Judges 4 | The Trickster

*Preached at Grace North Church first Sunday in July, 1996*

Have you ever felt like God has put one over on you? It sounds cruel, doesn't it--but how many times have you been in a situation where all the signs point to some momentous event, you think "God must be leading us to do this?" and it turns out to be the worst failure you can imagine?

I felt like that when Kate and I made a bid to save Creation Spirituality magazine a couple of years ago. It seemed perfect, we were doing a great job, and suddenly, it was all taken away. It felt like a huge, cruel joke that God was playing on us. It didn't seem fair. We felt that if God was really in charge of the universe, these kinds of things wouldn't happen.

Terrible things cross your mind when you meet with failure like this: did God trick us? Didn't we feel God's hand leading us? Is God laughing at us now? How can God be so cruel?

I'm sure many of you have felt similarly. In fact there is a great motif in the mythologies of nearly every people known as "The Trickster."

In many native mythologies, it is the trickster in the form of an Old Man, a Coyote, a Raven, or a Great Hare who succeeds in salvaging an inhabitable earth out of a bit of mud scraped from the bottom of the oceans. Sometimes the tricksters are gods, sometimes they are heroes or even anti-heroes.

One notable trickster is found in Yoruban myth by the name of Eshu, who is the gatekeeper of the abode of the gods, constantly confusing people with his trickery. Eshu gained his fame by an act of deicide, when he dropped a boulder onto the god Orisha's house. "Orisha was crushed and, with the splinters of his house, was scattered and flew in all directions. Thus" says the myth "fragments of the divine spirit can be found in many places, in all living beings, even in the winds and rivers. That is why there are now 401 Orishas or gods."

Among the plains people of North America, the trickster was known as Iktomi, who caused so much strife between the sun and the moon that he was banished.

And of course, the Trickster finds his way into more developed mythologies such as our scripture reading today from Judges.

Now, if you had asked me for a short list on absolute nightmare passages on which to preach, this would certainly have made my list! When Richard e-mailed me the text for today's lesson, I was struck with horror-- "How the heck am I supposed to preach on THIS??" I asked. This of course is one of those times I felt the Trickster God laughing at me!

But when you get past the gruesome elements, it is a whopping good story:

You will remember that at this time, Israel is in a sort of governmental disarray. The great charismatic leaders of the past, Moses and Joshua are dead, and the grievances of the people are heard and decided upon by a series of judges.

When we begin our story today, once again the Israelites have started to forget about God. God responds typically, with a brisk wake-up call in the form of a conquering army--this time it is the Canaanites. The Israelites suffer until they realize their sin, repent and ask God to come to their rescue.

Now the judge of Israel at this time is--oddly--a woman, named Deborah. Now I say oddly, because it is indeed unusual for middle eastern cultures to allow a woman to rule or to judge the affairs of men, so we must assume that Deborah was some woman to overcome whatever objections she must surely have been faced with. But there is no doubt that she spoke with the "authority of the Lord," because in verse 6, Deborah tells Barak to get an army together, because God is fixing to destroy the Canaanites and restore the Jews to freedom. But what she says in verse 7 is particularly interesting, when she tells him that "the Lord will trick Sisera into coming out to fight you."

This is the first appearance of the trickster in this story, and in this case the trickster is God himself! Now to our minds today this causes a little bit of--shall we say--cognitive dissonance. But the biblical writers were living in a world where many gods were downright devious and even evil at times, so we cannot be to hard on their vision of God for their time. Compared to the other Gods, Yaweh was a peach! But unlike us today, influenced no doubt by the Greeks who liked to make clear, black-and-white moral distinctions, the Jews felt none of this. God for them was not clean cut, but a passionate person for whom fidelity and relationship were all-important.

The second trickster in our story is another strong woman by the name of Jael. Now Jael is a very mysterious figure, because there was no good political reason for her to do what she did.

The text tells us that the Israelites completely wiped out the Canaanites, all except for their commander, Sisera, who escapes and runs to the camp of the Kenites. Now the Kenites were a nomadic tribe with long-standing ties to the Israelites. They were also on good terms with their other neighbors, the Canaanites. Jael's father, in fact, was descended from Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, but his clan was allied with Jabin, the kind of Canaan. This is probably why Sisera sought refuge there. But Jael seems to have political ideas of her own, either that or the political undercurrents in the tribe were running in favor of the Israelites at the time. We can only speculate. In any case, Sisera initially finds what he is seeking. Safe shelter. Jael is hospitable, encouraging, consoling, reassuring. She gives him nourishment. She insists that he get some rest. When he falls asleep exhausted, she goes over to his bed, and nail him. With a tent peg. Right through the skull.

What a shock! It was the last thing Sisera was expecting, and Deborah praises Jael in a song accompanied by Barak. So this gruesome story has a broadway-style ending with Deborah and Barak singing the praises of Jael the trickster.

Now how are we to feel about Jael's actions. She certainly lied. But was that wrong? This brings up a very interesting point of departure in Christian and Jewish ethics. Throughout their persecutions the Christians in the early church usually told the truth and did not shrink from the punishment that often followed. The believed that they would have their reward in heaven and that it didn't matter what happened to their body on earth.

No so the Jews. The Jews have traditionally shied away from speculating about the afterlife. "Remain faithful in this life," they say, "and God will take care of the rest." Thus, for Jews the only concrete afterlife is their progeny. Therefore, Jews have not traditionally been so absolute in their truth-telling. Survival always seemed a wee bit more important. Truth was not, as the Greeks believed and bequeathed to us, some absolute otherworldly standard of measurement. Instead truth was what worked in one's daily life. And making sure that there was a tomorrow for one's children is a pretty powerful truth to safeguard. There is a saying in the Talmud, the Jewish collection of oral tradition and scriptural commentary, which says that "a transgression performed with good intent is more meritorious than a commandment performed with no intent."

Let me say that again: "A transgression performed with good intent is more meritorious than a commandment performed with no intent."

Now, I think that there is a real beauty in this approach to ethics. It is earthy and real, and imminently utilitarian. In our gut, I believe, this is the sort of truth we all understand.

What does that say to us? What do these stories have to teach us? Perhaps one thing we can learn is that God is not safe! In C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Mrs. Beaver warns the children that when they meet Narnia's Jesus, who is an enormous lion named Aslan, they would be very frightened. "He's not a tame lion," she tells them, "but he's good."

I'm not sure what the whole magazine fiasco was supposed to teach me. I'm not sure what it means when God allows a couple to conceive and then the baby is stillborn. Perhaps it means that the God doesn't fit into the neat little boxes that we like to construct for Him. That just when we think we have God, or life, or anything else in the universe figured out, it is the sacred duty of the divine trickster to dance onto the scene and upset all the applecarts.

Perhaps we cannot understand it. Perhaps we can't even begin to get a glimmer, but like the Jews who didn't need their God to be lily-white and wonder-bread wholesome, we can perhaps gain an appreciation for it. Let us pray,

God of a thousand surprises, your ways are inscrutable to us. Give us grace to see ourselves in a more blessed light, less strict, less harsh, with a little leeway for grace. Shock us out of our complacency into real relationship with you, with each other, and with the Earth. Amen.