Sunday, August 4, 2013
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Judges 16:4-30
Rev. Rachel Johnson
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I’ve been thinking a lot this week about stories – specifically folk tales and the stories we are told as children. When I was a child, folk tales were a family favorite on long road trips. They were narrated to my sister and me in the form of books on tape to keep us occupied as we traveled the long distances to see our relatives. I remember one folk tale about an elderly peasant man in Russia with a horrible wife who wouldn’t feed him. He kept tightening his belt tighter and tighter to keep his stomach from growling, eventually having to cut new notches in it to make it go tighter still. Finally, he was reduced to stealing cabbages from the neighbors cabbage patch and then something remarkable and strange happened. Truth be told, I can’t remember the rest of the story, just the image of the belt getting tighter and tighter and the idea of someone being desperate enough to be willing to eat cabbage. There was also a story about a voodoo medicine woman in New Orleans; all I remember of that is the eyeballs she wore as a necklace.
But there are other stories I remember with greater clarity. One that still gets told in my family today is the gale of Brer Fox trying to catch some toads to eat. Try as he might, those toads were always just too fast for Brer Fox to catch and they loved taunting him about it. Then one day Brer Fox sat crying by the river bank, inconsolable because his friend Brer Rabbit had died. The toads, feeling sorry for Brer Fox, agreed to help dig a grave for Brer Rabbit. Deeper and deeper they dug, occasionally asking Brer Fox if the hole was deep enough. This is the part of the story that still brings my family delight as we all remember the inflection in the narrator’s voice as he told the tale on the book on tape: after digging for some time, the big toads would call up “is it deep enough?” followed by the smaller toads who would ask “is it deep enough?” Each time Brer Fox would ask, “Can you still jump out?” And when they responded “Yes,” he would tell them to keep digging. I think you all can see where this is going. Finally, after several rounds of asking, “is it deep enough?” it was determined that the toads could no longer jump out of the whole they had dug. Then immediately up sprang the decidedly not dead Brer Rabbit and he and Brer Fox feasted on toads that night.
The thing I remember the most about the folktales of my childhood is the moral ambiguity that surrounded them. You see, unlike tales of George Washington never being able to tell a lie, or Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return a dollar, these folktales weren’t necessarily intended to teach lessons of virtue. To be sure, there are lessons to be drawn, I suppose: If you can’t catch your dinner one way, be crafty and change the rules of the game so your dinner comes to you. Or, if someone has proven time and again they want to eat you, maybe don’t voluntarily dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. But my point is this, in these folktales, none of the characters were paradigms of virtue. There was no clear “good guy” and clear “bad guy.” They were all a mix of virtue and vice, leading to unvarnished consequences that couldn’t always be wrapped neatly in a bow.
This brings me to our current sermon series today on the book of Judges, and our particular story about the Judge Samson. Samson is perhaps the most famous of the Judges. Even people not familiar with the book know the tale of how a strong and powerful man met his downfall at the hands of a woman. There is a tendency to want to think of Samson as a supremely righteous man – a strong and powerful warrior, a defender of Israel, who tragically had just one weakness.
Indeed, this is what I learned about Samson growing up. Many of us who grew up in the church have stories about how we learned tales from the Bible – there are certain images and associations that are permanently fixed in our psyches related to how certain Bible stories were first told to us. For me, I will forever view the story of Samson as told through the lens of the great biblical scholars and theologians William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Hanna-Barbera was, of course, the great American animation studio that dominated American television for three decades – according to Wikipedia. They brought us classics such as Huckleberry Hound, The Flintsones, Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, the Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, the Smurfs and many more. They also created a fantastic series of videos called “The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible.” If you’re friends with me on facebook, I posted the link to the Samson and Delilah story earlier this week. In my mind, Samson will forever look like He-Man’s Israelite cousin, ridiculously strong with bulging muscles and clothing that for some reason never covered anything lower than the upper-thigh. Samson, as Hanna-Barbera tells it, lived during a time when the evil warrior Philistines ruled Israel, oppressing the Israelites and worshiping pagan gods. Samson was the lone Israelite courageous enough to stand up to the Philistines and defend the one true God. That is, of course, until Delilah ruined everything.
Actually, while I’m obviously about to expose this narrative as problematic, if you are going to tell the story of Samson to children, the Hanna-Barbera video really is pretty good. Now, after you’ve heard the whole story, the broader question you’ll probably ask is “why would anyone think it appropriate to tell this story to children??”
Now that I’ve walked us right back up to the meat of our text for today, I’m going to step back just one more time very briefly to put it in historical and literary context. As anyone who has spent any time in this church knows, “just reading the Bible” is far from a simple exercise. First it requires peeling back the layers of our own personal and cultural context that we’ve imposed on it, then it requires examining the layers of personal and cultural context that the authors bring to the story, and then you get to examine and wrestle with the actual text.
Jason has already given us a great overview of the book of Judges and I only have a little to add. The book of Judges falls in a part of the Hebrew Bible that many scholars refer to as the “Deuteronomistic History.” The theory that is popular among many biblical scholars is that the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings are meant to be read as an epic narrative whole that begins with Moses right as the people are about to enter the promise land, extends all the way through the conquest of Canna, the establishment of the kingdom of Israel, and then it’s subsequent fall ending in the Babylonian exile. This means, as Amy told us last week, that while the book of Judges is about the period of time immediately before Israel was established as a kingdom, it was not actually written down until after the kingdom had fallen and the Israelites were in exile.
This creates a couple of theological problems that the authors had to address, especially in Judges. The first is that Israel was never supposed to have a king; this is what made the Hebrews distinct. They had a special relationship with the one true God who was supposed to be the only sovereign they ever had. But, by the time of the exile, the authors couldn’t change history and erase the fact that there had been a kingdom, so they had to explain how that happened within the theology of Israel’s unique relationship with God. The second problem was that the kingdom was conquered. Even if Israel wasn’t supposed to be a monarchy, God did consent to create one and the very basis of the relationship with God was the promise that the Israelites would get to live in the land given to them. With the Babylonian captivity, that promise seemed all but shattered. The laws detailed in the book of Deuteronomy are meant to provide the theological framework for this existential wrestling and that’s why it’s considered the first book in this epic narrative.
If Deuteronomy could be reduced to a single theme, it would be this: Love the Lord your God. Deuteronomy begins with a re-telling of the 10 commandments originally given in Exodus – and what is #1?? “I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt; you shall have no other gods before me.” Less than one chapter later we are given the Great Commandment – “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This is it, the one thing. Yes, there are lots of other legalistic requirements and some 30 chapters of rules, but this is the single most important one. Love God before anything else.
This is the rule that Judges begins with. In chapter 2 God says, “I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you into the land that I had promised to your ancestors. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you.’ For your part, do not make a covenant with the inhabitants of this land.” That’s it, after bringing them in to the promise land, all God required was that the people remain faithful. But as Amy taught us last week, the theme of Judges is that the one thing God required of the Israelites proved to be the one thing they could not do.
Judges is constructed around a narrative cycle that repeats itself. Step 1) “The Israelites again do what is evil in the sight of the Lord.” – that is the refrain that is repeated throughout the book. Step 2) the Lord gives the people into the hands of oppressors 3) Israel cries out to the Lord 4) the Lord raises up a deliverer known as a judge 5) the oppressor is subdued and the land is at rest. Only, each time this cycle repeats, it degenerates a bit more. Like a downward spiral, even though they’re going round and round, Israel never ends up back in the same place. They’re always a little worse off by the end. Which brings us back to Samson. He is the end of the cycle, the last judge before utter chaos breaks out. Allyson Robinson has the distinct honor in a few weeks of preaching on the unique horror that is the very end, so I’ll leave that to her.
The story of Samson covers chapters 13-16 in Judges. It starts out, as you would expect, with the refrain “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gave them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years.” You may remember the Philistines from the important role they play in the story of a shepherd boy named David and a Philistine warrior called Goliath. But we haven’t gotten there yet. For our purposes today, the Philistines were Samson’s main enemy and he spent most of his life either antagonizing their warriors or sleeping with their women – sometimes the two went hand in hand. Samson was born to a woman who previously had been barren before God came and promised her a child – a very familiar theme throughout Scripture. The condition was that Samson was to be a nazarite from birth. The requirements for the nazarite vow can be found in the book of Numbers and include 3 main prohibitions 1) never eating or drinking anything that comes from a grape 2) never touching a corpse 3) never cutting one’s hair. Now, anyone could be a nazarite, but when it came to Samson, there were some unique characteristics of his vow, specifically that keeping his promise to never shave his head is the source of his awesome strength.
After the tale of his miraculous birth, there are a series of vignettes about the exploits of Samson and the Philistines that I think can best be characterized as a series of Chuck Norris jokes. You know the ones: When Chuck Norris does pushups, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the world down. What is an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object? Chuck Norris clapping. Chuck Norris made Journey stop believing.
Only for Samson the jokes go something like this: Samson doesn’t open doors to leave a room, he rips out the door posts and walks off with them on his back. That is the story of the time Samson visited a prostitute and the Philistines locked the city gate to keep Samson inside sothey could kill him. Rather than be defeated by a mere locked door, Samson pulled the city gate out by the door posts and carried it to the top of a nearby mountain. Here’s another one – Samson doesn’t eat honey made by tiny bees; his comes from a lion he killed with his bare hands. And last one, Samson didn’t have to use the jaw bone of a donkey to kill a thousand Philistines, but killing them with both hands tied behind his back would have been showing off. The last two come from some particularly violent stories in chapter 14 that are less than flattering to Samson. Unfortunately, there is not enough time to tell them here.
All this is the backdrop, to the story with Delilah. You see, Samson had a weakness for women and the Philistines finally decided to use that against him. The Philistine rulers bribed Delilah to coax from Samson the secret of his strength. Delilah wasn’t exactly sly about it either. She went directly to Samson and said, “Please tell me what makes your strength so great, and how you could be bound so that one could subdue you.” I guess she thought because she said “please” he would surely tell her. Three times Samson lied about how he could be bound and subdued and three times Delilah waited until Samson fell asleep, bound him as he had said – first with seven green willows, second with new rope, lastly by weaving his hair in a loom. Then she cried out, “The Philistines are upon you, Samson!” And each time, Samson sprang awake and snapped himself free. Delilah became more and more upset until, to quote our text, “After she had nagged him with her words day and night, and pestered him, he was tired to death.” Samson revealed the truth – because of his nazarite vow, if his head were to be shaved he would lose all his strength.
You know the rest. The Philistines captured Samson, blinded him, and shackled him to a mill stone. Then one day when they were offering a great sacrifice in the temple to the god Dagon, the Philistines brought Samson out to mock him. They placed him between two pillars that held up the temple. Samson prayed to God for one last feat of strength that he might bring down the pillars, killing the people on the balcony above, those in the temple below, and himself with them. That is what happened and 3,000 were killed in this final act.
So maybe Hanna-Barbera was stretching things a bit when they depicted Samson as a hero of the faith. This isn’t exactly the type of person parents want their children growing to emulate. Time and again Samson’s conflicts with the Philistines centered on personal grudges that he would solve with violent rages. He never actually showed any concern for the people of Israel or defending the one true God. He just picked fights and sought revenge. Then there’s the fact that he proved to be incredibly dense and – let’s just say it – stupid when it came to Delilah. She told him exactly what she wanted to do. Three times she tied him up and then shouted “the Philistines are upon you!” and still he told her the secret of his strength. But I think there’s actually more to the story than this. In fact, I don’t think Samson’s great downfall was stupidity; I think it was hubris. Samson’s strength was a gift from God and all he had to do to stay strong was keep one promise. I think Samson came to take that promise fore-granted; he viewed his strength as something innate to who he was that he could never lose. It was all about him, not God. And so he flaunted his vow. It didn’t matter if Delilah and the Philistines knew, there was no way they could ever bring down the mighty Samson. The promise to God didn’t matter, because when you’re strong and powerful, it’s easy to forget who got you there. It’s easy to put more faith in yourself than in the promises you’ve made.
And in this way, the story of Samson is the story of the entire Israelite people. They had made one promise to God, just one thing they were supposed to do – love God and worship no other. And they took that promise fore-granted. This is what I think the authors of Judges saw clearly when they were writing from the perspective of the Babylonian exile. The Israelites had believed they didn’t need a king because of their special status as God’s chosen people. But then because of their special status, they no longer believed they needed God. And so the people fell into chaos and did what is evil until God relented and gave them a king. Indeed, Samson’s tremendous strength could represent the height of Israel’s power as a kingdom, the time when they were prosperous and secure and a mighty force in the region. But even with a king, the Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and fell to the Babylonian’s conquering sword.
It would appear then that judges is not a tale of virtuous heroes. Instead, it is much closer to the folktales I was raised on; stories where the morality is unclear and the lessons a little harder to tease out. One commentator put it this way: “The biblical text seems designed to show the depravity of human, and specifically Israelite, nature and its need for divine mercy and assistance.” And that perhaps is the one clear lesson to take away – the one shred of hope the exiled Hebrews could cling to in Babylon, the one promise that is still true for us today. No matter how many times Israel turned away, God’s faithfulness was steadfast and divine mercy and assistance was always offered. Even after his pillaging and broken vows, God heard Samson’s final prayer. Even after all our short comings personally, and as the people of God, God still reaches out for us, hoping, always hoping that in return we’ll finally remember to do just that one, true thing.