Faith In Action: Joshua

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This week, we take another huge time jump, from the sending of Moses last week…to the sending of Joshua, four books in the Bible later. The important things to know to catch you up are:

• Moses responded to his call from last week, and marched into the halls of Egyptian power and freed his people.

• Those people immediately responded to their freedom by freaking out, blaming Moses for a lack of food and water, and disobeying God.

• Then they received the Torah, the long ethical and moral teaching from God, on the same mountain where Moses saw the burning bush.

• The people immediately responded to this teaching by freaking out, ignoring Moses, and disobeying God.

• Remember that God had long ago promised that Abraham’s family would be blessed by both descendants and land, and while the first part had happened over the last nearly 500 years, the second part had not. So God sent them into a “land of milk and honey” to move in and receive their blessings.

• And…the people responded by freaking out, ignoring Moses, and disobeying God.

Except for two men: Caleb, and Joshua. Only these two believed that God would give them this land, and so only these two survived to receive that blessing. Everyone else died over the course of 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, including Moses himself. And now, on the cusp of receiving that blessing, we see Joshua ready to take the mantle of leadership from Moses, and enter into the Promised Land.

All sounds well and good here at the beginning of the book of Joshua. But it is about to get rather dark, rather quickly. The next several chapters will tell a story of a violent conquest, where God not only gives Israel the land to possess, but also commands that they destroy the homes and people who currently live in the land, including noncombatant women and children. The book of Joshua is a difficult one for many of us, Jewish and Christian, who struggle with this violent view of God. It forces us to ask, “How will we read this book?” This morning, I will suggest five different lenses through which we might see the book of Joshua.

The first is the lens of annihilation. Since the book was written, many people have read themselves into it…almost always as the victorious Israelites, defeating their enemies. It has been used to defend all types of military action, political conquest, or even straight-out genocide. Christians used it to defend their military conquest during the Crusades. Euro-American Christians used it to defend their treatment of Native Americans, suggesting that the indigenous people who lived in America when they arrived were just like the Canaanites and needed to be removed. I think that we are seeing this lens today again in the Middle East. After a violent terrorist attack on Israeli citizens, two years ago this week, factions within the Israeli government, operating out of this lens, have moved to annihilate all Palestinians, much in the same way that Joshua depicts. After 1,500 Israeli citizens were killed or abducted, the response has been the deaths of 64,000 Palestinians, mostly noncombatant citizens. This lens of annihilation has taken Joshua and applied it, carte blanche, to any situation in which God’s people want to destroy others. They insist that since God told Joshua to defeat his enemies, God must be telling them the same thing.

But then others view the book through a very different lens: the lens of avoidance. Many people of God, Jewish and Christian, have been aghast at the book, and especially at the ways that other believers have used it to annihilate their enemies. So, their response to the book of Joshua has been to…just, kind of ignore it. Pretend that it isn’t there. Most lectionaries minimize the passages that are used from Joshua, and a lot of preachers avoid it like the plague. I mean, you don’t hear me preach from it a lot, do you? But then that avoidance practice starts to spread. Many times, the book becomes a symbol of everything that God does in the Old Testament. In fact, some Christians talk about an “Old Testament God,” as if the only thing that God does in the First Testament is command conquest. Avoiding Joshua turns into avoiding the entire Old Testament…and even to invent another God in order to do so. I know I have talked before about a guy named Marcion, who lived about 50 years after Jesus, who insisted that there were two different “Gods,” a God of the OT, and then a totally different God of Jesus in the NT. The Church rejected this theology, but Marcionism is alive and well still today. Whenever you hear someone say, “the God of the Old Testament,” and not in a good way, they are invoking the spirit of Marcion, even though the Church (and Jesus himself) rejected that theology, and that lens of avoiding Scripture, simply because it doesn’t fit their ideology.

So, is there another way? Besides annihilation and avoidance? I would like to think so. I came up with three.

The first is the lens of complexity. Both of these first two lenses are rather simplistic. “It is black and white; God said this to Joshua, so God must be telling me the same thing, no questions asked.” Or, “It is black and white; there is a bad Old Testament god and a good New Testament God and it’s that simple, no questions asked.” But I would plead that we don’t fall off to either side, but instead sit in the complexity of the moment. That means being uncomfortable with some ambiguity, and maybe even asking questions that we don’t have ready answers for. Let me suggest a few:

• How do we juxtapose the conquest commands of God here with the original call to Abram that he would be blessed to be a blessing to all nations? That passage, way back in Genesis, suggests that he would move in alongside of these other peoples, not replace and annihilate them. Furthermore, that command to bless all nations and outsiders is a major theme of the ethical teaching of the Torah. God even tells Joshua to remember the Torah and meditate on it, as he engaged in conquest!

• That said, how do we handle the reality that when they moved in, the current residents did not feel blessed, and in fact wanted them dead or gone? The promise to Abram feels naïve, since settling alongside of other warring peoples would not be a smooth transition, a story that we see play out in the next book of the Bible: Judges. The reality of Gaza today demonstrates this complexity, as there is a small but violent minority of Palestinians who want all Israelis wiped off the planet. How do we aim for peace when others desire our destruction?

• How do we navigate the question of justice in the story? The people of God were enslaved, oppressed, and murdered for 480 years in Egypt. There is a way of reading the violence of Joshua that looks like liberation and freedom for an oppressed people. Ending slavery was an economic assault on the Southern states…they fought a whole war about it. Justice sometimes means taking away from the oppressor to give to the oppressed. Sometimes some have to lose something for others to be allowed to be freed and secure. The story is one of freedom and justice, AND violence and conquest.

• Listen, I don’t have easy answers to these questions, and I think that is the point. Faith in Action is messy, and choosing to oversimplify it does damage to the Scripture, and to the work of faith. I would invite us to embrace the mess, and do the hard work of walking through the complexity, instead of running toward simplistic black and white answers. A work that leads us to our second lens:

The lens of self-reflection. Let me read a quote from Biblical scholar Robert Coote, which is helpful in describing this lens: What does the book of Joshua show us about ourselves? If we attend to it carefully, it may suggest to us our own affinities with the atrocities, violence, coercion, and prejudicial categorizing as means to social betterment that are its main events. The point of such insight through God’s Word is not to exaggerate our sins or grovel in them, but to encounter a greater reality in which we may not be as innocent as we suppose when averting our gaze from this book or disavowing it out of hand. The book of Joshua can help us to overcome consciousnesses mystified through the ignorance, fear, and conflict that to one degree or another affect all human beings.

How often have people of faith read this text, and asked if they were more like the Canaanites than the Israelites? We tend to identify with the good guys and the winners, and this is definitely the case for the book of Joshua. But Coote asks what if this text is here to get us to consider how we participate in systems that oppress and limit people to the point that rage and violence seem like the only way out? Coote reminds us that the core of the text is providence: the book of Joshua is not about a superior military machine destroying a weaker opponent, but about how God cares for the weak and oppressed. This lens of self-reflection motivates us toward humility. Reportedly Abraham Lincoln was told once by a Union sympathizer that they sure hoped that “God is on our side.” Lincoln famously responded, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.” Which leads us to a third lens:

The lens of strength and courage. Did you notice how many times these words show up in the text today? It feels like they are central to the sending of Joshua, and central to Faith in Action. One could make the argument that the Israelites were in the place they were because they had failed at every turn to be courageous. They left the Promised Land for Egypt with Jacob because they believed that God would not care for them…and ended up enslaved. They refused to enter the Promised Land right after the Exodus because they were afraid of its inhabitants…and ended up wandering for 40 years. Now, God is asking them “how about trying courage this time?”

The same is true for our Faith in Action. Courage and strength doesn’t always look like conquest; in fact, I would suggest that it usually doesn’t. It usually means going into places where you are terrified, and probably have no business going, but still going there because you believe that God is leading you there. Are we willing to take the courageous action to reckon with our own history? To wrestle with the whole Scripture and not just the parts that we tend to agree with? To take a stand for those who are oppressed and enslaved in our world today? To act in ways that are counter cultural and not just protecting our own history or self-interest? I would suggest that that’s what strength and courage are in our world today, and that is what Faith in Action looks like.

And if we doubt that, let us turn toward the author and perfector of our faith. Some of you may know that the Hebrew word for the name that we call Joshua is Yeshua, which is the same root word as the name that we call…Jesus. Joshua and Jesus had the same name. A name that means “God saves.”

Which leads us to one final lens today: the lens of Jesus. Whenever we read Scripture, or engage in self-reflection, or discern together what Faith in Action looks like, it must be viewed through the lens of Jesus. Jesus had the courage to wrestle with the complexity of the Old Testament Scriptures, and embraced them as the core of his calling. He found in them a call to peace, and love of neighbor, and even love of enemy. And he had the courage to follow that call, even to the table where his betrayer sat, even to the garden where his oppressors would be, even to the cross where his life would end.