June 27, 2010
Jephthah’s Daughter - Judges 11:29-40
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadOn May 11, 1944, in a Jewish ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, Solomon & Riza Baicovitz dressed their three and a half-year-old daughter, Suly, in a fur coat. They put her in a potato sack, put the sack on a potato cart, and went to a pre-arranged meeting place. They took the sack holding their daughter out of the cart and handed it over a barbed wire fence to a Jewish woman named Miriam Shulman. ‘I did not know where I was,’ the child in the potato sack recalled, ‘but I did not open my mouth.’ And that is how Suly Baicovitz – now Suly Chentin – who is now sixty-nine, married to Richard and lives in South Charlotte, escaped the Holocaust. All these years later, the little girl can still hear her father crying that day at the barbed wire fence.” Now imagine that, putting your baby girl in a sack and handing her off knowing that you would likely never see her again.
Fortunately for Suly, she and her parents survived the Holocaust. Unfortunately for six million other Jews, and an additional five million non-Jews, they did not survive it. Now for the record, the Holocaust was not God’s idea and it was not God’s fault. It certainly raises some very troubling questions regarding how God could allow something that horrific to happen, but do not blame God. Blame Adolph Hitler, for starts. He was the maniac who came to power in Germany in 1933 promising to restore the once great state (only if he could resolve the “Jewish question). Blame the French and English who arranged for Germany to be in a chronic depression after World War I. Blame the allies in the Treaty of Versailles (including the US) for remaining silent. Humanity is responsible for the Holocaust, and not God. Sin, it turns out, has some devastating consequences.
Likewise, Jephthah’s daughter died because of Jephthah, pure and simple. Jephthah was the seventh leader in what then was a tribal Israel. From about 1200-1000 BC, after it had made it through the wilderness away from Egypt, Israel was made up of twelve independent tribes, very much like the thirteen independent colonies in the early United States. It was a time of great chaos and war. In fact, the book of Judges has been described as a “book of weeping.” Israel developed a very troubling pattern: God would raise a leader, the people would prosper and forget about God and do evil in the sight of the Lord, and then they would fall from power and become oppressed by their enemies, and then God would raise another leader (or a judge) and the process would repeat itself. Every time it did, it got worse.
In this particular case, Jephthah – like all the judges – came from very little. In fact, Jephthah’s mother was a prostitute. Jephthah came to power in Israel by promising to protect them from their arch enemy, the Ammonites. Of course, that was a tall order given how big the Ammonites were, but Jephthah, probably more than any other judge, had these incredible diplomatic skills. So he talked the people into letting him be their leader. There was no civil war, no bloodshed, no violence, just talking. And he did more than any other judge in Israel to even talk to Israel’s enemies. Yet diplomacy broke down and then the war came, with the Ammonites.
Now the Ammonites made very formidable enemies, so Jephthah got scared and made a very foolish vow. Jephthah made this deal with God that if God would give him victory against the Ammonites, then Jephthah would sacrifice the first thing (or person) that came out of his house when he returned. When armies would come home victorious, the army’s wives and daughters would come out to greet them. Jephthah tried to cut a bargain with God, you see, that was so attractive that God couldn’t refuse it. Well sure enough, God gave Jephthah victory against his enemies.
So Jephthah came home victorious in battle and would surely go down as one of Israel’s great leaders. Everything was just wonderful for Jephthah until…, until he and his army came home, and his only child, his beautiful baby-girl came running out as the first person to greet him. And then Jephthah remembered that stupid, ridiculous, senseless vow that he had made. Why did he even make such a ridiculous vow? He knew that God didn’t work like that. God didn’t need anything from Jephthah. Why he had made it, though, did not matter now. That he had made it did, and so he just had to follow through. He just had to. A man’s only as good as his word, and God might get angry if Jephthah went back on his word and spared his baby-girl.
Would you not have done the same thing? Well, at least for me (and I’ve thought a lot about this in many different contexts), I am as positive as possible that I would have backed down. And, despite my word being my bond and all, I think God would have understood. Surely, one would think, God would not desire that you kill your baby-girl. You may can go back to that time in Genesis when God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, maybe… But even then, God relented. In fact, God had relented in that direction a number of times, Exodus 32 comes to mind, or even in the previous chapter in Judges where God spared Israel. God has this knack for loving his people and he seems to desire that they live. God always relents on the side of life. It happens all the time in the Bible, and I am almost certain that it would have happened here, had Jephthah only asked. But he never did. The leader who had shown such great diplomacy, whom God had brought up from prostitution to rule Israel, who had leaned so heavily on God earlier refused to even ask God to let his own daughter live. So he actually went through with it. Jephthah actually killed his own daughter.
People often defend Jephthah. Maybe, instead of killing her, Jephthah simply made her take a vow of celibacy and she lived to a ripe old age. That’s honestly been proposed many times. Or maybe Jephthah did have her killed only because things were different back then, when, as they say, a vow was a vow. Listen, I’m in the father business. In fact, I’m up to my eyeballs in babies, especially baby-girls. And I can tell you for a known fact that nothing beats a baby-girl. There’s just something about daddies and their baby-girls. I never understood it until I had one, but boy I understand it now. They’ve got me wrapped very tightly around their fingers, and we all know it. You show me any father with a baby girl who is not wrapped around her finger, and I’ll show you a unicorn.
Jephthah actually killed his baby-girl. I just can’t imagine that. The whole thing was so preventable. Why would he even make such a stupid vow? Do we really think that we can swing a deal with God? God will only love us, if we swing a deal with him? Never once in either the Old or New Testament do we read anything remotely close to that. In fact, the Ammonites believed that. The Ammonites sacrificed their children to appease their gods. But God says over and over again that he’s adamantly opposed to that. And Jephthah knew that. One of the great ironies of this story is that Jephthah essentially adopted the religion of the people he had just conquered. We don’t swing deals with God. God is always our God and we are always God’s people. Now sometimes we forget God and we reap some negative consequences. But never once has any respectable Christian theology proposed that the way to win God’s mercy and grace and care is to swing a deal. God’s grace has always been a gift. It has never been an exchange.
And even when Jephthah did swing the deal, Jephthah never got out of it. He actually followed through. There is absolutely no defense in the world for that. None. No way can any Christian claim that God desired that you kill your child. I even have a hard time saying that. What? God did what? Of course, I also have a hard time believing that anybody would actually be forced to put his three and a half-year-old baby girl in a potato sack and chunk her over a fence because society viewed his child as more valuable dead than alive. You know how it goes: the only good three and half year old Jewish girl is a dead one. Can you imagine that?
And yet it happened. People actually did it. Twelve million times over they did it. There is this prevailing theme in the Bible that God has this thing for us, for all of us. “For God so loved the WHOLE WORLD that he gave us his only begotten son.” And, God has this thing for the least of us. Jephthah himself came from a prostitute. Moses stuttered. David was short, and the youngest of his father’s sons. Jesus himself was born on the wrong side of the tracks to the wrong people in the wrong time. God became one with us in a slum. God has this thing, in all of the Bible, for all of us, everyone of us. And God calls us to love the world and his children as he has. That’s what worshipping God means, doesn’t it? How can you possibly claim to worship God and not do that?
We sometime sell ourselves on the myth that we don’t sin very much and what little we do sin really doesn’t matter. We haven’t come anywhere close to participating in anything like the Holocaust and we sure haven’t intentionally hurt our children. Our sins are victimless, we think. Who cares if I get jealous, or envious, or if I burn with lust? Or who cares if I’m idolatrous from time to time? Who cares if I worship at the altar of convenience and comfort? I think we all worship there from time to time. But who cares? Who are we hurting?
Well, Jephthah’s daughter for one. I’ll bet she cared a great deal that her father worshipped at that very altar, the alter of comfort and convenience. That’s sort of what he did, isn’t it? Trusting God is hard and very inconvenient. Loving the world as God has is very difficult and complicated and inconvenient and demands a great deal of sacrifice, more often than we’re willing to give. It’s easier not to worry about it. So who cares? That father who had to put his baby girl in a potato sack and chunk her over a fence and never see her again, I’ll bet he cared, too. For a lot of Jewish fathers and mothers back then, they never did see each other again. And of all people, the Church, for the most part, remained silent. That ought to kill us inside. How are we remaining silent today? What are we doing to hurt our children today? We ought to think seriously about that.
There’s no such thing as a victimless sin. Our sins really are too heavy to carry and too deep to undo and too real to hide. They have an effect, often times on the most innocent among us. You know that confession we do every Sunday? Sometimes we disregard that. IT’s too liturgical, too scripted, and we go through the motions. Yet, as Jephthah so tragically showed us, that’s a big mistake. So as we leave here, I charge us to look honestly at ourselves. We need to change. We need to quit worshipping our idols, and we all have a few. We need to be faithful. We need to love this world as God has and does. Just ask Jephthah’s daughter. Just ask your own daughter or son. So may we all go, and for everybody’s sake, for God’s sake, may we all sin no more.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
