When I lived in Minsk after college, I had the opportunity to travel to St. Petersburg, Russia. It is easily one of my favorite cities. No night in the summer and no day in the winter. It is called the Russian Window to the West. One of my best experiences in St. Petersburg was spending a day at the Hermitage. It has one of the greatest collections of Rembrandt paintings in the world.
I had visited once before and been struck by the size and use of light in The Prodigal Son Returns. To prepare for this second trip I read Henri Nouwen’s work on the Prodigal Son and planned to spend some time in front of this piece. It was time well spent. Needless to say, I have been a Rembrandt fan since. I have enjoyed the honesty and candor that Rembrandt brings into his paintings. His other work on the Prodigal Son shows the younger son’s excessive lifestyle. Rembrandt painted this as a self-portrait, as if he were identifying himself as son who ran from the Father.
In reading this chapter on David, I was quick to want to look at Rembrandt’s Saul and David. As with any Rembrandt, the lighting tells the story. My eyes were drawn immediately to the crown upon Saul’s head. Saul is wiping away tears. He has a thousand yard stare, his shoulders slumped under the weight of royal garb, scepter or spear dropped. He is a broken man. The weight of the crown is too much.Following the lines of the Saul’s body, his right arm, the angle of the harp and the secondary lighting source, my eyes are moved to David. He too is appears to be gazing somewhere else. But his fingers are active and his mind engaged. His head is slightly cocked as if his mental state is of deep concentration…or to borrow a sport cliché, he is in the zone. Interestingly, my lines around David do not guide me to his face, but to his chest, or more specifically, to his heart.
The movement of the painting is from the crushing weight of Saul’s crown through his complete dejection to David’s heart and his soulful playing of the harp. It is the transfer of Kingly authority.
The beauty of this painting is how Rembrandt has captured the ethos of the I Samuel passage. In chapter 15 Saul has not fulfilled the Lord’s specific command to destroy the Amalekites. He has tried to reason and rationalize his choices, but it was a blatant disregard of God’s command. Samuel is called to break the news to Saul that it is over for him as King…and in the process to “hack Agag (the Amalekite king) to pieces” I Sam. 15:33 (I only wish I knew the Hebrew phrase…I guess I’ll have to wait until Hebrew I this January). The Spirit of the Lord leaves Saul in chapter 16 and an evil spirit comes upon him. This spirit is only soothed by the playing of a skilled musician. Enter David. David’s skillful playing gives Saul relief of the evil spirit. It must weigh on Saul’s heart heavily, however, that the days of his reign are numbered and God will raise up another King. This will be a king who understands Samuel’s words in I Samuel 15:22-23:
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt
Offerings and sacrifices,
As in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
And to listen than the fat of rams.
For rebellion is as the sin of divination,
And presumption is as iniquity and
Idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word of The Lord,
He has rejected you from being king.”
I think Rembrandt captures that the weight of the crown of Israel is going to be transferred to one whose heart is attuned to God. David was a man after God’s own heart. He is playing as one who is not thinking about music, but as one who is allowing the music to flow from his heart. Immediately preceding the Spirit of the Lord leaving Saul, David is anointed by Samuel and the Spirit of the Lord comes upon him. In an artist’s way, this is what Rembrandt is capturing. It is breath-taking.
The weight of being King was transferred from Saul to David, but David was not the ultimate King for which God's people longed. There would be another greater King. Rembrandt's work is breath-taking, but what is more breath-taking to me is that David was only a shadow of the King to come. The one to come would not just be a "man after God's own heart" but he would share God's heart.
