The Violent Bear It Away

Reflections on the Amalekites and the Obstinate Widow

The lectionary readings for today (Sunday, Oct. 19 20205, USCCB) are particularly powerful. They strike me as of special significance considered as separate passages but far more so in their cumulative self-reading achieved through paired liturgical readings. Each passage becomes a mirror reflecting and refracting the other passages from diverse places in the biblical canon.

Raphael, Young Woman With A Unicorn, c.1505-1506

The Old Testament reading is Exodus 17:8-13 wherein we hear the famous story of the Israelites entering into the land and encountering violent resistance. This obstacle is in turn met with violence and the people of God engage in a fierce battle. Joshua is in the field of battle, sympathetically connected with Moses and his staff. As long as Moses keeps his arms raised, the battle goes well for the Israelites, and vice versa. Aaron and Hur act as living pillars, propping up Moses’ arms so that the divine talisman can continue to be displayed in its effective pose. The magical character of Moses’ staff in midrash and the Zohar will have to wait for another time (though readers can find some preliminary reflections here). Here the point is that clearly physical strength is not sufficient to defeat the Amalekites without the divine influence mediated through Moses’ staff. The result of these combined human/divine efforts is spectacularly effective and brutal. The NABRE is not always my favorite translation but here it describes the scene with sparse unrelenting poignancy. “And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.” Whose imagination has not been sparked by this scene? Whose conscience has remained untroubled? Something wonderful is happening here and at the same time there is a grotesque character to its application–we know this very trope of cleansing the land and exterminating the Amalekites has been put to use across history in genocidal ways. We should not be ignorant of these things.

The second reading, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2, comes to us at the very moment we are troubled by the passage from Exodus. The voice of St. Paul encourages us and exhorts us to wrestle with Scripture because all of it is capable of yielding instruction, power, and salvation. All of it is θεόπνευστος and ὠφέλιμος. Therefore, it is up to us to sift the words, separate the shell from the kernel, the wheat from the flax, the spiritual from the worldly, and find a meaning worthy of God.

How does this second reading re-read the first? As Origen tells us in the beginning of his homilies on the Book of Joshua, he does not find the idea of a historical conquest of Canaan to be spiritually fruitful. “Unless those physical wars bore the figure of spiritual wars, I do not think those histories would have been handed down by the apostles to the disciples of Christ, who came to teach peace, so that they could be read in the Church.” It is important to note that Origen does not base his spiritual reading on supersessionism, but on the fact that the Law itself along with all its histories is already spiritual (Romans 7:14). If you read the Torah unspiritually, that is not the fault of the Hebrew Bible. Look to your own eyes (a refrain that could be found just as easily in Hellenistic Judaism, the Mishnah, the Talmud, midrash, or Kabbalah). Origen states that since the Apostle Paul sees the spiritual life as warfare against sin, the flesh, and the Devil, he desired these histories to be read in the Church as a call to warfare in the spiritual life and a reminder of the war Christ wages for our souls. We read of the Amalekites and the conquest of Canaan not because they matter historically (and according to the overwhelming consensus of modern archaeology and ancient history they simply never happened at all) but because “a kingdom of sin was in every one of us before we believed. But afterwards, Jesus came and struck down all the kings who possessed kingdoms of sin within us.” The violence against the Amalekites is Christ harrowing our souls and we are Joshua assisted by Mosaic power when we enter into that battle ourselves through divine grace. In Moses’ weariness, we feel a resonance with Christ’s incarnation. He became flesh and made himself weary for us. He emptied himself–exhausted and harried–even asking, more than once, for someone else to give him a drink. His arms were held up too, by the wood of the cross.

Yet we should not close off the meaning of the “spiritual” too quickly into typology or allegory. While the historical sense may often be inappropriate for a spiritual exegete, the literal always remains useful; that is, the words themselves can still bring the Spirit. The divine liturgy offers herself as the bringer of the words of God and as the Word of God. It is in her dramatic performance, the pairing of the texts and the sacred calendar, the breaking of the bread and the offering of the chalice, that we understand how to read in a way that does not kill, as the letter does, but in a way that brings life, as the Spirit does. What then does the Church offer to us as a final movement to contextualize and transform the first two readings?

The Gospel reading for today is Luke 18-1-8 and it is, to my mind, the greatest parable of them all. It illuminates not only Christ’s own words about how the kingdom of heaven will be taken by force, it illuminates every act of violence in the canon of Scripture. In addition, it offers a model of holy violence against God which is glimpsed with such strength only in two other places: Jacob wrestling with the divine figure and Moses interceding for Israel on Sinai. Moses, as the Zohar and many Jewish texts make clear, is the greatest prophet because he refuses to let God destroy Israel and he directly changes the judgement of God. And of course, this being “overthrown” is precisely what God wanted the whole time. As one Zoharic midrash on Noah recounts, God was disgusted that Noah chose to simply follow his instructions to build a boat and save his personal family and belongings instead of asking to save the whole world. O foolish shepherd!

The figure of the obstinate righteous widow here in Luke is pregnant with power. It invites laughter, it is almost absurd (Kierkegaardian even!), yet even in her physical helplessness, she is unstoppable, inexorable. Immutable as divine stability. She is the cry of the poor, the cry of Iustitia herself, every impoverished human and especially every abused woman, always the object of rage and violence. It is, in fact, the judge who should be laughed at, it is he who is truly pitiable, dishonest and shameless, and therefore a coward. Even in his cowardice, however, this judge who fears neither man nor God, could raise his hand to strike her, but his power is taken away at the sight of her and at the sound of her. She is right and she is righteous and her two arms are lifted up by Righteousness and Truth. She has seen reality correctly and she will not stop until Peace and Justice are restored to the world.

Jesus is careful to spell out the parable for us in all of its shocking and scandalous narrative form. God is the Unjust Judge and you are the obstinate widow.

Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones

who call out to him day and night?

Will he be slow to answer them?

I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.

But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

If you do not do violence to God with your entreaties, prayers, and tears, if you do not wrestle with God for the sake of the world, you have no faith–the very faith the Son of Man was hoping to find in the world to save the world.

This seems like an impossible parable to enact. Who could possibly model an image of one who is a creature, not God, yet dares to demand what God has not yet given? Here we must turn to Mary of Nazareth. She was not yet a widow, though she would be, not yet scorned, though this was coming, not yet pierced through the heart at injustice done to her child, yet she was already at the Annunciation this poor widow. Mary received the news of the Incarnation, but as we know from Bernard of Clairvaux, there is a higher understanding of these words. Let it be done unto me according to thy will is Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. It is a demand, the demand implicit in every heart made explicit God be with us, it is the demand of the poor, and of the cosmos itself. We see in Mary of Nazareth something like the Shekhinah in Jewish tradition, that power which never stops asking for unity between the people of Israel and the Godhead, never abandons the knesset Yisrael to go into exile alone. St. Paul teaches in Romans 8 that not only humans but the entire cosmos groans with longing, awaiting the revelation of the children of God. She makes this possible by being the womb that contains the Uncontainable. She constrains the infant Jesus in her body. The Unjust Judge of parable feared that the widow would strike and subdue him. The Judge of the World that Mary wrestled desired to be subdued and take the form of a slave. It is Mary then who is our concrete image and exemplar of the one who does violence to God in the way God demands.