BONUS 25 - Samson: Deeply Flawed

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You're listening to the Catholic Acting podcast, where we revisit the stories you thought you knew and answer the questions you've always had about faith.
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Season three, one take.
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I want to cut down your editing.
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God love you, editor.
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I'm your host, Jordan Wico, along with Father Christopher Poojal and Father Andrew Hamilton.
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Let's roll.
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So it says here a common misunderstanding is thinking Samson is simply a hero we're supposed to imitate.
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The Bible actually presents him as deeply flawed.
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God works through Samson despite his failures, not because of his perfection.
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Yeah, this is a good point about all of especially the Old Testament.
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People say there's all these terrible things and terrible people and slayings and killings and this, that, or whatever.
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Because it's showing you accurate history, so it's not trying to whitewash that.
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And it shows the human condition.
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Yeah, but it's never giving credence to living that way.
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It's rather saying, like, this is what happens whenever you're devoid of God's grace.
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When everybody does what they want in their own eyes rather than the eyes of God, this is what happens.
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Don't let that happen.
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Be a part of God's household and live in ways of righteousness and truth.
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So that's why like we shouldn't whitewash the history of the Bible or be upset that there's like difficult stories there, but rather they're leading us towards the truth that we find in Christ Jesus.
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Some people find the New Testament easy to read and the Old Testament full of like a bunch of difficult things, and they almost separate the two whenever they're rather a whole tool.
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And they want to almost talk about God as two separate the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, but we cannot do that.
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It's the same God, one in the same, and the human condition has changed, and we see God's interaction with us in different ways.
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Did people like when he was a baby, did people know that he was going to be this like powerful, as you put it, like action hero, superhero type person?
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Well, I think it almost sounds like Hercules.
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When he was a child, the angel came to his parents.
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The biblical literature makes it seem like that they would be alone.
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Like this isn't something that everybody else sees.
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But the angel comes to them and then essentially like makes this proclamation.
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They show hospitality.
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This is a theme in the Old Testament as well, that you never know, be aware, because you could be showing hospitality to not just some random stranger, but God.
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And this is even in the ancient world, the Greeks had this as well called Zenia.
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There were certain laws around hospitality and so forth.
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So it's a recurrent theme that we even see in the biblical literature.
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But at that point, whenever the angel comes in, they show hospitality, they recognize after the proclamation who the angel is.
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And you hear the parents of Samson say that they should have like died in the presence of the angel.
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They're like afraid of, but the angel says all shall be well.
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And then the angel throws himself on a py, like a fire that they had made for the animal sacrifice that they had, and then rises up to heaven, like returns to heaven in a way.
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And so there's this supernatural reality that they know that their son will be something special, but I don't know if that's realized until maybe his youth to uh certainly by the time he's an adult, he's doing feats that no one else can do.
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He has a human.
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And people would have known that he made that Nazarite vow, and that vow was being lived out.
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So, you know, it's it's you guys said it was a jawbone of a donkey.
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Is there any symbolism in that?
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There's there's some symbolism with donkeys in and of themselves, that they've always been kind of servant animals.
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But also donkeys, if people have farms, they're protectors, they're actually rather uh temperamental.
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That's why they would go over and they would kick wolves or coyotes or different things that then protect the flock.
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And so Samson is still protecting the Israelites from the Philistines, but he's not doing so in a way that God has ordained.
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He's giving himself a self-justification.
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So he's doing he's doing the job, he's just not doing it correctly.
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Right.
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So, like we can say Or with the right intention.
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I could think of this within the priesthood, for example.
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I don't pray all my hours, a priest might say, because I'm busy and I'm helping people all day and like my work is my prayer.
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Well, that's not what promise you made before your diocesan bishop on the day of your ordination.
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You said that you would pray five times daily for the sake of the church, universal.
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And so that's great that you're doing a lot of good works out there, but you still have to do it the way that God has established it and the way that you agreed upon, not just say, like, oh, I'm gonna do it my way.
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You see how that becomes problematic.
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And then when you start to do it my way and give yourself a justification, you fall off the cliff very quickly.
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Like if you go on your own without accountability and without the way that God has established those parameters for you, you're in very dangerous waters.
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So in in Samson's case, we see him at the end of the story, he still recognizes that he has a duty to protect the Israel people.
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He pulls down the gates, and he himself ends up perishing because of his role in protecting Israel, just as Christ himself offers himself in sacrifice.
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And there's something here too from the Adam and Eve narrative, as well as Samson and Delilah, that uh in a way the protection is given to Adam is to till and to keep in his priestly role.
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But husband and wife protect for each other and have to protect their inherent relationship and the way that they live.
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And so what you see with Eve is that she really doesn't protect Adam from the forbidden fruit.
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And what you see with Delilah is that Delilah doesn't protect Samson whenever there's an introduction of the evil to her and an evil purpose, she doesn't rebu rebuke that, but rather all of those consequences come down upon her beloved.
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And so what we see is the exact opposite image in Jesus, right?
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Announced by an angel that he's going to do great things, the rise and fall of Israel and so forth.
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Rides into Jerusalem on a donkey.
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And beyond that, right, what does he do?
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He shields us from the evil.
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Instead of his bride leading to destruction, he shields the bride from evil and restores.
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And so Jesus is the opposite image of what's happening here, especially with Samson.
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And that bride becomes the church, right?
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And each one of us, as a member of that, becomes shielded from that evil that from the very first moments of the fall through Samson, through all of these biblical stories.
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We've been looking at that.
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We've seen, you know, that serpent slither through and see how humanity falls.
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But now we are protected from that in the bride, the church.
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And what I would say on that is the corruption of the best is the worst.
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Catholics are given much in the spiritual world, spiritual realm.
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We're given everything.
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We're given the sacraments, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ Himself, everything down the line, great tradition, culture, history.
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I'll just refer back to the words of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.
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The French government asked Saint Bernadette what she was afraid of as the Prussians were coming to the gates of France in her time, and she said, The only thing that I'm afraid of is bad Catholics.
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That was her simple statement to the French.
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And in that way, we have to recognize if we don't entrust ourselves to the grace of God, no matter what inheritance we've been given, we will fall short.
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We'll become like Samson in his fall.
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We could be super powerful, strong, be able to do everything.
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We could have a high intellect, all these other things, be successful in the midst of the world, and yet it's all for nothing if it's not given to God.
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And so that's a reminder for us no matter how great we are, we're not really great in comparison to God.
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It's only his glory that needs to shine through us.
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Thanks for listening to the Catholic Accent Podcast.
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