I want to tell you a story. I want to tell you a story of victory, of beauty, and of the boundless power of good over evil. A story where hope resounds and grace reigns, but like any good story, it cannot begin there. It must begin in a place of hopelessness, defeat, and agony. It must begin where evil is a garnish, beauty is abused, and grace is hoarded by those who believe they are the most worthy of divine favor.
It would be tempting in this Easter season to think that I might be speaking of the cross and resurrection, but this is a story with an origin predating even that glorious event. This is a story that points us to the cross and hints at what is to come, but it simultaneously conceals, so that our imagination might be awakened to future possibilities and wondrous realities yet to be unveiled.
Our story begins on a dark night in a town called Gibeah. We know the plot. We have heard it a thousand times. A place of refuge and rest for weary travelers becomes a place of violence and torture. Evil overtakes them, and a woman becomes the victim of the most gruesome of acts. The sun rises on her broken body, and her lifeless hands reach for the security she hopes lies behind a bolted door. The one who had once proclaimed his love for her now scatters her dismembered body across the land as a warning to those who might also seek refuge in this place.
The country cried out against this outrage, but not for her sake. Instead, they protested the crime that was committed against her husband, and they moved to right the wrong that had been committed against him in the loss of his wife. As one man, a nation sought vengeance on his behalf. Brother turned against brother, ripping the land apart, soaking it in blood, until six hundred men were bereft of their families. Until finally, the people had to face the truth. Violence must cease or they would destroy themselves. So, compassion was restored, but it was a twisted and perverse compassion. One reserved for those that society valued the most, the ones they deemed worthy of preservation and restoration.
Once again, the fate of the woman at Gibeah is played out, but this time on a national scale. The families of four hundred women were slaughtered, and the surviving women were taken so that they might become the wives of the men that defended those who destroyed the woman at Gibeah. Two hundred more women were kidnapped from Shiloh, the city where God’s Ark was housed. Religious leaders and government officials congratulated themselves for devising such a cunning solution, while the voices of the six hundred women who were ripped from their homes was never heard.
It would seem that our story ends there. If were to read it in our Bibles, we would find the conclusion of the book of Judges with nothing more to add. The scene shifts abruptly as we are told of the romance of Ruth and Boaz, and we celebrate their love and faith as they welcome the child that would be the grandfather to the great King David. But what if we didn’t have that pleasant interlude? What if instead we moved straight to the story of another woman and we found Hannah praying at Shiloh? Would we remember the women who were taken from this place of worship? Would we pause to realize that the woman killed in Gibeah may have been her friend, her sister, or cousin? Would we read her story in a different light than the one that has been cast upon it by so many traditions, that did not pause to consider the world in which Hannah lived?
What if we listened to her words, and considered the traditions that she knew? Can we hear how she echoes the prophet Moses? How she cries out for the afflicted, the same cry that God heard when he listened to his children in Egypt? The ones who had been abused and forgotten by the powers that be? Can we see her aligning herself with God to free the marginalized from their oppressors? How she embraced hope and faith so that she might sing of her Lord’s greatness in the face of corrupt leadership and those who believed that violence against the powerless was excused if it served their purposes? Could we see her as a woman whose desire exceeded her own pleasure and encompassed the destiny of a nation?
Once again, we know the story. God remembered Hannah, and he gave her a son. A son who would be both king-maker and king-breaker, a son who would change the course of history, and establish the monarchy in a land where violent tribal warfare had once been the norm, but the story takes an often-neglected detour. The narrative of Samuel is set aside for a moment, and our attention is redirected to spiritual leaders, governmental officials, and the ultimate symbol of God’s presence in their midst, the Ark of the Covenant. For those who had forgotten the women in Gibeah, the six hundred women who had been ripped from their homes, and the families that had been decimated in that perverse attempt at justice the shift is baffling. It jars us from easy complacency of maternal bliss, and reminds us that we are still in a blood-soaked land.
For many the shift is too much, and we breeze over the next three chapters. We fail to closely examine the weird and macabre tale that is the Ark in Captivity, as we briefly wonder why we are told of a time wherein God visits the plagues of Egypt upon the Philistines, in a way that offends the more genteel of society. Instead, we rush ahead to see the fate of Hannah’s child of promise, and we celebrate the new social order he inaugurates and the eventual reign of David, the man after God’s own heart.
But what if we paused, what if we allowed the writer of I Samuel to tell the tale he deemed significant enough to share with us? Would we see something that we had missed before and maybe catch a glimmer of beauty in the ugliness and disease?
Hannah had promised reversal. She had prophesied that God would no longer tolerate the status quo, and that those who believed that they were safe and secure would be ravaged by his wrath at the abuses they had once congratulated themselves on committing. Her words proved to be a true and accurate account of God’s heart for his people. The corrupt priesthood of Eli’s sons would be overthrown, and the perverted governance of Shiloh would be destroyed. The enemies that they had once scorned because God’s throne was housed in this sacred location would rise up, and they would take this emblem of Israel’s security.
Yes, it would be restored to them in time, but the return of the Ark would be met with weeping and lamentation as God struck down his own people for their sin. For centuries or more Bible scholars have debated the manner of their sin. What was it that they did that was so terrible that warranted the death of so many? Surely, the Bible could not mean what is written, these learned men and women would reason. Surely, God did not strike them down because they merely looked upon the Ark?
But to think such a thing is to forget the woman with whom all this began. It is to forget the women stolen from their homes. It is to fail to recognize that the sin of “uncovering” these women, to leave them exposed to violence and death, was the reason Hannah had cried out on behalf of the afflicted. To believe God’s reasoning is flawed or lost in the text is to forget that the Ark had been inappropriately uncovered. Layer by layer, the blue cloth, the skins, the veil, that had shielded his throne from the eyes of the unworthy had been stripped away by men of violence, and those who professed love for him had failed to cover this nakedness, once witnessed. Instead, they placed it on display for all to see, and invited the nation to participate in this vile voyeurism of the holy.
I told you at the beginning that I wanted to tell you a story of victory, of beauty, and of the boundless power of good over evil. A story where hope resounds, and grace reigns, but how are we to find these things amidst the blood, gore and violence of all of this? It is in those places where he is with the abused and neglected, where he joins with us in the pain and horror of this world. Not as some far off distant deity who smiles benignly, and perhaps even somewhat benevolently, down upon us, but as the God who unites our stories through action and deed. He did not allow himself the dignity of distance or the majestic austerity of space. Instead, he chose to be taken as the women were taken. He allowed himself to be removed from his home at Shiloh and placed in the house of his enemy, just as the women were ripped from their homes and placed in the houses of violent men. He allowed his Ark to be stripped bare, just as the bodies of the women had been stripped of their clothing.
In this we hear approaching agony and glory of the cross as history repeats. God, in the person of Christ, will once more enter into the suffering of humanity. He will be taken by those in power, his broken and bleeding body will be stripped bare and put on display, he will be laid in a tomb as those who love him mourn his defeat, but just as God emerged victorious from the House of Dagon, Christ will emerge from the realms of Death. And we can rejoice at the consistency and power of God’s love and mercy to the abused and forgotten. Our hope can ascend to new heights as we recognize that reversal and restoration is woven into all of eternity, that the powerless are not forgotten, and those who were once voiceless can sing:
For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. Luke 1: 49, 5