Being strong and very courageous is not easy, especially when that strength and courage is to try and live without coveting – wanting – some of what your neighbor holds dear. Human beings do tend to like things, and someone who is particularly prone to coveting and desiring yarn and books, those things don’t have to be bright and shiny for us to want to be like ravens and acquire them for our hoards. Despite being under strict instructions not to take for one’s own person the religious articles and the precious metals that are in Jericho, you know when chaos is unleashed, even temporarily and ritually very carefully, that something along this line is going to go wrong. Pilfering and thievery troubles most human communities, especially in times of war, when all kinds of awfulness can be stuffed into the justifications of war.
Joshua, chapter seven, sees the Israelites punished for the failure of a few to stick to the wretched business of wiping out the Canaanites in order to make their place in the world. Remember that the stories we tell are laden with meanings we make, and the historical books of the Bible aren’t any different. This chapter is also a commentary that tries to make meaning out of losing thirty-six people to the Amorites; if the Holy is on your side, then the only way you’re going to be beat is when the Holy wants you to be beaten, right? Frankly, that’s a theology I find hard to accept, as it goes against all my experiences of the Oneness. Were I to interpret that a little differently, it might be, hmmm, maybe we should find a different way of living in this land with all of us together? Here’s my liberal theological bias: I tend to believe that cooperation and inclusivity are more likely to create a solid community with more love and less fear than blaming, terrorizing, and killing people.
But what do you do when someone’s actions threaten your whole community? That’s really the issue at the heart of this chapter of Joshua. Whatever moral read you take about the actions of the Israelites and their understanding of what the Holy wants in this chapter, when the actions of one or a few threaten the viability of your whole community, what then is to be done?
They choose stoning and fire. I won’t. But not everyone is going to see the error of their ways, find a way of personal atonement, and then go on to live morally exemplary lives. Over time, communities develop procedures for punishment and justice, ones that need to be revisited from time to time. Because sometimes we lose our way.
That’s another reason why we need places where we can practice confession, forgiveness, and creating another way: so we know as a society how to do that, and so we have exercised these muscles of moral strength and these hearts of courage in loving justice and mercy.
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