Age of Heroes
Deborah, by Sarah Beth Baca
Lenten Vespers, Week Three
Homily:
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
St Augustine taught the story of Scripture by breaking up
human history into six great Ages of the World. We began with the Age of Myth,
the foundational stories that make sense of our world and tell us our true
place within it. We then continued with the Age of Noah, a time of renewal and rebirth,
when God rescued us from the worst of our own evils in the Great Flood, and
promised peace between Creator and Creation by hanging His war-bow in the
heavens.
With the arrival of Abraham we enter Augustine’s Third Age
of the World, which might best be thought of as the Age of Heroes. For indeed
there is not one great arc that covers the time between Abraham and David but
three: the time of the Patriarchs, the time of Moses, and the time of the
Judges.
The Patriarchs of the Bible are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Theirs is a long and wonderful series of stories, but for now we must be brief.
Abram and Sarai, whom we know today as Abraham and Sarah, were specially chosen
by God rather late in life. At no less than 75 years of age, Abraham is told
that he and his wife—long past their childbearing years and frankly described
as being “as good as dead”—will in fact become the parents of a great nation, a
people more numerous than the stars of the sky. And through this nation God
will bless all the peoples of the earth.
This has been called “the scandal of particularity,” that
the One True God of all peoples and of all worlds would choose one specific
people, indeed one specific person, through whom to work His salvation for the
entire cosmos. God’s promise to Abraham is at once both highly exclusive and
expansively universal. “I choose you,” God says. “But I choose you for everyone
else, for through you and your family I will work my salvation for all the
peoples of the world.”
Abraham and Sarah make their fair share of mistakes. For
that matter, so does their son Isaac, and his son Jacob. But regardless of
human failings, God always keeps His promises. And so through thick and thin,
God remains true to the family of Abraham. They do indeed grow to become a
great and numerous people. Jacob earns a new name, Israel, and his 12 sons go
on to found the 12 Tribes of Israel.
Due to the Spirit of God hard at work in Jacob’s son Joseph,
the 12 Tribes of Israel take refuge in the land of Egypt during a great famine.
Egypt was, of course, the superpower of the ancient world, one of the great
roots of Western Civilization. But as the family of Abraham prospered, and
Egyptian dynasties rose and fell, the Israelites found themselves enslaved and
oppressed by the very peoples who in happier times had hosted them as guests.
This leads us to the second story arc within the Age of
Heroes: the time of Moses. A slave child set adrift in the River Nile as a
baby, young Moses was rescued from the waters by no less than the daughter of
Pharaoh herself. Thus did a Hebrew slave, a descendant of Abraham, come to be
raised as a prince of Egypt within the royal court. It was this prince, at once
both king and captive, sovereign and slave, whom God would appoint to lead his
people out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land of their ancestor Abraham.
Wonders and terrors, miracles and horrors, would accompany
them on their Exodus. At the end of it all this people would be forged by God
into a great nation, led by divine Law handed down atop Mt Sinai as the famous
10 Commandments. Thus did God fulfill the first half of the promise given unto
Abraham some 600 years before: from an old man and wife “as good as dead” would
arise a great family, a great people, a great nation. Now it remained only for
this nation to become God’s blessing for the whole of the world.
Having settled in the land promised unto Abraham, the 12
Tribes existed in a loose confederation, recognizing no king save the Lord God
Almighty. In and of themselves, however, the Israelites were no more or less
wicked than the rest of humankind. They suffered the same proclivity to sin as
the rest of us, and often honored the Law more in the breach than in the
observance.
They had a tendency to stray from both Lord and Law, falling
into great evil. And when they did, great evil befell them. They would call out
to the Lord for forgiveness, for mercy, for the sake of their Father Abraham. And
God, in His grace and forbearance, would raise up for them unlikely heroes and
deliverers from every walk of life. These were the Judges, mighty men (and
women!) of old, who would serve as avatars of a sort for the Spirit of God.
They were far from perfect—some were borderline villains
themselves—yet God worked His purposes through them nonetheless. They defended
His people, rooted out injustice, and maintained the Covenant between humanity
and God.
All the while, God was shaping Israel, preparing them, as a
potter shapes the clay or a smith purifies silver, all so that they would
become what He had intended all along, the very thing He had promised unto
Abraham: that through this nation, through the family of this one faithful old
man, God would bring about the salvation of the world.
But first they would have to experience the rise of their
greatest hope and his catastrophic fall from grace. The third age closes, and
the fourth begins, with the anointing of a king named David.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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