets, John, Stephen—all of them spoke of what they had seen and were not believed, because such sight is rare and unshared. Virtue is undemocratic in this way: it is not evenly distributed, for to enjoy its benefits will cost us, and not all will incumber the cost.
The disciples will retell the story until they see what it means: that the God who served is greater than the one who sought to be served, that not all Nazarenes are the same, and that the empowering gift of God can only be seen at great cost.
So, enter in to this mystery, to what we behold but cannot yet fully understand. Let our eyes become accustomed to the light before us, and let us not turn away to easier things to see, to the pride of life and the lust of the flesh. A great mystery is before us here, for those who have the eyes willing to see it, and be changed by it.
Judges 16: 21: “Then the Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza. Binding him with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding grain in the prison.”