TRISTAN SHERWIN

Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s, Metro Christian Bury & Whitefield Zoom service (dated 16th May 2021). You can also listen via our YouTube channel.

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I want to take sometime this morning considering the cross, and thinking about justice, atonement, and what it is that God has spoken to humanity through the brokenness of his crucified body.

To help with that, we are actually going to jump into the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and spend some time absorbing a story that can be found in 2 Samuel 21.

READ: 2 SAMUEL 21:1-14 (NLT)

SOUND & VISION

If I was to ask you which animal has roared within the logo of the MGM film studies since 1982, I guess that many of us would give the answer, ‘a Lion’.

You would be partially right, but mostly wrong.

Yes, what you see is definitely a lion. So don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight, or your ability to classify big cats. However, the sound we hear—that tremendous, powerful, soul-shaking roar—is actually from a Tiger.

You are probably thinking one of two things, right now:

a) ‘Tristan’s brain is full of trivial rubbish’—and you are right (Steph would certainly agree with you).

Or maybe you are thinking, b) ‘Tristan’s making this up’—but I’m not. It came as a shock to me, too.

Your doubt is a sane response. Some of that disbelief will stem from the fact that we have witnessed this partnership of image and sound for so long that we cannot comprehend that they are not one and the same. And even though I’ve told you otherwise, you will understandably be suspicious of what I’ve said, and unwilling to except the truth that what you’ve seen is not what you have heard.

[In case you are looking for the hard evidence, here is a link to Mark Mangini’s blog, the sound engineer responsible for that roar since 1982: Click here.]

There’s an important lesson to take away from the MGM logo: what you are seeing and what you are hearing do not belong together.

And that’s the same in the passage we’ve just read together, in 2 Samuel 21.

There are images and sounds in this story that seem like they go together, and that we are happy to hold together, depending upon our understanding. And yet, if we take a closer look, and if we attune our ears to the sounds in this narrative, we will notice that the Hebrew text is helping us to discern the difference between what sounds like God, and what God actually sounds like.

Some of the prevailing sounds in this text are Justice and Atonement, and what they look like. And If we are willing to listen to the text, we’ll see that the one who moves and sounds like God in this story—the one who embodies something of God’s nature, God’s justice and God’s atoning work in this text—is not David, the ‘man after God’s heart’, but Rizpah.[i]

AMENDING, AVENGING & ATONEMENT

The story opens by telling us a famine has gripped Israel for three years. David goes to God and asks what the problem is, ‘why is this happening?’. God’s reply is straightforward: the famine is happening because Saul, the previous King of Israel, is guilty of murdering the Gibeonites. There was an oath, a covenant had been formed between Israel and the Gibeonites (which you can read about in Joshua 9—an intriguing story that we won’t look at this morning), and Saul is said to have broken this covenant and murdered the Gibeonites in his zeal.[ii]

There is plenty of food-for-thought in verse 1 alone, that we don’t have time for today. But one thing I want to stress is this: God, in speaking to David, is not taking ownership of this famine. God gives the reason for the famine. God is not saying he sent it. Humanity—or Saul, in particular—is the cause of this famine.

If it helps, you could think of it this way: Famine is just a form of Death. Crops are not growing. Life has stopped being expressed in the earth. Death has somehow, and by some means, taken up residence in the land. And when David asks why, why has Death moved in and taken control, all God is saying to David is that Death reigns because Saul (Humanity) had permitted it, and had worked with it instead of against it.

There’s surely an echo of Eden (Genesis 3), here?

David, in hearing this reason, then goes to speak to Gibeonites. That’s also important to understanding this story: David does not seek God about what needs to be done.

Instead, in verse 3, David approaches the Gibeonites and says that he wishes to make ‘amends’, at least that’s how the New Living Translation (the Bible I read from) words it.

It’s not a bad word—to amend means to repair, to reconcile, to put right. And I think that hits the mark.

The actual Hebrew word, though, and one that many Bible translations correctly translate, is the word kāp̄ar (כָּפַר)—to atone.

Atonement is a sound, in Christian circles, that we hear a lot, but its imagery is something that we get confused about.

It literally means ‘to cover over’, ‘to provide a covering’. David is asking the Gibeonites, ‘how do we cover this.’ Not in the sense of hiding it, or covering it up, but in the sense of acknowledging what has happened and fixing, repairing the damage that has been done.

The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggested that atonement is about freedom; creating a means of not repeating the same mistakes again and having the freedom to choose differently. It is to be gifted with a course in life that is not dictated to by our past and, therefore, not to be ‘trapped in a cycle of vengeance and retaliation.’[iii]

Ultimately, atonement is about Justice. We don’t often connect Atonement to Justice. We have often separated them in our minds as two separate things. But the Hebrew Bible never divorces these two things.

David wants to atone. David’s intentions are good, and David, with the Gibeonites make these sounds about justice and atonement. But when we read and imagine what visually follows, something is seriously out-of-sync.

The Gibeonites respond to David’s request by asking for seven of Saul’s sons or grandsons, which they intend to execute, to sacrifice, to impale before God. Seven has symbolic significance—it represents perfection. In other words, they believe that they are presenting a perfect and atoning sacrifice to God.

And David consents to this request! He takes the two sons of Rizpah and the five sons of Merab, and hands them over to be killed. Furthermore, there’s no burial for these men. David permits the Gibeonites to leave the bodies of these men exposed and hanging for six whole months. Which makes a profound statement about these men: it dehumanises them, it strips them of dignity. It is a purposeful act of desecration to the sacredness of human life, and with this act they are making a statement that these men are accursed before God and men.[iv]

This is a horrific scene.

Of course, at this  point, we ask ourselves an important question: Doe this “sacrifice” stop the famine?

No. No, it certainly does not.

This is because what we are hearing and what we are seeing do not belong together. This act does not atone—that’s part of the lesson here.

I’d like to say there’s no concept of justice here, but, sadly, this is not the case. Human justice, human atonement is on display here. This isn’t God’s atonement.

David is acting under the idea of retributive justice. What that means, in short, is that you get your own back. The problem is, that although getting our own back feels good, it feels like fairness, it feels just, it doesn’t actually repair or mend anything. It usually just deepens the problems.

It reminds me of my relationship to my brothers growing up. Occasionally, someone did something that would really upset the other. It could be the accidental breaking of a favourite toy, or even a purposefully aimed right-hook to a shoulder. Such things triggered a chain of exchanges, a growing injustice, where no one really repaid like for like, because the payback always came with an added lump of interest.

For example, when my brother hit me in the shoulder, I would hit him back. But I didn’t want him to feel just the physical pain he’d caused, I also wanted him to feel my sense of emotional injury, too. So, I’d hit him back, much harder than he hit me (which, to be honest, with my puny frame, wasn’t hard). This solved nothing. He’d strike back with his own perceived sense of justice, taking the threat level up a notch or two. And in response, I would retaliate in kind, following the trend in the growth rate. Before long, when both of our shoulders had had enough, the fight would then find spread out over the rest of our bodies, and our environment would get caught up in the collateral damage.

That same pattern litters human history.

The same pattern litters this story, too.

To paraphrase something that was said in Marvel’s TV show, Falcon and the Winter Soldier: David and the Gibeonites are not amending, here. They are avenging.[v] And there’s a big difference. One heals a wound. The other deals out another wound.

Death has reigned because of the deaths that Saul committed, and foolishly, David and the Gibeonites believe that the solution to pushing back this force of death is more death. Surely, this makes no sense. Moreover, it heals nothing—the famine is still gripping the land. Instead of defeating death, David gives it more leg room, and his retributive justice now results in two innocent women losing their sons, and seven innocent men being slaughtered and desecrated. Retribution and revenge lead to more bloodguilt.

Injustice breeds more injustice. Inhumanity leads to more inhumanity. Death begets death.

This is not the sound of atonement.

Atonement is not avenging. Atonement is not about giving Death more leg room. Atonement is not about deepening the scars. Atonement is about healing. Atonement is about mending. Atonement is about stemming death and cultivating an environment where life can thrive. Atonement is about restoration: putting things right. It’s not about throwing another punch back.

THE HOT STONE

It’s a good thing, though, that the story doesn’t end there, and in walks one of the most powerful, powerless people of the Scriptures: Rizpah. And Rizpah protests against Death and its reign of terror.

As I said earlier, if there’s someone who embodies God and sounds like God in this passage—if we wanted to know where God is moving in this story—then Rizpah is it. Unlike the MGM lion, and unlike David, in Rizpah the sounds and visuals are from the same source.

Rizpah is where we see God’s atoning and cleansing work express itself.

The text gives us three huge clues to help us see and hear this.

Firstly, remember that the word atone (Hebrew, kāp̄ar) means to cover. And what does Rizpah do? She literally makes herself a covering over a rock (a tent), and then she protects (she provides a covering) for these corpses by fighting off the vultures by day and the beasts by night. For six whole months, she does this. Yes, the smell must have been awful, and there must not have been anything left but bones by the end of it. But from the beginning of the harvest until the rains fall, Rizpah encamps herself with her impaled sons and their kin; she shares in the state of her family, she identifies with them, she becomes associated with them and with everything that means, protesting what has taken place.

Rizpah literally, with raw passion and lament, ‘covers over’, ‘atones’ this inhumanity: identifying with the dead, fighting off death, and protesting against death. In other words she bares this injustice of this in her own body, and also bears witness against it in her own body. She condemns this sin in her own flesh (it’s helpful to remember that, and it’s also helpful for seeing something the Apostle is Paul getting at in Romans 3:8).

Secondly, to point out the most obvious clue: it is Rizpah’s movements, not David’s executions, that launch a chain of events that culminate in the end of death’s reign. Or, as Professor Wilda Gafney puts it, ‘Lynching Rizpah’s and Merab’s sons did not heal the land or the people. Doing right by a multiply wronged woman did.’[vi]

We’ll come back to this.

However, there’s a third and bigger clue than those two, that may not be so obvious to us.

For those of us who have ever read the book Isaiah, we may remember a scene described in Isaiah 6, where Isaiah finds himself having a vision of standing before God’s throne, and being aware of his sin, his uncleanness. In that scene, a winged creature, a seraphim, takes a burning coal, a hot stone, from the altar and touches Isaiah’s lips with it—a symbol of cleansing his sin, a symbol of atonement.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what the Hebrew word is for ‘burning coal’, or ‘hot stone’?

Rizpah.

Rizpah, the hot Stone, the burning coal, is the cleansing agent of God within this story.

And so atonement comes not through David’s act of handing over these men over to death, but in Rizpah’s act of identification with the victims, and in her exposure of this inhumanity and the darkness that is behind that it.

It is Rizpah’s bodily protest that awakens David’s senses, that enables David to realise his involvement in this act of inhumanity. It’s Rizpah’s prophetic movements that stimulate change in David and which compel David to honour life instead of defiling it.

As Bible translator, Robert Alter puts it, ‘Rizpah’s sustained act of heroism achieves its end: the King is shaken out of his acquiescence [in] inhumanity.’[vii]

Or, to put that differently, David is shaken out of his submission and obedience to death, and is called back to life.

THE CROSS

As I said at the beginning, I’ve looked at this passage because I want us to see something about the Cross of Christ. The sight and sound of the cross is also supposed to shake us out of our submission and obedience to death.

In many ways, this story prefigures the crucifixion, and so I like to think of Rizpah being a Feminine Type.[viii] What I mean is that Rizpah’s act in this story captures something of God’s cross-shaped self-expression. Again, she identifies with the dead, becomes as one of them; in her humble passion, Rizpah lays down her life and protests and fights against death, and there is atonement in this protest as it alerts David to the truth of what he has done.

At the cross, like Rizpah, God identifies with the disgraced, and the dehumanised. More than this, like Rizpah and Merab’s sons, God surrenders and becomes the victim of our inhumanity, and in doing so, God exposes to us our inhumanity.

It’s not God dealing out death at the cross. It’s mankind. At the cross, humanity unloads and transfers its sin upon of Jesus. We deal out our violence upon Jesus. Like the Gibeonites and David lynching these seven men, we lynched Jesus. In other words, Jesus bares the image of Sin: Jesus exposes our rejection of God’s likeness, and our submission and obedience to Death. Jesus’ broken, marred and pierced frame holds up a mirror before us, showing us our reflection and our unwillingness to reflect God.

As strange as it sounds, there is atonement in this act. There’s justice. But it’s not retribution.

God is seeking restoration. God wants us to see what we have done. Like Rizpah’s act awakens David, God’s body and blood should be like an alarm going off: look at man’s inhumanity to man, look at man’s nonconformity to imaging God, look at what mankind does to God’s image.

The cross is not about God punching us back. It is not about God punching Jesus, either. Again, it is humanity crucifying Jesus. It’s humanity throwing the punches, and God, in Christ, is absorbing them. Our Sin is made manifest in God’s wounds.

Like Abel’s blood, after being murdered by his brother Cain (Genesis 4), Christ’s blood bears witness to our ability to be less than human, our ability to consort with death and to defile what is sacred in our world and in each other—it testifies of our violence. But, as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, unlike Abel’s blood, which called out for vengeance and retribution, Christ’s blood speaks forgiveness (Hebrews 12:24).

God wants us to see and hear what is spoken through the cross.

Yes, at the cross, we witness the blood-spilling effects of our Sin. But we also witness, as we do in Rizpah, the radical, self-emptying, parental nature of Divine love.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once remarked that when he beholds the cross, he sees the worst of humankind, but the very best of God.[ix]

In a similar tone, the reformed theologian, T. F. Torrance would describe the crucifixion as having both a dark and a light side. The dark side is the unveiling of our inhumanity. But the light side is the unveiling of God’s unflinching embrace of humanity.[x]

God is not willing to let us go. The cross is God giving his life, exposing our injustice, in order to call us back home, in order to revive us, to stimulate transformation is us, and to lead us out of our blind obedience to death and into the light of the Kingdom of God.

‘When David heard what Rizpah had done…’ (in verse 11), Death’s grip on him, and Death’s grip on the land, is suddenly overthrown and David is free to act differently.

This is what God desires for me and for you.

All God asks is for us to see, and to listen to what the cross has spoken. That we would hear what God’s blood is saying, and in response, repent from giving our blind allegiance to Death, and start imitating God in the patterns of life.

‘The son is the radiance of his glory and the representation of his essence…’ Hebrews 1:3 (NET)

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Question to Ponder:

What should David had done as an act of atonement, an act of justice, in response to the murder of the Gibeonites?

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Endnotes:

[i] I know this raises questions about what the title ‘man after God’s heart’ means, and they are good questions. It is worth stating that this statement about David is only made twice in the whole of the Scriptures: firstly in 1 Samuel 13:14, and secondly in Acts 13:22, which quotes the original verse.  That’s it, twice. Or once, depending upon how you count it. The original verse is spoken before David’s anointing by the prophet Samuel. Ergo, it is spoken ahead of David’s time as King, and is never uttered once during the rest of his story. The tensions in the story of David’s life are such that we can’t help but ask, ‘if David has a heart after God, will he act upon it?’ A similar question should be asked about David’s son, Solomon: Solomon has wisdom, but will he use it? Alternatively, we could understand the statement ‘after God’s heart’ very differently: that it is saying nothing about the nature of David’s heart, but it is instead speaking of God’s intent. i.e., ‘God chose David after his [God’s] heart.’ In contrast to the people’s choice of Saul (or what appealed to people as the qualities for a King—Saul was tall and handsome and stood out), David is God’s choice. Even the echo of 1 Samuel 13:14 in Acts, is more to do with God’s choosing, God’s means of administrating the Divine purpose, then it is about the inclination of David’s character. That’s not to diminish David, in any way. After all, he wrote some powerful psalms and there is much to learn from his story. Nevertheless, he was far from perfect. Being a ‘man after God’s heart’ does not permit us to unquestionably think of everything David does as being representative of God’s will.

[ii] Even though this slaughter is mentioned in 2 Samuel 21, we don’t actually have an account of this massacre by Saul within the writings contained within 1 Samuel. And yes, that does raise many fascinating and intriguing questions. Equally, the pairing of Saul and ‘zeal’ (mentioned in 2 Samuel 21:2), is also an interesting ‘rabbit-hole’of a combination.

[iii] See Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s essay, Jewish Time, within Covenant & Conversation: Genesis, The Book of Beginnings, p.352.

[iv] By the way, in doing this, David, the so-called “man after God’s heart” moves in opposition to two of the Torah’s commandments; Deuteronomy 21:22-23 and 24:16. Or, as some have suggested, it could be that Rizpah’s protest against these acts led to the establishment of these laws (see, https://www.workthegreymatter.com/rizpah-protest-david-laws-deuteronomy/).

[v] The actual quote from Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier, episode 5, is ‘You weren’t amending, you were avenging.’ This is spoken between Sam Wilson (Falcon/Captain America) to Bucky Barnes (The Winter Soldier/White Wolf). It’s a great show if, like me, you’re into the comic book/superhero scene.

[vi] Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne, p. 201. By the way, this an amazing book. So, if you are looking for a good place to explore Rizpah further—or to explore any other woman in the Bible—then I would highly recommend this.

[vii] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Prophets, p.405

[viii] This idea of Feminine Types will be the basis of my next book.

[ix] The exact quote is, ‘[As I behold that uplifted cross] I am reminded not only of Christ at his best, but of man at his worst. We must see the cross as the magnificent symbol of love conquering hate and of light overcoming darkness. But in the midst of this glowing affirmation, let us never forget that our Lord and Master was nailed to that cross because of human blindness. Those who crucified him knew not what they did.’ Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. From his sermon Love in Action, which can be found in the book, A Gift of Love, p. 44

[x] See T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, pp. 245-246