by CCW | 3 April 2019 20:00
Discipline. It is a loaded word, one which is freighted with a lot of baggage, and largely viewed negatively. I am sure it makes Mr. Faucher cringe to be thought about as the disciplinarian! But that is to overlook the positive and stronger feature of discipline as something essential to education and maturity. Discipline is really about learning.
In the spiritual traditions of the world’s religions and philosophies, there are those special times which are about a recovery and a renewal of the mind and soul in the ethical principles that belong to ourselves as embodied beings capable of grasping meaning and truth. Such things are about spiritual discipline.
Lent is a time for“self-reflection and repentance”, for “prayer, fasting and self-denial”, for “reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP, p. 615[1]). To that end, we have embarked upon a series of reading from The Book of Judges, in part, because it provides a self-critique of human reason and presumption, a necessary check upon ourselves, somewhat akin to Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex. It offers a critical view of our humanity in its adolescence, we might say. One of its recurring themes is “the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” The other recurring theme which also ends the work is the phrase “in those days there was no king in Israel and everyone did as was their wont.” There is the question about how the truth and order of the will of God in the Law are to be mediated to the people of Israel. In a way, The Book of Judges is a reminder, yet again, of the destructive folly of our humanity when left to our own devices. It reveals the necessity of the Law as the overarching set of ethical principles that shape individual and communal behaviour. Judges shows us what happens when we fail to attend to those principles. As such it recalls us to their necessity. It is a profound check on all and every form of humanism which thinks itself to be self-complete.
It is, to be sure, a pretty violent book with a number of pretty disturbing stories including the ugliest and most disturbing story in the whole of the Scriptures, the story of the Levite’s concubine (which we are not reading this year!). The Judges are motley collection of charismatic individuals raised up by God to try to return Israel to God. It is not about their personal qualities; they are all flawed and importantly so. Yet this awareness of the limitations of our humanity in itself is the important lesson. That awareness can only open us to the need for God’s will and grace in our lives.
We embarked upon a brief consideration of The Book of Judges with “The Song of Deborah” celebrating the victory of Jael, “most blessed of tent-dwelling women”, over Sisera, the enemy of Israel. She drove a tent-peg through his skull! Be careful about your tent mates! The story, perhaps one of the oldest parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, reminds us that the conquest of the Promised Land was not easy and straightforward. There is a conflict of principles. But in the Jewish view, the problem is not about external forces and political power; it is about Israel herself in relation to God’s will in the Law. It is a question about our attention to the Law understood as something ethical.
This week we have considered the challenging story of Jephthah’s vow and Jephthah’s daughter before beginning the stories about Samson. All of these stories awaken us to the profound limitations of human reason especially in our arrogance and presumption. Jephthah’s vow is largely recognised across a number of interpretations as a foolish vow. It shows us what happens if we cling to the legal at the expense of the ethical; an important question in our own times. “I have opened my mouth to the Lord”, Jephthah says, “and cannot take back my vow”. His vow was to sacrifice to God the first thing to come out of his tent if God would grant him victory over the Ammonites. He defeats the Ammonites decisively only to return home to be met by his only daughter.
Cryptically told with a profound sense of the power of words and the idea of being bound by one’s word, it nonetheless reveals a number of problems that have to do with a form of human overreach. For one thing, Jephthah presumes to negotiate with God as if he and God were equals. The daughter acquiesces to her father’s vow asking only for time to bewail her virginity on the mountains before he fulfills the vow. What are they thinking? Is Jephthah thinking that God will intervene as he did with Abraham in the intended sacrifice of Isaac? Yet that story, disquieting as it is, was told not only to test Abraham’s faith – it was God who told him to sacrifice Isaac only to intervene – but to establish as an ethical principle both the end of human sacrifice and the transcendence of God. Here Jephthah is the initiator of his vow. He has vowed what he should not have vowed. Holding to his vow violates the greater ethical principle.
These kinds of ambiguities and dilemmas in which we get entangled point to the necessity of the Law and to the need for stable form by which these ethical principles can be mediated to us and live in us. When that is missing then there is only violence and destruction. We are heroes in our own eyes, not God’s. Judges would awaken us to a truer view of ourselves in our presumptions.
We are to be careful about what we say and to what we commit ourselves. The struggle for the good is a real struggle. Here Jephthah holds to the letter of the word at the expense of the ethical principle, at the expense of the spirit of the Law itself. We are embodied beings capable of grasping meaning and truth but also capable of betraying truth and order. In a way, it is a failure to appreciate how life is a gift requiring our gratitude and compelling a sense of ethical responsibility, requiring our recognition that such things are grounded in God’s bestowal of himself upon us.
Judges reminds us of the forms of that struggle and wonderfully so in the story of Samson. Our peace and stability cannot be achieved by virtue of our strength, like Samson, nor by his wit. One of the few riddles in the Scriptures is by Samson who sees the carcass of a lion in which bees have made a hive full of honey. The riddle to which he puts the enemies of Israel is charming: “out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet.” Not quite a summary of The Book of Judges, it nonetheless alerts us to the true power of words that open our minds to meaning and truth, to the primacy of the ethical, to something strong and sweet.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/04/03/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-3-april/
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