Judges 3:12-30
“Then Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into Eglon’s belly; the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not draw the sword out of his belly; and the dirt came out.” (Judges 3:21-22)
Unless you’re a real fanboy/girl of violence, there are aspects to the Bible – especially in the Old Testament – that are going to leave you feeling uneasy. And it’s not just a general queasiness around violence (though those feelings are valid), but the role violence appears to play in God’s will.
Our story today begins with Israel’s disobedience and subsequent punishment-by-subjugation as laid down upon them by God. After a season (18 years… and having suffered only four months under COVID, imagine how long those 18 years felt!), God relents. Yet to return Israel to their freed state, a left-handed assassin in Ehud must be dispatched.
It is further interesting that what the story recounts is the major violence against the king of Moab – and rendered in particularly graphic detail! – instead of the inevitable countless violences rendered against the Israelites while they were an oppressed people. This would be a different story if the details of their punishment – the economic injustices of having to pay tribute, the inevitable racial/ethnic prejudice heaped upon this circumcised lot, the rape of their women and the debasement of their men – we the thing remembered. But no. Instead, what is remembered is that they were set free through a clandestine, horrific act of violence against another person. Indeed, the story tempts us to regard Ehud as a hero.
I wonder what these sorts of stories do to our spiritual and moral imagination. I worry that they give us permission to regard anyone who annoys, offends, or harms us as just another fat, stupid Eglon with a clear bowel issue and then to dispatch these folks with the same swiftness and deception we see in Ehud. I especially worry about what happens when we cast other institutions in our society (e.g. America) as the put-upon Israel and thus give ourselves permission for unbridled militarism – and all by the hand and design of God!
All this to say, we have to be careful how we read these stories. To read poorly is to live poorly. Which is why it is imperative to read every act of violence in the Old Testament as some sort of precursor or foreshadowing of the Cross of Jesus Christ. For even if we swallow the bitter pill that, at one point, God’s justice for God’s people required the slaying of another, we cannot still believe this pattern to hold true in our own times. For we live as those who worship the assassinated, not the assassin. We worship the one whose blood and water spilled from His dead side, whose head wore a mocking “crown” made of thorns, whose even resurrected body still maintained the scares of the violence done against Him. To worship such a one as this is to recast the entire history of violence and its relationship to justice; it is to cast a new vision for the relationship of violence and justice in our present and our future.
Based upon the authoritative witness of the Cross, we can no longer believe – and, thus, must live accordingly – that God’s work on behalf of God’s people will involve the smiting of our enemies, for Jesus became the enemy of God on behalf of every enemy. Naturally, then, our relationship to enemies of every sort must be transformed, even to the degree that we must love our enemies and pray for them… just as Jesus taught us.
Let us, therefore, take a moment right now and do just that. Amen.
