Michael Knowles: the Church and its Scriptures 8

The Church and its Scriptures Michael Knowles

Back to Hebrews Chapter 11

Hebrews 11.32-34 cannot be dismissed with a throwaway line. A good reason has to be provided –just as good reason has been provided for rejecting some of Paul’s statements as sexist, though they are part of the New Testament. There is nothing intrinsically unacceptable to say that Hebrews has got it wrong about Samson, just as we have collectively decided that Paul got it wrong about the relationship in which a wife stands to her husband and what she should and shouldn’t wear on her head in church.. But it has to be demonstrated.

For my part though I am not sure that Brian’s reading of this text in Hebrews is the right one. The same text includes Rahab the prostitute in its list of men and women of faith and that might well be our guide how to understand the tribute to Samson. “By faith the prostitute Rahab escaped the doom of the unbelievers because she had given the spies a kindly welcome” (11.v31). The author of the letter to the Hebrews would not have approved of prostitution (even if the two spies inside Jericho did). What saved her from being massacred with the rest of the inhabitants was the fact that she helped the spies escape. What persuaded her to do that was her belief “The Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below” (Joshua 2.11). It was a faith which had ‘good works’, in her case doing something which helped towards “seeing God’s promises fulfilled” (Hb, 11.33).

My point is that, in the economy of salvation where God works with the grain of humanity, there has first to be a People of God who would be the instrument of salvation. That people was the Jews. For the Jews to establish themselves to their own satisfaction as a people they had to have a territory. The –by our Christian standards- immorality of the methods they used to acquire a territory was not an issue with them. Killing and slaughtering the occupants of the territory they wanted, without which they would not be a people, they did not consider immoral. Such an outlook could not be changed in any natural way overnight. Rahab’s faith in the supremacy of Israel’s tribal god was instrumental in achieving a successful invasion of Canaan.

Likewise with Samson. He was a brute, really nothing more than the Israelites’ version of whatever thugs the Philistines were using against them. But in the economy of salvation, which has no favourites, he belonged to the people God had chosen to bring salvation to all. His faith was in the God of Israel. This god was his tribal god. For Israel their god was their tribal god. In God’s plan it would be to Israel that He would reveal himself in the fullness of time as the one and only God, “God in heaven above and on the earth below” as Rahab said, and gradually transcend and transform their understanding of God. At the time of Samson however the plan was a long way off reaching fulfilment. God had to make do with what there was. He had to work with and from the human condition as it was. He had to put his wine in the only wineskins available. The alternative would have been somehow to produce a tribe that was separate from, unaffected by, insulated from every culture around it, in some fantastic way morally, religiously, not just unadulterated and pure but intellectually amazingly advanced. It would have been totally false, totally artificial. A sort of Midwich cuckoos. It is not, it could not be, the way of revelation. God took a wanton for a wife (Amos 1.2), a woman loved by another man, an adulteress (3,1) God hoped he’d found grapes in the wilderness, the first ripe figs. No such luck. “They resorted to Baal” (9.10). God took flesh in the condition it was in..

Samson was the tribe’s ferocious patriot. He is specifically presented by Judges as believing in the power of the God of Israel, which faith made him instrumental in defeating the Philistines who opposed the establishment of the Israelite kingdom, and in that way his faith worked towards “seeing God’s promises fulfilled” (ibid) –which ultimately was fully achieved in Christ (ibid.v.40). So, as I read this text of Hebrews, there is no approbation of Samson’s thuggery and murderous activities, just as there is no approbation of Rahab’s prostitution. Rather there is approbation of their faith which de facto worked towards the establishment of the kingdom. For the Jews, and more importantly for the writer of Judges, the establishment of the kingdom of Israel in Canaan was the fulfilment of God’s promises; and for them it was a matter of indifference how Rahab and Samson contributed to that outcome as long as they did contribute to it.

For Hebrews however the fulfilment of God’s promises is not any earthly kingdom. “For God had a better plan” (11.40). It is one, to share in which “we must throw off every sin to which we cling” (12.1). It has no earthly fulfilment. It has no earthly attitudes and purposes such as Samson had, and had in abundance. Instead our eyes must be fixed on Jesus “on whom faith depends from start to finish. Jesus who for the sake of the joy that lay ahead of him endured the cross, making light of its disgrace and now has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (12.2). It is a plan which repudiates everything about Samson except his faith in the power of his God. The life and death of Jesus which is the example of morality which Hebrews enjoins upon us was the very antithesis of that of Samson who was a thug, a lecher and a murderer. The “promised inheritance” (11.40) which this thug of an Israeli patriot believed in was nothing like the promised inheritance which was in the plan of God and hence they could not “enter upon” it (v.39) until Christ had endured the cross and made light of its disgrace. Christ is the complete repudiation of everything about Samson except his faith that the God of Israel was, in the words of a prostitute “God in heaven above and on the earth below”.

God worked with Rahab and Samson as he found them. Their faith in him was inadequate, in Samson’s case purely tribal. But that was what God had to work with. They contributed each in their own way to the establishment of a people of God which required in the context of their times territorial definition. No other understanding of a ‘people of God’ was possible in that culture. Then, and indeed as now, the Jews had an understanding of themselves as a ‘people’ which was racial, generational, genetic. One has to read the first eleven chapters of the Acts to appreciate how entrenched that racial understanding of ‘people’ was, and indeed still is, and how immensely difficult it proved for the first Christians to surmount it. It was a faith limited by and to the notion of belonging to a particular tribe, of belonging to a particular tribal god. It was that limited religious understanding that God took up and worked with till, in the fullness of time, his ‘better plan’ could be revealed and executed. Without the narrow and limited faith of men like Samson, for all the evil it was employed by him and others to justify, the ‘people of God’ could never have been established; and from that people came Christ.