The Spear and the Jug
Newsletter for February 21, 2025
Our opening reading for this Sunday comes from 1 Samuel 26. David and his companion Abishai have found Saul asleep in the desert of Ziph. David and Saul are sworn enemies, so it is not surprising that Abishai offers to kill the king “with one thrust of the spear” that is placed beside Saul’s head. What is surprising is the way David restrains him. He takes the spear and a neighboring water jug, and the two flee the scene unnoticed.
As I studied this passage throughout the week, I kept coming back to the image of the spear and the jug. It was hard not to think of the crucifixion as depicted in the gospel of John, where we read that “one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out” (John 19:34). I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this. Any connection seemed tendentious at best, more of a musing than a thought.
And then, as is often the case, Thomas Merton stepped in to help me along. Here he is in the transcript of a conference published under the title “Is Contemplative Life Finished?”: “When reading the Bible your imagination should be distinctly aware of the images, the pictures presented to it. Besides taking account of these separate elements, it should also see how they are fused together in a symbolic unity, in what the Germans call a Gestalt, a form made by things converging in a new living unity.”
In this reading, the spear and the jug have value precisely as themselves, in the fact that the first iteration of the image conjured for me the second. The value comes in showing that Scripture is an interdependent network of symbols that emerge from reality, from the life of water and metal as they are touched, drank, carried, and shed by human beings.
Jesus understood this, and it was part of his capacious poetic and spiritual genius that he was able to take the concept off the page and process it through his body. The institution of the Eucharist is the ultimate example, but there are many others. I think of his selecting an “ass’s colt” on his way into Jerusalem in John 12:14, prompted by his knowledge of Zechariah 9:9: “Your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass.” It is as if he’s reached back through the book and pulled the symbolic valence of the prophecy to life as easily as one might lead a pack animal by a strap.
Merton correspondent Boris Pasternak probed this notion further: “Our age has reached a new understanding of the aspect of the Gospels that has always been best understood and expressed by artists. It was strong in the Apostles and then it withered away in the Fathers, the Church, morality and politics . . . It is the idea that the communion of mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic, because full of meaning.”
I have a weakness for the pithy dismissiveness of that phrase, “morality and politics.” It reminds me of all the bloviating we see in public life, the false promises and false accusations tinged with saccharine piety. But it is useless to dwell too long there. I am more interested in the upshot of Pasternak’s proposal—that it is one short step from the book of text to the book of life, and that by training our minds and ears and hearts to assimilate Scripture as a web of relationships, we might better recognize the “new living unity” as it manifests itself through all of creation.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic