Unconventional
Judges 4:1-10
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The verses for this morning’s reading do not begin to do justice to the story that is before. It is something whose details seem better suited to the stuff of graphic novels, or an episode of Game of Thrones. The children of Israel have entered the land; the land that was long ago promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. After forty long years of exodus out of their slavery in Egypt, and a sustained military campaign under the leadership of Joshua to subdue the Canaanite people, things are less settled than you would think they’d be. In fact it’s a pretty stark contrast between the triumphant conquest that we read about in the book of Joshua and what’s depicted in the stories of the Judges, where the people are in a kind of limbo. Because while they are in the land, they are by no means in control of the land. As a result, their existence is tenuous at best, filled with conflicting loyalties, hostile neighbors, and an on-again-off-again relationship with God.
Most of what we know about this book comes from the selective Sunday school lessons that we may have heard about Gideon, or Samson. But the book as a whole follows a fairly predictable pattern that is really the trope for this part of Israel’s history. It starts with the Israelites doing evil in the sight of the Lord. In turn, God gives them over to an enemy. The Israelites then cry out to God, who raises up a judge- someone who will lead them back to God and help them overcome whoever it is that happens to be oppressing them. The entire book of Judges is effectively a series of variations on that theme. And it’s probably why many of us remain unfamiliar with the darker contours of this book of the Bible. We don’t particularly like the suggestion that God would hand us over to our enemies for something evil that we’ve done. There’s just a whole lot about that sentence that makes us very uncomfortable. What about grace? What about forgiveness? What about all this talk of God’s steadfast love that endures forever? Of course we could get so indignant at this God who would allow such horrible things to happen that we might never get around to the latter half of the formula; the part where God hears the cries of the people and raises up a deliverer, someone who will be God’s agent in helping to save and restore the people. That is, until the whole thing starts over, and once again the people do evil in the sight of the Lord.
But what does that mean? What exactly are we talking about when we say that? I mean, what is so wrong that God would allow someone like King Jabin of the Canaanites and his general Sisera to stand with their boot on Israel’s neck for twenty years? Elsewhere it is noted that all this happens in the days before Israel has a king, or at least an earthly king. The people were uncertain about their leadership, we are told, so everyone did what was right in their own sight. It that such a bad thing? No king. Everybody’s free to do what’s right for them? Why that even sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it? Only freedom isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
In their freedom, the people of God forgot who it was who had brought them into the land to begin with. They forgot that it was God who freed them from the yoke of their slavery in Egypt. They forgot that it was God who led them through the waters of the sea to safety. They forgot that is was God who kept them alive as the journeyed across that barren and desolate wilderness. They forgot that it was God who went before them as they drove out their enemies and took their place in the land that had been promised to the forebears.
What the people find is what we all find eventually. The most daunting challenges to our faith are not our hardships. It isn’t what weighs us down, or the dry expanse of the desert that stretches for endless miles around us. It isn’t even the frightening reality of someone who wants us dead. As difficult as those things may be, the times when our faith is the shakiest is when everything is going okay, when we enjoy the freedom to do and have whatever we want. The time when we are most vulnerable is when we are surrounded by the comforts and perks of living in the promised land, because that is when we begin to forget. Things are good. There’s plenty to eat, the freedom to make our own way, maybe even to prosper. Not all at once, mind you, but gradually, over time, we begin to wonder why it is exactly that we need God. Or maybe it’s that we simply think about God less and less. We forget how we got to this place to begin with. We forget how we almost didn’t make it. We forget how, without God, we never would have been able to leave that abusive relationship, or been able to stay sober, or had the strength to forgive that person when it would have been easier to give in to the hurt and the hate. In the bright light of day, we forget how dark it can get and what it’s like to see that first glimmer of resurrection light.
So we leave God behind and go chasing after whatever it is that everyone around us is chasing after too: a second house, a better office, the latest this, the nicest that. For God’s people it was the belief that two gods are twice as good as one. Why not cover you bases, just in case? I mean, if what your neighbor worships can deliver the goods, why not send a little love that way? The people took for granted the goodness of their life with God and figured the prevailing wisdom of their Canaanite neighbors couldn’t be all that wrong, could it?
Now the bible isn’t a book for the politically correct. It doesn’t tend to shade the truth in the interest of protecting our fragile self-esteem, fearful that its Word may hit too close to home and scare us away. This prophetic Word names our tendency to go chasing, our habit of pursuing substitute gods- whether it is in the form of political parties, nationalism, professional ambition, perfectionism, or simple popularity- for what it is: evil. The people did evil in God’s sight when they violated the first and most fundamental commandment and began to worship other gods.
Another way of translating that word from the Hebrew is, ‘disaster.’ When our pursuit of something other than God leads us away from the only one who can give us life instead of taking it, we are flirting with disaster. It is evil. And because God is loving, not one to coerce or control our decisions, God lets us go. But the evil that leads us way brings with it disaster. It brings with it plenty of unintended consequences. Nobody sets out to make things worse. It’s a little like that line from the old movie Romancing the Stone, where Michael Douglas says to Kathleen Turner, “What did you do, wake up this morning and say, ‘Today, I'm going to ruin a man's life’?” Well, nobody wakes up and says, “today I am going to ruin my life,” or “today I am going to surrender to my enemy.” No, we usually say things like, “today, I am going to do what I want,” or “today, I am not going to trouble myself with all those things I’d rather not deal with,” until we find ourselves stuck, trapped by our freedom and confined by our choices in a life that neither we, nor God, intended.
For twenty years the people lived with the cruelty of King Jabin, whose power rested upon a superior army of iron chariots and the man who commanded them, his general Sisera. The people of God were no match for that kind of weaponry and they lived in constant fear. They cried out, and the Lord answered them. And this is where the story gets interesting. Because in those days the judge and prophetess in Israel was a woman named Deborah, who sat under her palm tree and would tell the people what was what. You see, the answer God provides is not to defeat all the evil around us and within us on its own terms. God will not get into an arms race and go toe-to-toe, matching Sisera’s 900 chariots of iron with 900 chariots, plus one, of God’s own. God does not fight fire with fire. No, God’s answer to our cries, God’s deliverance from the disasters of our own making comes in the least likely and most unexpected of ways. The powers of this world rest on their superior fire power. But God’s power rests on those who do not see as the world sees, but recognize the wisdom of what God has to say, even as it upends all our assumptions.
So it is with Deborah, Lappidoth’s wife, who summons Barak and relays to him God’s command to take on Sisera. When Barak blinks, and refuses to go unless Deborah goes with him, she utters a phrase that foreshadows how this whole episode will end. It is a phrase that we would do well to heed ourselves. She tells him she will go, but, “the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory.” In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that if the road we are on is one that we expect to lead to our glory- it’s the wrong road. When the battle begins, Sisera’s chariots of iron are no match for the power of God that goes before Barak and his army. But it won’t be Barak and that army that bring down Israel’s foe. As the tide of battle turns, Sisera runs for his life and takes refuge in the tent of a woman named Jael, assuming, I’m sure that she could do him no harm. She invites him in, gives him some milk to drink and covers him up to rest. Then, as the mighty warrior sleeps, she takes a tent peg in one hand and a mallet in the other and drives the peg through his head and into the ground.
It’s a pretty dark story, this chapter out of the Judges. But it is a reminder that no matter how many times God’s people turn away and find themselves with a disaster on their hands, when we cry out, God is sure to hear us. And hearing our cry, God will raise up for us a deliverer who will take on the powers of this world in unconventional ways, restoring God’s people once again. In fact, God already has.