(1 Samuel 1:1–8)
Monday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
Today, as the Church enters Ordinary Time, the liturgy opens a new chapter of Scripture: the Books of Samuel. It does not begin with a king or a battle. It begins with a family.
We meet Elkanah, a devout man, with two wives. Peninnah has many children. Hannah is loved—but barren, the future mother of the prophet Samuel.
This quiet domestic tension is not accidental. The Book of Samuel stands like a hinge in the Bible. To understand it, we must look backward and forward.
Before Samuel, there is the Pentateuch—the five books of Moses.
The Bible begins with the creation of a good and beautiful world. It then tells of its loss through sin, of violence spreading so far that only Noah and his family survive the flood. Later, we follow the story of Abraham’s family, which slowly becomes a nation—oppressed in Egypt, yet liberated by the Lord.
God frees Israel from slavery and gives them the Law, not to control them, but to teach them how to live as a just and compassionate people.
Then comes the Book of Joshua.
Joshua imagines the conquest of the promised land as total and divinely commanded. Whether this conquest happened as described is doubtful. What is certain is that the violence attributed to God in this book remains deeply troubling. It is not an easy book to read—nor to explain.
After Joshua comes the Book of Judges.
Leadership collapses. “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” The weak suffer. Chaos grows.
Then, unexpectedly, comes the Book of Ruth.
A quiet story. No armies. No battles. A foreign woman—a Moabite—chooses faithfulness, love, and care.
Ruth shows that God’s future does not depend on power, violence, or “pure blood,” but on kindness across boundaries.
And now—Samuel.
Samuel will become a great leader. He will guide Israel. He will anoint kings.
But this is where the danger begins.
The people ask for a king not because they are holy, but because they are afraid. They want order. They want security. They want control.
Kings promise all of this. And they deliver catastrophe.
The monarchy centralizes power. It builds armies. It normalizes violence. It turns land into property, people into resources, and God into a stamp of approval.
What follows—told in Samuel and the Books of Kings—is failure after failure, until the land is lost and the people are exiled.
The Bible does not tell this story to depress us. It tells it to sober us.
We recognize this pattern today.
Wars are no longer fought only for survival; they are businesses. Weapons are industries. Violence is efficient and profitable.
We exhaust the earth faster than it can heal and call it progress. We poison rivers, cut forests, heat the planet—and call it development.
The Bible dares to tell us the truth:
No political system can save us. No technology can replace wisdom. No prosperity built on violence—against people or against nature—will endure.
The last book of the Jewish Bible is the Second Book of Chronicles. It ends with an edict by Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, allowing the exiles to return and begin again—six centuries after Samuel.
It was another chance.
Today, we too still have a chance.
Hannah’s name means grace. Grace does not deny barrenness; it transforms it.
We cannot be satisfied with a world where a handful of people own half of the earth. We cannot accept a future built on exhaustion, exclusion, and fear.
Only God’s grace can turn a barren world into a fruitful land.
And that grace still begins quietly— with listening, with courage, and with the refusal to make power our god.
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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© 2025 Krakus.
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