Wielding the Sword

2 Kings 2:23-25

February 4, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Tonight is the night—the big game, the “super bowl,” the face-off between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. And you thought I didn’t pay attention to sports! I had one person this week tell me the most important part of the game is actually the first half, when the majority of the new commercials are shown—because ultimately, in today’s world, it’s not about who wins or loses, but who has the best commercial. Last year’s Super Bowl brought in $419 million from advertising alone. Over the last ten years, advertising revenue from the Super Bowl has risen 87%. This year, it’s reported that advertisers are paying NBC “north of $5 million” for 30 seconds of airtime, and that doesn’t include the cost of production for the commercials. It shows, again, how much value companies put on reaching the expected 111 million television viewers. There are virtually no other moments during the year when so much of the nation is gathered in one place, and so this one night has become the ideal venue and perhaps the most valuable night for advertisers. By tomorrow morning, we’ll all be talking about how well they did, or didn’t, do.

$5 million for 30 seconds. That’s nearly $200,000 per second. That’s a lot of value begging for your eyes and ears and attention (and wallets!). And yet, as advertisers remind us day in and day out, we’re willing to spend most anything on things that we value, things that are important to us. And it’s not just money. We spend time, energy, and other resources to support or purchase things that are important to us. So, as Christians, how does the way we use what we have indicate what’s important to us? A research project from Lifeway Research last year found that 9 out of 10 Americans report owning a Bible; many own more than one. Personally, I have forty different Bibles sitting in my office—it’s a bit of an addiction (or occupational hazard) with me! But Lifeway found that few Americans actually read the Bible or take it seriously. Only 11% of Americans have read the Bible all the way through and men are worse than women at reading it on their own. 39% of men say they never read the Bible on their own. One of the conclusions of the study was this: “The only time most Americans hear from the Bible is when someone else is reading it” (https://goo.gl/WkR2fG). In many ways, we’ve become like the people who confronted the prophet Elisha. In essence, by our actions and our inaction, we tell God to just move along. What do you believe God thinks about that attitude, about what we value?

This morning, we’re finishing up our series of sermons on “God Behaving Badly,” not because we’ve covered every possible scenario or objection to belief in God. I realize some of these sermons may have raised more questions than they answered, but my hope in this series is that you have been equipped to begin seeing such passages a different way as well as being able to be one of the few who digs into the text and the background on your own, to honestly and wisely answer when people as you such questions. Maybe you’ve learned to ask better questions of the text. This morning, then, we’re going to wrap things up with a big question that a lot of people would answer “yes” to, and that’s this: is God violent? Does God use violence to solve his problems?

There is no question: the Old Testament is often a violent book. Especially when you read books like Joshua and Judges, there is a lot of fighting, a lot of killing and death, a lot of bloodshed through the stories told there. When I’ve led classes where we go through the whole Bible, I always have a few who stumble in their reading through these stories because the violence is hard for them to take. But, let me remind you again how the Scriptures reflect the time in which they were written. The world of the Old Testament was, in fact, a violent time—but so was the world of the New Testament. Part of the reason we don’t think that way about the New Testament is that by the time the Gospels were written, the style of literature had changed so that violence was not highlighted or even “glorified” as much. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ reminded us that the first century world was violent and could be ugly as well; in fact, one criticism some first-century scholars leveled at Gibson’s film is that it wasn’t actually as violent as the event would have really been. The world of the Bible is a violent time—but, then again, is it really any different than ours? We, too, live in a dark, violent time. We’ve become desensitized to much of it, but just like the people of the Roman Empire, we seem to crave violence for entertainment and then when it breaks out in “the real world,” we’re no longer shocked by it. I don’t know what that means for the future of the human race, to be honest.

So, yes, the Old Testament is a violent book. But what about the God we meet there? Is violence one of his primary methods of dealing with people? There are a lot of stories we could look at, but I chose the story of Elisha this morning, somewhat for its comedic value, and somewhat because it’s a confusing story we often don’t know how to read (if we read it at all). Elisha, you might remember is the successor to one of the most well-known and powerful prophets of that time, Elijah. Elijah’s ministry had included confronting idolatry, loudly criticizing the king and queen, and calling down fire from heaven. In the end, he was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Elisha was his chosen successor, but it’s not easy to follow someone whom the people loved and looked up to. That may be, at least in part, why Elisha asked for a “double portion” of Elijah’s spirit (2:9) when Elijah departed. He knew he had a hard job ahead of him.

The story we read this morning takes place soon after Elijah has been taken and Elisha is on his own. He’s probably uncertain of himself; his ministry hasn’t really yet begun. The only thing he’s done so far is to heal a town’s water supply. Then he heads toward Bethel. To understand what is happening here, we have to know some things about Bethel. The name of the town means “House of God,” and in the time of the divided kingdom, it was one of two places of official worship for the northern kingdom of Israel. You may remember that when the kingdom divided into two, the city of Jerusalem, complete with the Temple, was in the boundaries of the southern kingdom, Judah. So to prevent people from leaving the northern kingdom during important times of worship, King Jeroboam set up two altars so people could go to worship (and spend their money) in their own nation. One was set up at Dan in the north (a site where I’ve visited a couple of times) and the other was set up at Bethel in the south. So, if Jerusalem is the big box, corporate store, Dan and Bethel were the local shops. But on a spiritual level, Dan and Bethel had other problems. Jeroboam had set up golden calves and told the people that the statues were their gods. Dan and Bethel were not just “other places to worship” the one God; they actually represented a competing faith. In fact, the author of 1 Kings this way: “This thing became a sin: the people came to worship the one [statue] at Bethel and went as far as Dan to worship the other” (12:30).

So Elisha is passing by one of these places of worship: Bethel, the “house of God.” And as he is passing by, the story goes, some boys come out of the town and call Elisha “baldy.” Elisha, apparently in a bad mood, curses them “in the name of the Lord,” after which two bears come out of the woods and maul the boys. And Elisha, apparently oblivious to the fate of the boys, goes on to Mount Carmel. Quite a story, right? Why would God send bears to hurt these boys over what seems to be a harmless prank? Well, as always, and as you might begin to guess by now, there are a few things we need to understand about the context and the culture behind this story. First of all, before we picture this as a few boys playing a prank on a cranky old man, we need to understand the language here. The word translated “boys” would be better translated as “young men.” Throughout the Old Testament, it is used to describe young men between ages twelve and thirty. Elisha himself, at this point in his ministry, is probably only twenty-five at the oldest. Plus, a detail that often goes unnoticed is that there are at least forty-two of them (2:24). There were probably more than that, but at least 42. This is not a small group; it’s a gang of people. So what you actually have is a gang—a large gang—of peers who are taunting (we would call it bullying) a young man who has just begun a ministry, who is trying to call people back to God (Kaiser, et al, Hard Sayings of the Bible, pgs 232-233).

You can see this even in what they say to Elisha. The NIV that we read this morning is pretty good at translating what they mean: “Get out of here, baldy!” Older translations would put it something like, “Go on up, baldhead!” Basically, this gang of young men is saying to Elisha, “There’s no room here for you or your religion! We’re quite content with our golden calves! We don’t need your God. Keep moving, Elisha! Keep on going! Don’t bother preaching in Bethel! You can pass right on by the ‘house of God’!” (Goldingay, 1 & 2 Kings for Everyone, pg. 113). The insult about his baldness (whether that was a natural baldness or because his hair was more like a monk’s) is just added to try to hurt Elisha personally, but this whole incident is more than people making fun of Elisha. It’s a whole-scale rejection by the people of Bethel of the God whose people they were supposed to be. In other words, this insult is ultimately aimed more at the God Elisha represented than it is at Elisha himself (Patterson & Austel, “1, 2 Kings,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 4, pg. 177).

Another piece of this story to understand is the difference between our culture and the middle eastern culture. We like to pretend in our world that words don’t hurt us (even though they do). But in the middle eastern culture, words are taken much more seriously, and silly things we say can cut very deeply. I had this happen on one of my trips to Israel when the guide came to me about something one of my passengers had said to him. Now, I knew the person and I knew they were, as we would say, “just joking around,” but the guide did not take it that way. He was deeply offended, to the point where I wasn’t sure he would continue the tour with us. He didn’t react in a violent way, mainly because he liked his job and wanted to keep it, but folks in that culture would understand Elisha’s response and would approve of it. You see that happen in the clashes that take place there so often. Words have power, and so when these young men insult Elisha, and Elisha’s God, he curses them. In that culture, and certainly in that time, it was the natural thing to do.

But notice that Elisha does not prescribe a punishment for the young men. In some ways, Elisha’s curse is not directed solely at the young men, but at the whole culture of Bethel that would cause a city full of people to reject God. No doubt these young men are only reflecting what they have heard at the dinner table most of their lives (cf. Kaiser 233). The text also does not say that Elisha’s curse caused the bears to come out of the woods, though we generally assume that’s the case. Elisha seems content to leave the judgment and any punishment up to God, and so he simply pronounces a curse. The text also does not say that the bears kill the young men; only that the young men are “mauled” by the bears. The attack is violent and brutal, but not fatal (cf. Lamb, God Behaving Badly, pg. 98). It’s actually the punishment that God’s law had said centuries before would take place. God, in Leviticus (26:21-22), says, “If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me…I will send wild animals against you, and they will rob you of your children…” In the end in this story, the people get exactly the punishment they were promised, but we are surprised by that.

The bigger picture here is that God is protecting Elisha. Elisha didn’t start the fight; his reaction is out of self-defense. His ministry is just beginning, and it could have ended here in Bethel (cf. Lamb 98). That is a consistent theme throughout the Scriptures: God is willing to punish individuals and even nations to protect those who are weak and vulnerable (we’ll come back to that idea in a moment). Whenever God uses violence directly, it’s to protect something good that might be destroyed. In the New Testament, in the book of Acts, there is a story that is nearly as striking as this one, the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. It’s a time when some people are selling what they owned and giving the money to the church. They weren’t expected to; they just did. But when Ananias and Sapphira see how people are affirming the ones who are giving all they have, they also sell some property and give some of the money to the church. The problem is they say they give it all. Because they lie about it, they both are struck down and die. I’ve heard a lot of preachers, even one recently, say the reason these two are killed is because they failed to give the money, but I don’t think that’s the point at all. The reason they are struck down is because they lied, and the church is at such an early and rather weak stage, they can’t afford to allow that sort of attitude and spirit to infiltrate their work. God is protecting the vulnerable work of his church by acting in a striking way.

But what about Jesus? If, as Christians, we see everything through the lens of Jesus, what does he say and do? Well, the only time we really remember Jesus being violent is when he runs the moneychangers and the merchants out of the Temple; we’re told he did that with a whip. On another occasion, though, Jesus said this: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household’” (Matthew 10:34-36). And yet, among his last words to his disciples are these: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you” (John 14:27). So is Jesus a peace-bringer or a sword-wielder? We think of “peace” as the absence of conflict, but behind that Biblical word is the word “shalom,” which means so much more. “Shalom” is “life lived the way God intended,” and the indication from Scripture is that God’s heart is for the least, the last and the lost and that he will do anything to protect them, to reach them, to bring them back. Remember, Jesus said a good shepherd would leave behind the 99 sheep to rescue the one that is lost (Luke 15:3-7). God’s heart bends toward the least, the last and the lost, the weak and the vulnerable, the ones who know their need of him.

So, in many ways, we’ve come full circle in this series. Three weeks ago, we talked about how God does, in fact, become angry over injustice and oppression, over the hurting of those whom he loves. And sometimes, we learn from the Bible, God does use violence if it is necessary to protect the weak and the vulnerable. That is never the first step, and it is never the preferable step. We see God going centuries before he carries out his punishments, but we also know that God doesn’t just use or engage in violence for violence’s sake. If that path is taken, it is so that a greater peace, shalom, wholeness, can emerge. However, it is not our calling to take on God’s role. Jesus, after all, said one of our greatest callings is to become peacemakers: “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said in his sermon on the mount, “for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9). So how do we live as peacemakers in a violent and divided world? We do it by following in the footsteps of Jesus. We live out lives of peace by providing healing, feeding the hungry, loving and praying for our enemies. We live our lives in such a way that we offer blessings rather than curses to those around us—even to those who may reject our faith and our God. We become peacemakers as we do what we talked about last week, crossing those borders that we create and getting to know someone on “the other side.” I don’t often make political statements from this pulpit, but in the wake of last week’s “State of the Union” speech last week, what concerns me most about our country is that even our leaders (all of them) seem unwilling to “cross the aisle” and try to get to know—really know—someone on “the other side.” We, as followers of Jesus, must do better than that. We’re called to first and foremost be people of shalom, people of peace, people of reconciliation.

But, pastor, what about “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Isn’t that in the Bible? Yes, it is. Leviticus 24(:19-20), to be exact. Sometimes we like that verse, especially if it seems to work in our favor. One author tells how his two sons were in a wrestling match when the one son gave the other a wedgie. While chasing the perpetrator, the victim yelled out, “An eye for an eye, a wedgie for a wedgie!” Meanwhile, the perpetrator was crying out, “You’re supposed to turn the other cheek!” (cf. Lamb 105). What we miss about that statement is that it wasn’t prescribing punishments for infractions between people; it was actually limiting punishment. It really means, “Only an eye for an eye.” Cultures around Israel had this system of increasing punishments, with each cycle getting worse, but Israel was not to live that way. Moses was not saying you had to respond this way, but if you chose to respond to a hurt against you, you could only respond in kind and no more. You didn’t have to. The Leviticus law was meant to restrict serious violence and injury, not promote it. It’s always about protecting the vulnerable, and ultimately seeking to be peacemakers.

We worship, after all, the God who took the most horrific, violent act ever committed and redeemed it. Jesus had done nothing deserving the kind of death he was given, and yet in response to his love, mercy and grace the world gave him torture and crucifixion. Yet, in the midst of that violence, to use Paul’s words, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19, NLT). And, just a few verses below that one, Paul says this: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (5:21, NIV). We remember that redemption in the act of holy communion, which we are about to share together again this morning. In this bread, we remember Jesus’ body broken on the cross. In the juice, we remember Jesus’ blood, poured out freely for you and for me. God took the world’s worst violence and redeemed it. He made a way for us to come back to him, which, in the end, has been his goal from the beginning. Ultimately, God is not primarily angry or violent; he is not sexist or racist. He is for us, and he longs to be with us. In anticipation of that day when we are with him, let’s gather at the Lord’s table and share in this meal of bread and cup. Will you pray with me?