Hilton Head Island, SC – March 26, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 26:14-25; II Samuel 13:1-14
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor bad; for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had forced his sister Tamar. – II Samuel 13:22 (RSV)
There are many tragic stories in the Bible. In reading the context, we might have guessed some of these sad stories were coming, but others sweep over us without warning. The story of Tamar, Absalom, and Amnon is one of the latter types of tales.
King David had many children by several different wives. Keeping track of who was born to whom, and when, would keep the royal genealogist and the biblical historian up nights trying to make the record accurate. Three of his older, but not the oldest, children were two sons and a daughter. David’s son Amnon was born to the king via his wife Ahinoam, and he had a son and daughter, named Absalom and Tamar, by his wife Maacah. (There will be no quiz the end of the sermon, so you don’t need to try to remember the specifics.)
We are told nothing that led up to this terrible episode. The writer of II Samuel simply begins by saying, “Now Absalom, David’s son, had a beautiful sister, whose name was Tamar; and after a time Amnon, David’s son, loved her” (II Sam. 13:1). No lead-up, no explanation; just bang! there it is. However, you do need to remember that, as convoluted as this story is. Absalom and Tamar were full siblings, but Tamar and Amnon were only half-siblings. To express it differently, Amnon fell in love with his half-sister.
In the scripture passage you just heard, you learned what happened. By a demonic stratagem, Amnon got Tamar to visit him alone, and then, after trying to seduce her, and she very naturally resisted, he savagely raped her. When David heard what had happened, he was furious. And yet he did nothing. Tamar went into seclusion for the rest of her life, living in shame, unmarried, in the home of her brother.
Needless to say, Absalom was enraged by what his half-brother had done to his sister. Rather than act instantly on his rage, however, he withheld it. He masked it. But all the while he carefully and insidiously nursed it. Then, after two full years had passed, during which Absalom said and did absolutely nothing at all, Absalom ordered his servants to get Amnon drunk. When his half-brother was in an alcohol-induced stupor, Absalom ordered the servants to kill Amnon. A prince commanded the murder of a fellow prince, and the terrified royal retinue dutifully obeyed. Uneasy lies the head that might someday wear the crown, we might suppose.
There is only one other grudge of such magnitude that I know of in the entire Bible, and we shall come to it presently. But the story of Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom is so horrific, so far removed from the wide range of acceptable human behavior, that it stands out in holy writ as an example of savage behavior savagely dealt with. It illustrates an enormous grudge carried to extremes as the result of an extremely horrendous crime against a young, innocent woman. And it is all the more repellent to us because it was not some unknown beauty whom Amnon raped; it was his own half-sister. It was a rape/incest, which makes it all the more deplorable.
That did not end the story, and no one should be surprised. Because David did nothing to avenge Absalom’s sister’s rape, Absalom attempted a coup against his father after Absalom had Amnon killed. David hesitated to strike out against his favorite son, and David’s generals demanded either that they would desert David and go over to Absalom’s side or that they must be given permission to slay Absalom. Reluctantly, David gave that odious order. But when Absalom at last was killed and the conspiracy against David was ended, David still was completely unstrung by his son’s death, traitor and rapist of David’s daughter though Absalom may have been.
In this story it is the deep and abiding hatred of Absalom’s grudge which most appalls and intrigues us. How could someone nurture such deep animosity for so long without showing any signs that it was being nurtured? What kind of profound rage could be masked so effectively that the subject of the grudge, Amnon, could be lured into a trap without even being aware that a trap had been set? Without question what Amnon did was cruel and unthinkable, and without question Absalom had every reason to be justifiably wrathful. But why didn’t Absalom go immediately to their father and demand that justice be done to the malevolent miscreant? Why would Absalom do nothing except to nourish his seething wrath until he could lethally strike against the evil his half-brother had committed against his sister? Psychologically or theologically or spiritually, how could any sane person do what Absalom did, as terrible as was the crime of Amnon?
Let us stop for a moment and consider an essential element of a grudge. Grudges always connote time, the passage of time. People who get angry but quickly get over it don’t hold grudges. Only people who feel they have been greatly aggrieved, or who believe others they love have been greatly aggrieved, hold grudges. Grudges do not represent momentary bursts of anger. They suggest bad blood or ill will that is carefully nurtured for years or decades. In collective terms, grudges are the Hatfields and the McCoys, the Montagues and the Capulets, Germany and France, France and England, Japan and China, Japan and Korea, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and once again in our current headlines, America and Russia. That is how grudges manifest themselves between groups of people.
But the focus of this sermon is on individual grudges, animosities that are stoked for years between various individual persons. It is Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Richard Nixon and the host of enemies he assiduously clutched to his heart, Bill O’Reilley and Rachel Maddow. But it may also be you and me. Of the latter, more later.
I want instead now to turn our attention to a twenty-centuries-long grudge which has been judiciously maintained by the Christian religion. I am talking about how most of us through all of Christian history have perceived one of Jesus’ twelve disciples. I speak of Judas Iscariot. In none of the four Gospels is Judas given even the faintest hint of sympathy by anybody. Frequently, indeed almost always, he is identified as “the one who betrayed Jesus.”
Why? Why is that? Why do the Four Evangelists always go out of their way to besmirch Judas? Well of course it is possible that Judas in fact did betray Jesus. It is historically conceivable that Judas took thirty pieces of silver from the Romans in exchange for turning Jesus over to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane the night in which Jesus was arrested. The next day Jesus was crucified after a very brief if also legally highly dubious trial.
But did you ever ask yourself why a betrayal of Jesus was necessary? The Keystone Cops could have located Jesus immediately after the Last Supper, or during it, for that matter. The Romans were not inept military and political administrators of a vast empire. Had they wanted, they easily could have arrested Jesus at any point within weeks of when he began his public ministry three years earlier in the Galilee, let alone during what we call Holy Week.
Could it be that the other eleven disciples wanted somebody to blame for Jesus being arrested, tried, convicted, and crucified, and they chose Judas to deflect blame from themselves and their own indecision? They did absolutely nothing to defend Jesus in his time of greatest peril! Therefore, could it be that Judas became particularly convenient as an apostolic scapegoat?
Judas is the only disciple who appears to have a surname, or at least a descriptive nomenclature in addition to his “given name.” In Hebrew, Judas would have been known by Jesus and the other disciples either as Yudah Ish-Keriot or Yudah Ish-Sicari. There was a village south of Jerusalem known as Keriot. Ish-Keriot literally means “Man of Keriot.” If that is what Judas’ name meant, he was Judas, the Man of Keriot. In Latin the word sicari denoted a short Roman sword. In effect it was really a long two-edged dagger. So Yudah Ish-Sicari could connote Judah the Zealot. The Zealots were Jews who, for decades, waged a low-key guerrilla war against the Romans. Whenever they found a lone Roman soldier in a crowd of Judeans, they might come up behind him, whip out their sicari from under their cloaks, put their hand over his mouth, and quickly slip the dagger between his ribs, killing him before he even knew what had happened. Then silently the zealots would sneak away, before anyone was aware of what had just transpired. They didn’t use improvised explosive devices or car bombs; daggers nicely sufficed.
So who was Judas Iscariot - - - a man from Keriot, or was he a man with a sicari? If he was from Keriot, he was the only southerner among a Galilean preacher and his Galilean followers. Thus maybe Judas was, from the beginning, the odd-man-out. Or maybe he was a crypto-zealot, who was trying either to enlist Jesus in an armed insurrection against the Romans or to force Jesus to lift his hand against Rome in what Judas supposed would have to be an overwhelming divine display of revolutionary power which would cast the Romans out of Judea forever.
This, of course, is all speculation. But is it also speculative to ask why every Gospel account of Judas is so universally negative? Might there be a personal or regional or political or theological grudge against the only disciple of the Twelve who never seemed to fit in, and therefore they made him the “fall guy” for the crucifixion? The Romans didn’t need a Judas! A Pontius Pilate and a compliant Sanhedrin were more than sufficient to send Jesus to the cross! On Good Friday, Jesus was surely a scapegoat - - - but so was Judas. Judas also was executed, either figuratively or literally, in an age-old theological grudge against him.
The Rev. Johann Heermann was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the early seventeenth-century Thirty Years War between the Protestants and Catholics. Because of health problems, he was forced to leave his pastorate. He took consolation in writing poetry. In 1630 he entitled one of his poems Herzliebster Jesus, wass hast du verbrochen. In 1899 it was translated into English by Robert Bridges as “Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended?” The second stanza asks this: “Who was the guilty?/ Who brought this upon thee?/ Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!/ ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus/ I it was denied thee/ I crucified thee.”
Have we engaged in a two-millennia grudge against Judas Iscariot in order to try to escape our own complicity in the denial of Jesus? None of us actually crucified Jesus, but when we show less than total devotion to the Man from Nazareth and the ideas and ideals he set before us, we deny him as surely as did all the disciples! They did nothing in Jesus’ defense when it became obvious that the powers and principalities of first-century Judea had arrayed themselves against the most righteous man who ever lived. It doesn’t seem like a grudge to us, it doesn’t feel like a grudge, but might it yet be a deeply-subverted grudge? Are we any less guilty than the Eleven?
It is so easy to fall into grudges, and so hard to extricate ourselves from them! We want somebody to blame for our troubles in life! Your brother did something mean to you when you were ten years old, your sister stole your boyfriend from you when you were sixteen, your parents clearly favored another of your siblings over you. A friend betrayed you, making you look bad when you had done nothing wrong. A co-worker stabbed you in the back, suddenly obliterating your standing in the company, so that you had to seek employment elsewhere, even though you had done nothing to undermine anyone or anything. People do things like that. It happens.
It is very easy to give birth to grudges, but very hard to end them if we refuse to stifle them. Animals don’t bear grudges; only people are capable of doing that. Animals might be wary of people who mistreat them, but they don’t constantly seek to harm them. Instead they just avoid them. That’s what we may need to do when someone causes us deep hurt. But holders of grudges stoke their carefully-cherished animosities tightly within themselves, flailing out against their adversaries whenever possible. But unless we release ourselves of our grudges, they can turn our spirits into twisted, cancerous, lifelong lesions.
Grudges are psychologically and theologically lethal. God hates grudges as strongly as grudge-holders hate those against whom they hold their grudges. God did not create us to create grudges. He created us to live in harmony with one another. He does not force us to do that, but He desires us to do that. Good Friday indicates that we fail to do it, but Easter declares that God will overcome our shortcomings anyway, and that eternal life, not eternal death, has the last word.
Grudges are unhealthy. They fester in us for as long as we refuse to forgive both the offender and the offense. Grudges are unwise. They damage the one who nourishes them within more than they damage the one who avoids them as best as possible without. Grudges are unchristian. They violate every precept Jesus taught us about how God wants us to live with all our fellow human beings, however hurtful they may have been to us.
Good Friday and Easter are just around the corner. Get rid of your grudges. Love one another, and so fulfill the law of Christ.