The Hardest Text?
May 23, 2011
Yesterday, I preached on Judges 19. As I preached, I was aware of a stillness in the congregation that I had never known before.
I have been working through Judges for nearly two years and, from the moment I started the series, I was always acutely aware that Judges 19 was coming. The gang rape of the Levite's wife casts its shadow across the whole book; the crimes of Gideon, Jephthah and Samson, serious as they are, seem mere preparation for the moment when the Sodom of Genesis 19 is no longer somewhere out there but is to be found within the very people of God. In those days Israel had no king; she had functionally rejected God's rules; and the result was a picture of God's people which is far worse than anything the New Atheists have ever dreamed up. Atheism is not a polite option; just read Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman to see a more intelligent account of the matter than you will ever find in Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris (they are more akin to those standing around in Nietzsche's marketplace, whom he mocks as naive and smug). Yet the Bible, in Judges 19, puts it even more dramatically than does Nietzsche.
I will not burden readers with how I preached the text; rather, I will raise the four challenges that I spent most of my time wrestling with this week:
1. There are children in the congregation. Yes, I must preach the text; yet I must do so in a way that does not raise unnecessarily embarrassing or difficult questions for parents over lunch.
2. Statistically, in a congregation of around 90 people, it is extremely likely that sexual abuse is not some idea in a book or some story involving other people; it will be a painful, personal reality. I must preach the text; but I must do it in a way that is sensitive to the sufferings of any anonymous victim of sexual abuse who may be listening.
3. How do I find a way to make the congregation understand that they are to identify themselves with the Benjaminites who brutalized the young girl or the Levite who callously sacrificed his wife to save his own skin? The genius of Augustine, in his account of stealing pears in his Confessions, is that the crime is so trivial, any reader could identify themselves with it and walk straight into his literary and theological trap. But this is gang rape and the facilitating of the abuse of a spouse. Who can identify with that? Yet that surely is the point of the text: human beings, even the people of God, are capable of anything once they have thrown off God's rule.
4. Where do I find the good news? `Don't go out and rape people,' or `Love does not sacrifice a wife to save one's skin' might be legitimate moral precepts but they scarcely bring the gospel out of this passage.
Whether I succeeded in answering any of these questions is not for me to judge;. One clue as to Question 4 - Ephesians 5 is the key. The Levite, by calling, was meant to represent the character of God to the people. Yet he was capable both of sacrificing his wife for himself and presumably sitting indoors as he heard her screams for help on that long, dark night, without ever moving to the door to help her. His callous `Get up, we need to be going' to her as she lay blood stained and broken in the morning light, is merely the icing on the nauseating cake. So very different to the God who sacrificed himself for his bride and whose marriage is the archetype of all other marriages.
The passage is perhaps the most harrowing and difficult I have ever been called to speak on.
I have been working through Judges for nearly two years and, from the moment I started the series, I was always acutely aware that Judges 19 was coming. The gang rape of the Levite's wife casts its shadow across the whole book; the crimes of Gideon, Jephthah and Samson, serious as they are, seem mere preparation for the moment when the Sodom of Genesis 19 is no longer somewhere out there but is to be found within the very people of God. In those days Israel had no king; she had functionally rejected God's rules; and the result was a picture of God's people which is far worse than anything the New Atheists have ever dreamed up. Atheism is not a polite option; just read Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman to see a more intelligent account of the matter than you will ever find in Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris (they are more akin to those standing around in Nietzsche's marketplace, whom he mocks as naive and smug). Yet the Bible, in Judges 19, puts it even more dramatically than does Nietzsche.
I will not burden readers with how I preached the text; rather, I will raise the four challenges that I spent most of my time wrestling with this week:
1. There are children in the congregation. Yes, I must preach the text; yet I must do so in a way that does not raise unnecessarily embarrassing or difficult questions for parents over lunch.
2. Statistically, in a congregation of around 90 people, it is extremely likely that sexual abuse is not some idea in a book or some story involving other people; it will be a painful, personal reality. I must preach the text; but I must do it in a way that is sensitive to the sufferings of any anonymous victim of sexual abuse who may be listening.
3. How do I find a way to make the congregation understand that they are to identify themselves with the Benjaminites who brutalized the young girl or the Levite who callously sacrificed his wife to save his own skin? The genius of Augustine, in his account of stealing pears in his Confessions, is that the crime is so trivial, any reader could identify themselves with it and walk straight into his literary and theological trap. But this is gang rape and the facilitating of the abuse of a spouse. Who can identify with that? Yet that surely is the point of the text: human beings, even the people of God, are capable of anything once they have thrown off God's rule.
4. Where do I find the good news? `Don't go out and rape people,' or `Love does not sacrifice a wife to save one's skin' might be legitimate moral precepts but they scarcely bring the gospel out of this passage.
Whether I succeeded in answering any of these questions is not for me to judge;. One clue as to Question 4 - Ephesians 5 is the key. The Levite, by calling, was meant to represent the character of God to the people. Yet he was capable both of sacrificing his wife for himself and presumably sitting indoors as he heard her screams for help on that long, dark night, without ever moving to the door to help her. His callous `Get up, we need to be going' to her as she lay blood stained and broken in the morning light, is merely the icing on the nauseating cake. So very different to the God who sacrificed himself for his bride and whose marriage is the archetype of all other marriages.
The passage is perhaps the most harrowing and difficult I have ever been called to speak on.
