Dropping the Jawbone (Week 5, Sep 25)

Readings

  • Genesis 9

  • Judges 15

  • Matthew 18:21–35

Silent Reflection

Remarks

The story of Samson is a tale that takes the listener through a wild ride of laughable, at times unbelievable, twists and turns. In Judges 15, we read through one of the most “shake my head” portions of his life. The “I’m only doing to them what they did to me” rhetoric between Samson and the Philistines is hard to listen to.

I once heard a teaching that discussed the escalation of this cycle in the story of Samson. What started out as a little journey with a goat to give his wife turned into a rebuke from a frustrated father-in-law. This turned into the destruction of acres and acres of crops. This led to the death of the father and daughter. This cycled into the death of “many,” the mustering of tribal armies, and the eventual slaughter of a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey.

From a perceived grievance, to a betrayal, to property, to a thousand lives.

The teacher spoke of the need to end the cycle of petty vengeance that inevitably escalates into something more serious. At some point one of the parties, in a moment of clear-eyed maturity, must stop the cycle; they must “drop the jawbone” and say that the cycle of vengeance stops with them. The difficulty is that such a move requires a willingness to forgive. Every party, at every point in the story, feels as though they have been wronged and are simply making things right and settling the score. In the words of the characters in Judges, “we simply did to him what he did to us.”

Dropping the jawbone is an act of trust. It’s letting go of a process that you have attempted to seize control of. It’s realizing the notion that you ever could control it is a farce.

Samson was far from the first biblical character to lose his cool. In narratives that show the importance of trust, the opening stories of Genesis show us the dangers of letting our fear and insecurity get the best of us. Indeed, we encounter Samson’s same vengeful impulse in one of our earliest heroes — Noah. Having been betrayed by his son, and in what seems like extreme retaliation, Noah lets his fear and insecurity get the best of him in a big way when he lashes out and takes revenge on his son’s offspring — Noah’s own grandson.

I wonder if Noah ever suffered the regret of cursing his own grandchildren. I wonder if he ever thought about how his aggression might one day be turned back on him. He may have considered it later, but not when it counted. In moments of self-preservation, these considerations tend to be far from our minds, don’t they? Fear and insecurity, which lie at the heart of vengeance, drown them out.

Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, sandwiches a teaching on “judging others” between one about worry and another about trusting that God will give you what you ask for. Why sequence them like this? Could it be because judgment – the act of placing ourselves in God’s seat — is really about a “worry” problem? Could it be that fear and insecurity lie at the root of our judgments, that in our woundedness and thirst for things to be made even, we worry that God won’t truly stand for justice and take care of business? Does the famous “ask, seek, knock” teaching immediately follow the famous “judge not, lest ye be judged” one because Jesus is inviting us to trust God with our grievances, realizing that a good Father would know “how to give good gifts to his children”? For what kind of father would give a child what they didn’t need, exchanging bread for a stone and a fish for a scorpion? Maybe God hears us crying for revenge, but He calls it the scorpion-curse that it is and gives us a fish-blessing instead.

This kind of forgiveness is one of the deepest forms of “trusting the story” because it requires the offended to absorb some of the debt that wrongdoing creates. Timothy Keller speaks to this in Reason for God: 

Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.

Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism. … [N]o one “just” forgives, if the evil is serious. … Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into a resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears. … [E]veryone who forgives someone bears the other’s sins. …

Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.

Silent Reflection

Response

  1. Take a moment to sit and reflect on the gravity of true abuse and offense. Before talking about lofty concepts and ideals, just spend a moment realizing it very likely that someone in the room has suffered intense betrayal, emotional/physical/sexual abuse, and other horrific atrocities. These are not trivial matters. Forgiveness does not always mean forgetting; sometimes it means remembering. Forgiveness does not mean condoning; forgiveness does not mean it doesn’t matter. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you don’t call the cops, leave the house, and set up boundaries. Forgiveness is about realizing that vengeance only tears the world apart and the work of redemption will require absorbing a debt — doing the work, paying the bill, going to therapy — that you never should have been responsible for. Take a moment to silently honor that truth.

  2. Have somebody in the group who has navigated significant forgiveness (and is willing to share) reflect with the group about what it was like.

  3. As a group, reflect on the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (today’s reading from Matthew). Reflect on the connections between Noah, Samson, and the Unmerciful Servant. What happened to the debt the king forgave? Who had to pay for it? Is the servant in prison being forced to pay all of his debt, or the debt that is owed to him? How do you read it?

  4. Is there anyone in the group who has not navigated the process of forgiveness and would be willing to share? Do not resolve this tension, but honor it and reflect on it. Appreciate the weight of forgiveness and the urge for revenge.