The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A, 2014 – Judges 4:1-7; Psalm 123; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30
We are nearing the season of Advent, which is the time when we anticipate Christmas, Christ’s first coming in humility, and Christ’s second coming in glory as our judge. In fact Advent readings have already started. In Thessalonians we have Paul’s repetition of Jesus’ warning that he will come again in judgment like a thief in the night—a rather fitting warning given the ending of our story in Judges. For Paul, readiness distinguishes who are children of the day as they wait for the Judge to come.
Jesus’ job as judge of the world, on the one hand, can often be obscured by all the portraits of him carrying lambs and such. On the other hand people have often forgotten that Jesus is merciful. I want to explore how Jesus is both: he is the merciful judge. I will use the story of Deborah and Barak to illustrate that mercy is all a matter of timing.
In short, we know that God is merciful, but we cannot just assume that he is merciful at all times equally. We cannot say, “God is merciful so I can get away with it right now,” and then come back and ask for mercy when it’s convenient for us. If we want mercy, we must wait for him to offer it and take it when the time is right.
The time of the Judges of Israel began back in the days of Moses when he was leading Israel through the desert after escaping Egypt. For a while Moses had been sitting as judge over all of Israel’s disputes no matter how small. So when his father-in-law shows up for a visit and sees the situation of burn-out that Moses is facing, he suggests delegating his judicial authority to a number of men who will be over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. That way only the more complicated cases will come to the prophet.
With this system in place the Israelites enter the Promised Land and, after the death of Moses and Joshua, the judges take over leadership. Remember, Israel did not yet have a king. God directly ruled. As for his human delegates, what qualified them at this point in time for judicial authority seems to have come down to a combination of prophetic gifting, divine commission, or military talent. The judiciary was a rather flexible institution, one it seems that was open to women like Deborah as well.
But in contrast with the generation of Joshua, who entered the promised land with great triumph, and who loved the Lord with all of their hearts, the later generations began to backslide. We read in Judges 2: “They provoked the Lord to anger, because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel the Lord handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress. Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hands of these raiders. Yet they would not listen to their judges but prostituted themselves to other gods and worshipped them.”
“Prostituted” is a rather apt way of describing what was going on. Who were these gods the Israelites were going after? I haven’t been able to entirely sort out the complex background of how one god morphed into another as their cults were transferred from place to place. But I do know that there was a common religious culture that came from the ancient centres of Assyria and Babylon, the Eastern empires that hundreds of years later would put an end to Israel altogether. Their gods made their way into Canaan where the Israelites met them as Baal: the Sun God, aka. Beelzebub, which means “The Lord of the Flies,” so named after the fact that all the flies come out in the heat of the summer sun. Yet it is a name that ironically connotes a sense of death and decay. And indeed when the summer heat was ruining the crops, a human sacrifice might be made to Baal. Again, “Baal” simply means “possessor” or “master” or “lord,” a lordship the prophet Hosea would contrast to the lordship of Israel’s God (Hosea 2:14). God was like a loving husband to Israel, while Baal an abusive pimp who “possessed” women’s bodies, which he could sell at a whim. That’s why Baal worship included ritualized prostitution. No wonder Jesus gave the name of Beelzebub to the devil! He ran into his demonic possessions everywhere.
So why, then, did Israel run after this god? It seems utterly absurd, but Israel freely worshipped the gods of their oppressors! But if the Moabites or Ammonites or Amalekites are taking away your land, why are you bowing down to their gods? Why aren’t you rebelling? The complicated reality of prostitution is that it’s a mix of immorality and slavery. So, time and again Israel would be “sold into the hands” of their oppressors.
Now here is a troubling fact. I have just been highlighting that God’s lordship is different from the lordship of Baal. God is a loving husband while Baal is an abusive master; God delivers Israel from slavery while Baal possesses them as slaves. But here if you’ll pay attention to the verse, you will see that it is God himself selling them into slavery: “So the LORD sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan.” It is not that God is like Baal. What effectively happens is that his protection, favor, and presence are withdrawn from the people once they become idolaters. It is as if God sells them to Beelzebub. St Paul is thinking the same thing when he describes the plight of the world without Christ: “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another….Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind.”
In effect, God has set up the scheme of this world that certain natural consequences follow wrong action. It’s something we experience every day. Good deeds are rewarded with good consequences; bad deeds with bad ones. I don’t mean to say that bad things don’t happen to good people, or that bad people don’t find themselves by God’s grace in merciful circumstances. If it were the case that the hammer always dropped when we sinned, we wouldn’t make it very far in life. But we can’t presume that the hammer won’t eventually drop if, say, we accumulate forty parking tickets. Mercy isn’t mercy when you can presume on it. So, in general we see that good deeds are rewarded with good consequences and bad with bad, and that there is some wiggle-room for mercy. That’s religion 101.
Mercy for the oppressed is what we see in our reading today. God had sold Israel into the hands of Jabin, king of Canaan, and once they cried out for help, he sent them the prophetess Deborah. It reads, “She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel.” This is a rather interesting fact since it is the very spot that the Rachel’s nanny, named Deborah, had been buried way back in Genesis 35. The Bible does this: if you pay attention, you will find that all of the women are linked together by these little cues. Another cue to pay attention to is the tree that she sits under. For, Baal had his female counterparts, one of them being Asherah, the fertility goddess, whose place of worship was marked by a tree-trunk or a stone. And yet we find even worshippers of the True God like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob marking important ritual sites with trees and stones. Were they and Deborah tempted to imitate the paganism around them? To understand I will bring in two more women: Eve is tempted by the serpent in Genesis 3 to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil rather than from the tree of life, which is also called the tree of Wisdom in Proverbs 3. This is about Wisdom vs knowledge. And Wisdom, as you know, is personified as a woman in Proverbs over against another metaphorical woman named “Folly,” who takes the role of a prostitute tempting men down the path of destruction. This is about Wisdom vs foolishness as Paul said. Eve, as it were, chooses folly, while Deborah, being older and wiser, sits in the place of Wisdom under the tree of Life where she judges the deeds of men and advises them on how to defeat Folly.
At God’s command this is what she does: “She sent and summoned Barak son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, “The LORD, the God of Israel, commands you, ‘Go, take position at Mount Tabor, bringing ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin’s army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his troops; and I will give him into your hand.'”” It would seem that Israel, who had been suffering the natural consequences of their infatuation with Baal, were now about to be shown mercy, while the chickens had come home to roost for their oppressors. God decides to let the hammer fall now upon Jabin and Sisera’s evil deeds.
I hesitate to jump to the end of the story yet because I want to highlight this theme of liberation. I don’t know to what degree Israel was getting what it deserved by bowing to Beelzebub and to what degree Beelzebub’s men, Jabin and Sisera, were punishing Israel way beyond proportion. But when they cried out for mercy, whether they deserved it or not, they got it. So God acts and he commissions Barak.
Barak leads his men up Mount Tabor. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that the mountain overlooks the valley of Armageddon–suggestive! You’ll also know that the mountain is a rock bed; it would be impossible to get a chariot up. So the Canaanites have to stop their chariots at the foot of the mountain, and that’s when Barak descends on them. Sisera’s men are slaughtered, and he flees all the way to the tent of Heber, a man from a tribe who is supposed to be an ally of Israel, but who has fallen under Baal’s influence. His wife, Jael, is there to meet Sisera, and she quickly ushers him into her tent where she hides him under a blanket. And now my metaphor of the hammer dropping becomes a reality! Lulled to sleep by a warm glass of milk, Jael sneaks into his room, positions a tent peg right over his temple, and like a new Eve crushing the head of that serpent she pins him to the ground. Strength demonstrated in weakness.
For forty years after Israel has peace. But what happens next? they slide back into a cycle of Baal worship then God worship then Baal worship until finally they can’t presume that God’s mercy will be automatic. The book of Judges ends at one of the lowest points in Israel’s history. Torn by divisions, enslaved by idolatry, they have been completely sold to sin. The stage is set for the advent of King David in the next book.
I hope you see that this is all leading up to a rather straightforward ending. God mercifully gives us time in our life to flip-flop back and forth between faithfulness and unfaithfulness. But there comes a point, a point we don’t know, once we have become totally ensnared that there is no turning back. Referring to the coming moment of reckoning John the Baptist said to his crowds of followers “The axe is at the tree.” He might as well have said “the tent peg is at your temple.” When Jesus, the Son of David, tells us that it is time for war, there is no time to waste. That is the moment of your freedom and it must not be passed up. For those who continue to prostitute themselves to this “Lord of the Flies” the consequences are inevitable. But for those, no matter how unlikely, who take Wisdom as their weapon, spiritual freedom is a reality.
The only question is whether we will take hold of this mercy when God gives us the word. It is one thing to presume on this mercy and think it is available any old time. It is another thing to watch and wait for the Lord’s help. Timing is everything in war, and that holds for spiritual warfare too.
Launch your own battle on your own terms at your own time after having ignored God’s own command, and you will fail. Remember the story of the twelve men Moses sent to spy on Canaan. They came back with a bad report and discouraged the people from going to battle. So Moses told them they missed their opportunity to gain freedom, at which point they tried to take Canaan by force and failed miserably. Spiritual freedom is all about wisdom and timing. So take hold of God’s Wisdom at the time that he offers it. Repent and get ready!
