Hanging up our gloves: a Christian response to the violence of the Older Testament
Based on Judges 7:2-22
In the middle of last year, I did something I had never anticipated I would
do, and certainly not at fifty-something. I took up kickboxing.
This kind of happened by accident. I had been looking for an alternative
form of exercise. It was winter, and it was now too dark to go climbing
hills when I got home. I had been going to the pools, but I wanted to try
something different. I decided to go to a gym, something I had never done
before. But I had the impression – rightly or wrongly – that gyms could be
somewhat pretentious places. And I figured that a martial arts or boxing
focused gym might be a bit more down to earth. So I wandered into Oliver MMA
and arranged to come in for a trial session.
I thought that I would be working out on bags and with weights. I had no
idea I would be doing kickboxing training. But that night I discovered a few
things. Such as kickboxing was a lot of fun. It gave me the best workout of
any exercise I had ever tried. And I had a pretty reasonable left hook.
I kept it up for a couple of months. My twice-weekly training sessions were
among the highlights of my week, and I became the fittest I have ever been.
But then what I had expected would be a routine hospital check-up for my
glaucoma saw me requiring immediate laser surgery. I took a break from my
training while I recovered, but when I went back, I found my hand-eye
coordination had been compromised. Good coordination is vital for any
martial art. Without it, I could end up getting badly hurt. So, after
several attempts to get back into it, with some reluctance, I hung my gloves
up.
I was sharing my frustration and disappointment with some friends and
acquaintances, and one of them commented that there were far worse things
that could happen in life than having to give up what she described as a
‘violent sport’. I pointed out that what she called my 'violent sport' was
an effective means for me to maintain physical and mental health and
fitness, adding that violence and aggression did not come into it.
But after that conversation, I found myself reflecting on my attitudes
towards violence. I have always had somewhat pacifist leanings. And I tend
to find graphic violence on television and in films disturbing. However I
must confess I enjoy watching physical sports like boxing and rugby union
and league, which I know must somewhat tarnish my perceived peacenik
credentials.
My previous job, which I left about two and a half months ago, was with
Oranga Tamariki-Ministry for Children, and during the more than four years I
worked there, I read many detailed accounts of horrific violence and other
abuse against the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society.
And in more recent years, I have awoken to the reality that many of the
privileges I enjoy through being a middle class Pākehā in Aotearoa
New
Zealand were ultimately gained by violence against Māori during colonisation
during the 19th Century.
I revisited the whole issue of my attitudes towards violence while I was
reflecting on this afternoon’s Older Testament lesson from the Book of
Judges.
As part of the official story of the Israelites, Judges describes the time
between the conquest of Canaan led by Joshua, the successor to Moses, which
is described in the Book of Joshua, and the emergence of the monarchy with
the anointing of Saul, in the First Book of Samuel. This book is called
Judges, because the people were led by a series of temporary leaders we know
as judges during this time: five men, and one woman, Deborah. The most
well-known stories in Judges include those of Samson and Delilah, and Gideon
defeating the Midianites, which we heard this afternoon.
Joshua, Judges, and the First and Second Books of Samuel and Kings
respectively, are often collectively referred to as the Deuteronomistic
History. Up until quite recently, it was widely accepted by scholars that
these books were all the product of possibly a single writer or compiler
around the time of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, who was trying
to make sense of these events, modelling his work on the theology and
language of the book of Deuteronomy. The Book of Joshua portrayed a divinely
authorised conquest, the Book of Judges, outlined as a cycle of rebellion
against God and subsequent restoration, and Books of Samuel and Kings
emphasised the catastrophic consequences of disobedience to God, which
culminated with the Babylonian conquest.
It sometimes surprises people to discover that there is quite a bit of
graphic violent and sexual content in the Bible. Especially in the Older
Testament. And while the most explicitly violent individual incidents I can
remember reading are found in the Second and Fourth Books of Maccabees (the
latter is not in the Bibles used by most churches), Judges has been named by
various commentators as being the most violent book overall in the Bible.
And if you read the entire book in one sitting, it’s easy to understand why.
While Judges may have been awarded the dubious honour of being the most
violent book in the Bible, the text we heard today is one of its tamer
offerings. As part the cycle of rebellion and restoration, which I mentioned
earlier, the Israelites had been oppressed by the Midianites for seven
years, which was attributed to divine punishment for idolatry, until the
Midianites were soundly defeated by Gideon, a judge and military leader,
whose name has been co-opted by a certain well Bible distributor that bears
his name.
Although this story, the Midianites got off relatively lightly in that they
were permitted to flee after their defeat. Other retributive texts in Judges
can be very disturbing in comparison. Innocent men, women, and children are
killed.
So how do we deal with the violent nature of some parts of scripture,
especially the Older Testament? Especially when violence appears to be
divinely initiated, the implication being that the God of the Older
Testament must be some kind of violent despot.
There are several approaches we can take,
One approach is to reject the violent depiction of God in Judges and other
parts of the Older Testament as being wholly incompatible with the God
revealed in Jesus. But this is problematic. Jews, Christians – and also
Muslims – worship the same God, the God of Abraham. So we can’t try to
pretend the God of the Older Testament is a different entity altogether.
An alternative is embracing the violence by citing it as all being part of
God’s plans. But this has led to all manner of bad theology, including
attempts by Christians in some countries to justify violent actions, such as
slavery and the use of capital punishment in the USA, on the basis that this
is God’s will. Even though advocating violence is completely at odds with
the way of Jesus.
Somewhat between these extremes are other options, such as contextualising
the violence, or trying to justify it in the context in which it occurred.
And reinterpreting it to make it seem less confronting. But these responses
achieve little more than camouflaging the harsh reality.
My preferred approach is that we consider the cultural and historical
contexts of the original texts before we can determine how they might
possible be speaking to us today, and secondly use Jesus and his teachings
as the benchmark against which they should be measured.
Books like Judges were written at a time of national crisis when nationhood
and identity needed to be restated. Especially the Israelites’ perceived
divine right to occupy that land that had just been taken from them by the
Babylonians.
So rather than interpreting the text as saying the Israelites had a violent
God, it makes more sense to say that those who wrote down and edited the
stories hundreds of years later made the depictions of their God violent to
justify the more violent aspects of their own national struggle. And the
inherent violence makes much more sense when we consider when it was
written, and by whom and for whom it was written.
So where does that leave us today?
I believe reading the challenging, violent texts, like those we find in
Judges and other parts of the Older Testament reminds of the harsh, cruel,
and unforgiving world Jesus was born into and would later transform. It can
challenge our views of power structures in the world and help us to examine
the role violence has played in our lives, especially the privilege it has
created for some of us as we try to find our place in a post-colonial
Aotearoa New Zealand. (I particularly think if the invasion of Parihaka,
whose anniversary we remembered on Thursday). And it can galvanise us
towards working towards fixing these injustices
When we consider the text we heard today from the Gospel according to St
John, in which Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us, we
get a much better picture of an ideal for living. [1]
I believe all of us have to some degree benefitted from the systemic
violence of unjust power structures or the past. And I say it’s time to hang
up our gloves and instead play our part in fighting for
the realisation of God’s reign of justice and peace here on earth.
Darryl Ward
8 November 2020
1
John 15:12
All Bible references are from the New Revised Standard Version unless stated
otherwise.