Zoom
Judges 4:1-24 · Deborah
Expecting the Unexpected
Judges 4:1-24
Sermon
by Robert S. Crilley
Loading...

Whoever started the tradition of referring to the various documents of the Bible as "books" probably meant well. However, it seems to me, this rather generic designation often obscures an important truth: namely, that the "books" are, in fact, an extremely diverse body of literature -- containing everything from laws to letters, and poetry to prophecy. Even a casual reader soon realizes that the so-called "Good Book" is actually an eclectic collection of pieces written over the course of centuries by God only knows how many people, and for how many divergent purposes, or from how many variegated points of view. Of course, it somehow manages to hold together, and when we consider the Bible we usually regard it as a whole. But all the same, perhaps in part because of its plurality, I think different passages of Scripture place different burdens upon us.

Some passages, for example, are difficult to understand. If there is an edifying word, it often eludes even the most gifted exegete. Much like a stubborn child refusing to speak, the text just sits there on the page before us with arms folded, lips tightly sealed, and appearing almost to stare off in another direction. Jesus denouncing that defenseless fig tree with a withering curse for failing to yield a little fruit ahead of schedule, or the time he instructs Peter to pay the temple tax by catching a fish and getting it to cough up a spare coin, are two which come to mind. Or how about that unnerving scene of the she-bears mauling 42 youngsters after they had playfully ridiculed Elisha's receding hairline. Who wants to tackle a children's sermon based on that lesson? Not me, thank you. It's hard to make sense of some texts. Their burden is primarily one of comprehension. And after spending a frantic Saturday night searching for anything which even remotely resembles good news,

I'm sure many a preacher has been tempted simply to paraphrase the sentiments of Henny Youngman: "Take this passage ... please!"

Other texts, though, place a burden not so much up on the intellect as upon the will. We understand them well enough, or at least think we do. It's achieving them which poses the real problem. Mark Twain once quipped that what troubled him about the Bible was not what he failed to understand, but rather what he understood quite clearly and yet failed to accomplish. "If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile" (Matthew 5:49b-41). Have you ever attempted to live out the meaning of these words? It's tough to do! And hence, the burden of such a passage is more keenly felt in trying to follow the instruction than in figuring it out.

Still, I suppose it's best to be honest and admit that there are some passages which place a burden on our ability just to accept them. It isn't a question of comprehension or achievement. The problem is not one of lacking explanations or even examples. The difficulty lies in the truth that, when you get right down to it, we simply don't like the text. And that is the case, at least for me, with this unsettling account from the fourth chapter of Judges, in which the Israelites face overwhelming odds, and yet end up overwhelmingly defeating the vast army of the Canaanites. For whatever reason, the lectionary leaves off rather abruptly at the seventh verse. However, the narrative itself doesn't conclude there, and to get a real sense of what a scandalous passage this is, one needs to read on a bit further.

Curiously enough, the story actually begins in a somewhat understated, almost casual, matter-of-fact fashion: "The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, after Ehud died. So the Lord sold them into the hand of King Jabin of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor; the commander of the army was Sisera, who lived in Harosheth-ha-goiim" (Judges 4:1-2). At the time, as the text goes on to explain, "Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel" (Judges 4:4). She was, of course, their only woman judge, but it was hardly a token appointment. Like an ancient E. F. Hutton, when Deborah talked people listened! And from all accounts, she was forceful and yet fair, courageous and yet compassionate, favoring no one and yet attentive to each. Indeed, Deborah displayed so little personal emotion in rendering judgments that, every now and again, I suspect some folks might have teasingly compared her to the palm tree under which she often sat out in the Ephraim hill country.

And it is from beneath this very tree that she eventually summons Barak, and insists that he start preparing for war. "The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you," Deborah tells him, " 'Go, take position at Mount Tabor, bringing ten thousand from the tribe of Naphtali and the tribe of Zebulun. I will draw out Sisera, the general of Jabin's army, to meet you by the Wadi Kishon with his chariots and his troops; and I will give him into your hand' " (Judges 4:6b-7). At first, Barak can scarcely believe what he's hearing. As a matter of fact, Deborah's voice is filled with such startling confidence that he begins to wonder whether she's residing under this tree because she has fallen out of it! After all, in the past Jabin's army had proven to be a rather intractable enemy -- possessing 900 iron chariots, not to mention having already oppressed Israel some 20 years now.

For a while, Barak just stands there with a puzzled squint, staring at Deborah as if studying a museum painting. And when he finally does manage to stammer out a few words, they are punctuated with half-hearted reluctance: "If you will go with me, I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go" (Judges 4:8). She agrees, but feels it's only fair to warn him in advance that the bragging rights for this battle are not to be his. "The road on which you are going," she says, perhaps with a knowing smile, "will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman" (Judges 4:9).

No doubt, the reader immediately assumes that this woman is to be none other than Deborah herself. But alas, instead of the dramatic, Israelite-judge-verses-Canaanite-general scene we clearly expect, when the dust finally settles, Sisera is fleeing for the hills along with the rest of his troops. Just shy of the border, though, he happens to encounter a woman named Jael, the wife of Heber the Kinite, who belongs to a tribe which isn't even involved with this skirmish. Astonishingly, Jael practically rolls out the red carpet for Sisera. In fact, she provides him with even more than he requests. He asks for a drink of water; she gives him milk. He wants to catch his breath; she suggests he take a nap. He doesn't wish to be disturbed; she makes sure he'll never move from that spot again. For as Sisera sleeps, Jael creeps quietly in and quickly disposes of him by the rather innovative (though I would guess somewhat arduous) technique of hammering a tent-peg through the temple and nailing his head to the ground! Of course, upon hearing the news, Deborah is as pleased as can be. Call it divine prophecy, call it woman's intuition, call it what you like -- but she had predicted it from the very beginning. And while she doesn't exactly dance on Sisera's grave, Deborah does break into a triumphant 31-verse song, glorifying the entire gruesome episode.

It isn't easy to be fond of a text like this, is it? Frederick Buechner, I think, underscores part of the problem by observing that: "In view of the fact that Jael's victim was a) her guest and b) asleep and c) had never harmed a hair of either her head or her people's, it would seem that to call her deed heroic is to stretch the term to the breaking point."1 Now, I suppose one could always file such a passage under the broad heading: "All's fair in times of war." However, according to Deborah, it's not only fair, it's just. And stranger still, it's been accomplished because of Yahweh's command. Or to put it another way, if this were a movie, the closing credits would read: "written, directed, and produced by the Lord, the God of Israel."

We might as well admit that by the time everything's said and done, Sisera's troops aren't the only ones panic-stricken -- I dare say, a good many preachers are also! To put it mildly, it's difficult to accept a story like this, because it's difficult to accept the kind of God who would instigate a story like this. But then again, this isn't the first time the Almighty has acted in a way we didn't quite anticipate. In fact, "expecting the unexpected" seems to be a common refrain in the storyline of Scripture.

Take Abraham and Sarah, for example. Here they are in their golden years, when suddenly three strangers announce that they'd better strap a child-safety seat on the camels, and begin preparing for a blue-blanketed bundle of joy -- the stork is on its way at last! Small wonder that Sarah laughs out loud. After all, at her ripe old age, who would've ever expected that she'd soon be expecting? And I suppose, along with learning how to change diapers, warm bottles, and assemble a crib, the two of them also learn one additional lesson: that with God around, sometimes even your craziest dreams don't actually prove crazy enough.

Or consider Jacob. Among other things, he is an outright crook. Thomas Long once joked that long before P. T. Barnum ever said, "There's a sucker born every minute," Jacob had already come across a first-class sucker -- born just a minute earlier -- by the name of Esau.2 And when Jacob gets tired of hustling him, he moves on to pull the wool over the nearly-blind eyes of his old man Isaac. In fact, he even cons his double-crossing father-in-law Laban, by swindling him out of most of the best livestock and eventually sneaking away with both of his daughters. Now I ask you: Is this the kind of person one would expect the Almighty to choose? Hardly. And yet, according to the story, God not only chooses Jacob, God wrestles him to the ground with an angelic half nelson and blesses him!

Over and over again, heaven's agenda seems to catch us off guard. For who could have known that when the time came to lead the Hebrews out of slavery, Yahweh would appoint as divine spokesperson not a silver-tongued orator, but a stuttering sheepherder? Who would have ever guessed that the secret to Samson's strength depended more on his avoiding the barbershop than working out in the gym? Who could have possibly foreseen that from the imprudent affair of David and Bathsheba there would one day be born the wisdom of Solomon?

Or move ahead into the New Testament and think of those marvelous gospel passages depicting Jesus' birth. Talk about expecting the unexpected. Here, the wedding invitations are already in the mail, a hefty down payment on the reception hall, perhaps even a few premarital counseling sessions with the local rabbi, and suddenly Joseph discovers that, through no fault of his own, his fiancee is pregnant. Mysterious? Of course. Miraculous? To be sure. Expected? Not! I mean, let's face it: Mary is just an adolescent girl, barely old enough to have a child at all -- let alone this child!

Like some recurring punch line that's always popping up when we least expect it, we are repeatedly invited to share in the delight, and at times sheer folly, of a God who works through the most unlikely people in ways that we, or even they themselves, could not ever predict. And maybe that's the point. After all, if we could calculate it in advance, derive it from the plot, or deduce it from the facts at hand -- it wouldn't be grace.

"I will go with you," Deborah tells Barak, "but the glory of this day shall not be yours."

"What do you mean by that?" the Israelite general asks plaintively.

"I mean it won't be what you expect. In fact, with the Almighty around, you might do well to start expecting the unexpected!"

Fred Craddock enjoys sharing the story of a time he returned to the little church of his childhood.3 He had not visited there in years, and walking into the sanctuary, he was surprised to discover that they had purchased new stained-glass windows. Inscribed at the bottom of each was the name of the donor, but to his dismay, Craddock was not familiar with any of them.

"You must have had a good many folks join this congregation since I was a boy," Fred remarked to a woman after the worship service, "because I don't recognize a single name."

"Oh, those people aren't members here," she said. "This town hasn't grown a bit since you were a child, and for that matter neither has our church."

"Then how did you get these beautiful windows?" "Well, it's kind of an interesting story," she said with a smile. "You see, they were made by an Italian company for a church in St. Louis. Unfortunately, when they arrived, none of them fit. The company apologized, of course, and said they would make new windows. But they were too expensive to ship back, and so the company told the church in St. Louis to sell them wherever they could. We bought the windows from them."

"But don't you want to remove these names?" asked Fred.

"Well, we thought about it," the woman explained. "We even discussed it at the board meeting. We're just a little church, you know. Not many of us here, never any new people. So we finally decided that it was important for us to remember all these folks we'll never meet, through whom the Lord is working in ways we'll never know."

Isn't that a lovely story? I mean, none of these names had any significance to the members of the congregation -- except in their realization of the eternal significance gracefully bestowed upon each by the Almighty, in a manner none of us might ever expect. And such, it would seem, is the very nature of God's kingdom. Jesus once said it was like being out mowing your yard, and suddenly there is this strange clank of steel against steel. Before you know it, you have shovel in hand and are digging up the earth -- and there, lo and behold, lies a buried treasure. Or you're strolling through the swap meet on a Saturday afternoon and come across an item of such immense value that, caught up in the impulse of the moment, you cash in all the savings bonds and take a second mortgage out on the house just to purchase it.

That's the way God's grace works. If you will, being unpredictable is part of the present. It's always meant to be surprising, because it is never something gotten by us as much as it is something given to us. Working at grace is like trying to fall in love -- more often than not, it just happens. We can't deduce it any more than we can deserve it. We don't expect it; we experience it! Small wonder that God's ways sometimes appear to us so strange and incomprehensible. How could they be otherwise? After all, they are God's ways, not ours. And I dare say, they are laughable in the best sense of the word, because they enable us to share in the joyful laughter of heaven itself. I mean, a joke that's predictable isn't all that funny. Worse still, if it needs to be explained, something has obviously been lost in the translation.

"I will go with you," Deborah tells Barak, "but the glory of this day shall not be yours. Expect the unexpected!" And as she stands there on the battlefield strewn with chariots, off in the distance -- above the raucous celebration and beyond the murmured cries -- Deborah can almost imagine that she hears the persistent tapping of a tent-peg. She might even have smiled at the thought that she'd nailed this prediction down as surely as Jael had Sisera's head!

It still isn't easy to like this story, I'll admit. But rather than asking whether we can live with a God who acts in such unexpected ways, perhaps the better question is: Can any of us really afford to live without such a God?

1. Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 59.

2. Thomas G. Long, from a sermon delivered at the 203rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Baltimore, Maryland, June 8, 1991.

3. As cited in William H. Willimon & Stanley Hauerwas, Preaching to Strangers (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 73-74. The story was originally told by Fred B. Craddock in "Vision as Memory," Newscope Lecture Series, 1991 Louisiana Conference.

CSS Publishing, Veiled Glimpses of God's, by Robert S. Crilley