Godliman Street

“It is better to be silent and to be.”

          ~from a letter to the Ephesians by Ignatius (c. AD 110)

 Scripture: 1 Samuel 9:3–6

Some years ago my wife, Carolyn, and I were walking the streets of London and making our way toward Saint Paul’s Church when we came across a street named “Godliman.” It was an insignificant little road, not much longer than a football field, but for some reason the street name stuck in my mind.

Later I learned from an old book by a nineteenth-century Londoner that a gentleman had lived on that street many years before whose life was so saintly the road became known as “Godly Man” street, and thus the English corruption, Godliman. The etiology reminded me of an old story.

It seems that Kish, Saul’s father, had lost his donkeys, a matter of some consequence in his day, and sent his son and a servant to find the straying animals.

From their home in Gibeah, the two young men traveled northeast some twenty miles, ascending the east slope of Mount Ephraim and passing down the other side. From there they turned to the northwest to the land of Shalishah, then south to Shaalim and into the borders of Benjamin’s tribal allotment, making a circuit of over a hundred miles, but they caught no sight of the donkeys.

It occurred to Saul that their long absence might cause his father more worry than the missing animals and suggested that they return home, but his servant pointed toward Ramah, Samuel’s village, and replied, “Look, in this town there is a man of God; he is highly respected, and everything he says comes true. Let’s go there now. Perhaps he will tell us what way to take.”

So Saul and his servant hastened to Ramah, where they found Samuel and explained their plight and gained a good deal more than they expected. But that’s another story (cf., 1 Samuel 10:1).

What intrigues me most about this tale is the reputation that Samuel had earned as “a man of God.” The old prophet had run his course, had retired from his work, and was no longer in the public eye, yet the fragrance of his life lingered on. His presence was “weighty,” to use the Old Testament idiom.

“He is highly respected” (9:6) is the way the NIV translators render the verb in an effort to turn it into normal English, but the essential meaning of the Hebrew word (kabod) is “heavy.” It’s the term used elsewhere in Samuel to describe Eli’s corpulence: “He was an old man and heavy” (1 Samuel 4:18).

To be “heavy,” in idiomatic parlance, was to be weighty—glorious, esteemed and distinguished, an expression reminiscent of the sixties accolade, “He’s a heavy dude.” The word had to do with the opinion others had of a person, or, in an objective sense, that person’s reputation, honor, and glory.

The New Testament employs the same idiom, using an equivalent Greek word, doksa, that also means “heavy.” The word has a wide range of meanings, but all correspond closely to the Hebrew word, kabod, and again have the idea of weight—honor, distinction, and glory. (This is the idiom behind the title of C.  S. Lewis’ book, The Weight of Glory.)

Many years ago I was traveling in central Greece with a friend of mine, John Landrith, and happened upon a small museum in the city of Berea. The curator was busily uncrating a new acquisition as we walked in the door. The crate contained a tablet dating from the first century AD, recently excavated from the city, that honored a distinguished citizen of that day. The tablet was written in Greek and listed the man’s contributions to his community-civic duties and appointments in which he had distinguished himself and put his mark on the community. The litany ended with the phrase: “This was his weight (doksa).”

This man’s gift to his city was political savvy; Samuel’s beneficence was holiness. The gravity of the prophet’s godliness weighed on all who knew him, so much so that Samuel’s hometown, Ramah, became known as “the place where a man of God dwells.”

Would that our lives would so reflect Jesus that we would make a similar mark  on our neighborhoods and that the memory of our godliness would linger on.