Religious Freedom Crusader or Ignorant Religious Bigot? 

The big twitter-fight story of this week in America was of course Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to provide a marriage license to a same-sex couple. Her refusal to, as a county official, obey the law has landed her in jail for contempt of court.

People on Facebook and Twitter are spouting off either supporting her or denouncing her for either her obstinacy, rebellion, or courage.

How people view her is of course a function of how they view other issues.

• Should she resign her post if her job forces her to violate her conscience?
• Does she have a right to impose her Christian belief on the state of Kentucky?

Others note that such temporary lawlessness is not uncommon in American history even on this subject. In 2004 then San Francisco mayor violated California law by offering marriage licenses to same sex couples. He didn’t wind up in jail but the license were invalidated for a time.

The issues this incident raises go back to the reasons the United States was founded as a secular nation. If people can’t agree on what God thinks about things, or even if there is a God, then the government can’t be used to impose anyone else’s “god stuff” on others. This entire system was designed to allow religious authority but keep it separate from governmental authority.

After hundreds of years of inter-Christian bloodshed in Europe the great compromise was to allow the government “use of the sword” while Christians mostly submitted to it but were allowed freedom of speech. This was the American solution to Europe’s holy war problem. One author suggests in fact that World War I was actually Europe’s last religious war.

The Most Tenacious People in History

Paul Johnson in his book A History of the Jews sees this tension as going all the way back to Abraham and Moses. Once Yhwh declares to his people “you shall have no other god before me” religious authority and political authority are set on an inevitable collision course. For most of world history differences over god or gods were resolved either by addition (having multiple gods) or conquest (killing those who hold different ideas about God or gods). Kings and nations fought for a god or a group of gods and conquered in their names. Conquered populations usually simply added the new conquering god to their list of family gods and the gods of past conquerors. When Yhwh declares exclusive allegiance, however, tensions get raised.

Johnson calls the Jews “the most tenacious people in history” because the Jews both embodied these tensions and have survived them for thousands of years, a feat which is unique and perhaps even miraculous in all of human history. These tensions have run throughout their history. How can they stay distinct and engage productively with their neighbors around them who are often stronger than they are. Through most of their history they were at the weak end of engagement with neighbors and had to figure out how to survive from below. When they weren’t, however, they often looked back to the book of Joshua for inspiration and affirmation.

Greek Domination of Judah

In the second century before Christ it was the Greek Seleucid’s turn to engage the Jewish puzzle. They attempted to “civilize” the tenacious Jews by providing them with proper Greek educational and cultural institutions. They were happy to welcome the Jewish God Yhwh into the stable of gods the Greeks had assimilated in Alexander the Great’s conquests.

When the Greeks were weak the Jewish pushback came in the form of the Maccabee family who began an guerrilla effort to free the Jews from their Greek overlords and to purge their land of this foreign cultural contamination.

The Maccabees were brave, desperate, fanatical, strong-minded and violent men. They saw themselves as reliving the Book of Joshua, reconquering the Promised Land from the pagans, with the Lord at their elbow. They lived by the sword and died by it in a spirit of ruthless piety. Most of them met violent ends. Simon was no exception, being treacherously murdered by the Ptolemies, along with two of his sons. Simon was a man of blood, but honourable in his fashion, not self-seeking. Despite his triumphant installation as high-priest and ethnarch, he retained the spirit of the religious guerrilla leader; he had the charisma of heroic piety.

Johnson, Paul (2009-03-17). History of the Jews (pp. 106-107). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Does Kim Davis stand in the tradition of the Maccabees standing up to American cultural imperialism?

As we saw last week Joshua is often considered to be a dangerous book because of how it has been appropriated. It’s important to not simply judge a book by its reputation or application but to read the book itself.

Yhwh’s Invasion of Canaan

Unless you were raised on the Bible stories of Joshua 5 and 6 you’d find these stories exceedingly strange.

The first thing that happens is the circumcision of the male population of Israel. Why they had not practiced circumcision in the desert, or even the Transjordan is a puzzle that continues to baffle Bible scholars. The truth is we have no idea. What is clear is that crossing the Jordan and invading the “really promised land” to the west of the Jordan required that the people be wholly devoted to God’s covenant as expressed by embracing the covenant sign.

The next vignette is an equally mysterious encounter between Joshua and someone who describes himself as “the commander of the LORD’s army”. We expect this messenger to declare “God is on your side Joshua and I’ve brought his army” but instead he declares that God is on no-one’s side. There is just God’s side and everyone else. Fortunately for Joshua God had decided to turn the “really promised land” over to Joshua and Israel as promised and as the instructions and the subsequent taking of Jericho will exhibit, this will primarily be God’s work and not theirs.

How the Weak Take Jericho

The third and most famous story was in fact the taking of Jericho. Joshua, the priests, the army and the ark famously walk around the city for six days, and then on the seventh do it all seven times, blow the trumpets, and God brings the walls down allowing Joshua’s army to finish the job by slaying everyone in the fort except Rahab and her family who were promised salvation.

It is important for us to recognize something in the story. Walls were weapon-technology and the story assumes that Israel, apart from God’s intervention would have been unable to defeat these walls. They had no technology to defeat the more advanced technology of “the wall” and so without the intervention of the commander of God’s army to take down the wall the invasion of the land would have been over before it began. Think about the movie Independence Day where the armies of earth couldn’t counter the alien invasion until they figure out how to eliminate the enemy force fields. Walls were weapons that weak Israel couldn’t contend with so God does the work.

The point of the three stories is that God isn’t a tool to help Israel achieve her goals, Israel is a tool to help God achieve his goals.

Joshua then becomes a story of hope for God’s ability to rescue the weak.

Triumph and Corruption

The Maccabees saw their triumph over the Greeks in the pattern of Joshua’s triumph over the Canaanites, but the story of the Maccabees highlights elements of the Joshua story as well.

Joshua and Israel were commanded to not rebuild Jericho. This puzzles people. Why not?

Jericho was a fortress, a military weapon designed to control and tax the trade routes. These trade routes were the principle commercial value of the promised land. The land sat at the nexus of three continents. Jericho was an obvious key to ongoing military and economic success and it seems to be precisely this that God withheld from them, along with the plunder of the fortress. This would of course be the test of the next story in Joshua.

The Maccabees eventually became the kinds of rulers that they originally resisted. We see this story again and again in history.

Simon’s third son, John Hyrcanus, who succeeded him and reigned 134-104 BC, was quite different: a ruler by birth. He issued his own coins, stamped ‘Jehohanan the High-Priest and the Community of the Jews’, and his son Alexander Jannaeus, 103-76 BC, actually called himself ‘Jonathan the King’ on his coinage. The recreation of the state and kingdom, originally and ostensibly on a basis of pure religious fundamentalism– the defence of the faith– rapidly revived all the inherent problems of the earlier monarchy, and in particular the irresolvable conflict between the aims and methods of the state and the nature of the Jewish religion. This conflict is reflected in the personal history of the Hasmoneans themselves, and the story of their rise and fall is a memorable study in hubris. They began as the avengers of martyrs; they ended as religious oppressors themselves. They came to power at the head of an eager guerrilla band; they ended surrounded by mercenaries. Their kingdom, founded in faith, dissolved in impiety.

John Hyrcanus was imbued with the fundamentalist notion that it was God’s will he should restore the Davidic kingdom. He was the first Jew to seek military inspiration and geopolitical guidance from the ancient historical texts of the Bible, telescoping the books of Joshua and Samuel. He accepted as literal truth that the whole of Palestine was the divine inheritance of the Jewish nation, and that it was not merely his right but his duty to conquer it. To do this he created a modern army of mercenaries. Moreover, the conquest, like Joshua’s, had to extirpate foreign cults and heterodox sects, and if necessary slaughter those who clung to them. John’s army trampled down Samaria and razed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim. He stormed, after a year’s siege, the city of Samaria itself, and ‘he demolished it entirely, and brought streams to it to drown it, for he dug ditches to turn it into floods and water-meadows; he even took away the very marks which showed a city had ever been there’. 60 In the same way he pillaged and burned the Greek city of Scythopolis. John’s wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking. The province of Idumaea was conquered and the inhabitants of its two main cities, Adora and Marissa, were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused.

Johnson, Paul (2009-03-17). History of the Jews (p. 107). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

If you listen to the Kim Davis back and forth you will hear both sides playing the victim. Christians cry “persecution” while secularists cry “theocracy!”. Both sides knowing full well that the history of the world is filled with zealots, religious or otherwise who once they gain power use it to perpetuate their own welfare and advantage.

Jesus engages Joshua and the Maccabees

If you want to understand Jesus you should understand the book of Joshua and the Maccabean episode.

The book of Joshua nicely sets the baseline that God’s claim on this world is absolute. He has it by virtue of being creator and we his creation. The interaction between Joshua and the commander of the army of the LORD nicely illustrates that God is not a tribal possession that can be called upon to serve our political, social or economic agendas. God is free and if there is any agenda serving to be done we are the tools.

At the same time the Maccabees illustrate the danger of this narrative. When the weak Maccabees become strong they become oppressors not unlike the Greeks. In the words of The Who “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” The Who wishes to say “we won’t be fooled again”, but we are, time and time again. Not so much from the underside, but from the top side. We imagine that we, or our allies, do what’s right. The Kim Davis episode illustrates that if Christians think they are the exception to this, the non-Christian world begs to differ.

https://youtu.be/BrHUD2XmLN4

Jesus steps into this dynamic to do the unthinkable. The political, religious, and social climate of his times were filled with these tensions. What Jesus does is die. Jesus is in a sense the prohibition to rebuild Jericho. Jesus’ life is the declaration of God’s willingness to pay the price, suffer the cost, lose the culture war, and in the end rise again.

Jesus’ disciples were thinking that Jesus would be a Joshua in the image of the Maccabees. They were horrified when he, the miracle man, the stop of storms and the healer of bodies does not employ his power far greater than any county clerk to preserve himself.

The Bewildering Application

Jesus naturally then leaves us with a puzzle. He illuminates but he doesn’t necessarily define or leave explicit instruction for our tiny part of the struggle. Should Kim Davis resign? Go to jail? How about light herself on fire in a parking lot as a sign of protest?

There is an element of Jesus’ willingness to lose that is deeply troubling to us. That is the Jericho quandary.

You might say “well God raised him from the dead!” and I’d say “yes he did, but so what?”

Did Jesus rising from the dead free the Jews from Roman tyranny? Did Jesus rising from the dead disarm the Jewish culture war that had been raging for hundreds of years with different imperial proxies? Yet Jesus’ resurrection (and/or its story) began to shape history in an indirect yet powerful way that even those who claim it didn’t happen cannot deny.

The Jesus question is the Jericho question, are you willing to risk your life on something you cannot secure or control?

The answer of the world is “secure it”. This usually means power. The use of this power to secure it over time turns the underdog into the oppressor.

Jesus responds “I give you my body and my blood for your food. Take, Eat, Remember and Believe”