Then the people of Judah said to him, “We’ve come down to take you prisoner so we can turn you over to the Philistines.” Samson responded to them, “Just promise that you won’t attack me yourselves.” 13 “We won’t,” they said to him. “We’ll only take you prisoner so we can turn you over to them. We won’t kill you.” Then they tied him up with two new ropes, and brought him up from the rock.
14 When Samson arrived at Lehi, the Philistines met him and came out shouting. The Lord’s spirit rushed over him, the ropes on his arms became like burned-up linen, and the ties melted right off his hands. 15 He found a donkey’s fresh jawbone, picked it up, and used it to attack one thousand men. 16 Samson said, “With a donkey’s jawbone, stacks on stacks! With a donkey’s jawbone, I’ve killed one thousand men.” 17 When he finished speaking, he tossed away the jawbone. So that place became known as Ramath-lehi.
18 Now Samson was very thirsty, so he called out to the Lord, “You are the one who allowed this great victory to be accomplished by your servant’s hands. Am I now going to die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” 19 So God split open the hollow rock in Lehi, and water flowed out of it. When Samson drank, his energy returned and he was recharged. Thus that place is still called by the name En-hakkore in Lehi today. 20 Samson led Israel for twenty years during the time of the Philistines. (Common English Bible)
“Heroes, not Kings: The
Days of Israel’s Judges,” Week Seven
As
a student associate pastor in seminary, trying to absorb as much as I could, I
could see my senior pastor as he strode on the chancel, jawbone in hand. He was
showing us what it was, explaining the different parts of it, and then telling
us that it belonged to a donkey—the same species of donkey whose jawbone Samson
picks up in this passage of Judges 15 and ends the lives of one thousand Philistines.
Russ
recounted his mental image of the story, of the violent nature of Samson
himself and the qualms he felt personally at the notion that such a slaughter
should be so celebrated by us today, in a world as fraught with violence now as
it was in those days.
Then
he turned and placed the jawbone down on a side table upon the chancel, and
implored each of us, in our own lives, to quite simply *put the jawbone down.*
To put down the endless cycle of vindictiveness and vengeance we talked about
together last week that the jawbone represents, to put down violence and the
vehemence with which it is being committed in this story.
And
when we respond to Charlottesville, with the candlelight vigils at the
University of Virginia and the memorial service in which Heather Heyer’s mother
committed Heather’s soul to right action and her father preached forgiveness,
and in its wake we immediately see carnage reminiscent of Charlottesville in
Barcelona, as we did in Manchester and in Nice and in Paris, we would do well
to heed the call of Russ in that sermon seven or eight years ago: Put. Down.
The. Jawbone.
This
is a (no longer altogether very) new sermon series for the season of summer,
and it reflects in part my desire to proffer a balanced spiritual diet of sorts
in my preaching. We have just spent two full months in the New Testament for
Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, so it’s high time to slip into some Hebrew
Bible Scripture, and for me there are few stories more compelling anywhere—not
just in Scripture—than the stories of Israel’s judges.
The
term “judge” is a bit of a misnomer to us now in the Biblical sense. In our
government, judges are the black-robed guardians of justice who sit from on
high and issue opinions and decrees that interpret the law in such a way as to
protect and uphold the United States Constitution. My dad quite enjoys his gig
doing exactly that as a judge on the Court of Appeals of the state of Kansas.
But
“judge” in the Hebrew Bible sense refers to a very different sort of role: that
of a unifying figure who arises as a result of popular acclamation to unite the
otherwise disparate twelve tribes of Israel temporarily into one nation to face
down an external threat (typically, a neighboring nation of people), and who
may serve as judge for life, but who does not necessarily have an automatic
heir and thus is unable to turn their rule as judge into a dynasty of kings.
Hence, the title of this sermon series: “Heroes, not Kings.”
We
began this series with the story of the left-handed assassin Ehud, and we
continued the series with the female judge Deborah and her aide-de-camp Barak.
We heard in succession about three more judges—Gideon, Abimelech, and Jephthah,
and we now come to our second week of three on the most well-known judge of all,
and whose story the book of Judges goes into the greatest detail with by far:
Samson.
Last
week was the first of three weeks that we are spending on Samson, and we read
about his reaction when he went to go see the woman he believed was his wife,
who he had just married, only to find out that her father had given her in
marriage to his best man (talk about a Bible story readymade for a Jerry
Springer episode). This leads to cycle after cycle of grievances and hurt
feelings that ends up with a number of people—including Samson’s wife and
father-in-law—dead.
This
cycle of grievances comes to a rolling boil now in the second half of Judges
15, as the Philistines have functionally declared war on Israel—deploying a war
party to make camp and march upon the Israelites, and in case there is any
ambiguity as to what their purpose is when they charge in shouting in verse 14,
consider the notes from the late Bible scholar Robert Boling on Judges in the
HarperCollins study Bible: “The Philistines are shouting (Hebrew, “yelling a
war cry”) in triumph and jubilation.”
They’re
yelling a triumphant war cry, intent on neutralizing forever the threat that
Samson poses to their military hegemony in this small region of the Levant.
Instead, they, too, end up dead. One thousand of them, according to the text.
In
another time, maybe we would have read this story and felt the same sort of
triumphalism the author clearly feels, that the Philistines may have initially
felt before they were slain, and which Samson likely feels himself once he has
appealed to God and slaked his thirst. And I realize that sort of triumphalism
was surely part of the original intent at least for some of the author’s
original audience, if not for the anonymous author of Judges personally as
well.
But
that cannot be the sort of triumphalism that we celebrate as a church that
worships this God. And so we too must put down the jawbone that represents this
sort of triumphant victory of violence over yet more violence.
Put
a different way: we follow the way of the empty tomb, not the way of the
jawbone.
Yet
neither have we entirely put the jawbone down, or else we would have set
ourselves free from that endlessly vindictive cycle of violence that we talked
about last week, and that we see escalated in the text here this week.
The
way out of that cycle, though, is still in this same text, though, albeit
hidden in a throwaway verse towards the end: God cracks open rock for water to
flow through.
It
is an outward image of what God is inwardly capable of within each of us: the
softening of our hearts to let the living water that Jesus preached of to, say,
the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4 to likewise flow through into our
lives. There is a hollowness in that rock that today’s text speaks of, yet the
living water of God rushes through it, just as it rushes through the ministry
of Jesus to the Samaritan woman at the well who beseeched Him for just some of
this living water of God’s.
In
Samson’s case, the water from the rock was not quite enough. It washed away his
thirst, and perhaps the physical (though not spiritual) blood from his hands,
but his was one of the hearts that needed to be softened and broken through
like that rock at En-Hakkore. And lamentably, that did not happen.
It
can happen, however, for each of us.
Indeed,
in another year of domestic and international terror, I would say that it must
happen.
It
is imperative that it happen.
And
I believe that humanity will not survive in any meaningful spiritual sense if
it does not happen.
So
humanity must put down the jawbone. Put down the jawbone on the grand,
macrocosmic scale, between nations and continents, but also, put down the
jawbone on the smaller, microcosmic scale, between individuals, between
people…like us.
In
the wake of Charlottesville and Barcelona, and now this weekend in Florida with
the report of two police officers shot and killed in the line of duty,
reportedly by a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder--just as the murders of the five Dallas PD officers last year were likewise committed by a veteran with PTSD--this is not an ask
for a kinder, more polite world from the Church of Be Nice and Chew With Your
Mouth Closed. This is a radical ask from a radical Savior who taught His
disciples on the last night of His life that one who lives by the sword dies by
the sword.
Samson
lives and dies, to put it in the context of Judges, rather than Matthew, by the
jawbone.
But
it should not be how we live and die.
So
put down your jawbone when confronted with people different from you. Put down
your jawbone when presented with someone who asks you to walk a mile in their
shoes instead of presuming that your shoes fit them just fine. Put down your
jawbone when given reason to tighten your grip upon it instead.
May
the ground around us and our churches be littered, then, with dropped jawbones.
And
may God see those jawbones and pierce our hearts at long last with living water
like the rocks of En-Hakkore.
Put
down the jawbone. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
20, 2017
Original image source: NPR
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