“A Burden”

(2 Timothy 3:14-17 and Nahum 1)

          In the very first verse of the first chapter, we are told what will follow in the book of Nahum is an oracle, a term which generally means a vision or a word from the Lord concerning things to come.  Interestingly, though this same Hebrew word literally translates as burden. 

Now I confess I was careful in my choice of texts this morning, knowing we’d have an intergenerational crowd, so it might not yet be clear to you just what sort of burden Nahum delivers here.  If you care to take even a quick glance at the remaining two chapters in this short prophetic book, you’ll not only find enough blood and gore to warrant at least an ‘R’ rating, you’ll also learn that the goriest bits are directed against an enemy people. 

Ninevah was the capital of Assyria, a powerful empire that had conquered the people of the northern kingdom of Israel years earlier, destroyed many of their cities, and taken their best and brightest into exile.  The Assyrians were equally hated and throughout the Ancient Near East for their cruelty, particularly for the inhumane ways they would treat their captives.

The book of Nahum is a response to what the Assyrians did to Israel.  It’s an angry, vengeful book, the entire purpose of which is to announce God’s coming judgment of Ninevah.  The prophet assures those who’ve suffered at their hands that the Ninevites will pay for their crimes, and then he spells out proposed punishments in gruesome detail.

We certainly find in Nahum, as in other prophetic books, bold metaphors and passionate language and a strong conviction that the prophet speaks on behalf of the Lord.  But here the entire force of the message is directed against people other than the Israelites themselves. So instead of the strong calls to righteousness and justice we find in books like Amos and Micah, here the prophet seeks to comfort folks by assuring them Ninevah’s end is near; those blankety-blanks will get as good as they gave…

Nahum’s words aren’t exactly the kind of thing that makes it into your average children’s Bible!  Nor are they the kind of thing I normally seek out in my own Bible reading, thanks just the same.  These are angry, vengeful, violent words.  Makes me wonder if the author of 2 Timothy forgot about Nahum when he penned those marvelous verses about all Scripture being inspired by God and useful?  When, many generations later, decisions were being made about which books to include in the Bible and which ones to omit, you really do have to wonder how Nahum made the cut.  This book is a burden, all right.

But if it’s a burden for modern readers that these words sit here in the Bible, isn’t it also a burden that the ancient Israelites experienced such cruelty that it provoked this response? In other words, it’s a burden that the devastating things that prompted these angry words happened in the first place.  Once they had, the people of Israel couldn’t imagine God wouldn’t want to punish the perpetrators. And of course what a burden it is that world history has so many episodes like this, of violence and cruelty and war.

From a safe vantage point, thousands of years later, it’s easy enough for us to find this book a burden – we’ve joked before about the thick black magic marker approach to biblical interpretation, and the book of Nahum might well be on the list for a number of us to “X” out … the Scriptures would be so much easier to understand without this kind of thing.

But as you already know if you’ve read around in the less familiar, less often-quoted parts of the Bible, the Scriptures don’t universally speak words of comfort, don’t exclusively offer clear directions for how we ought to live. Their pages also have a lot of jagged edges, stories and poems and songs that defy smoothing into easy categories.  Nahum is a perfect example of just that sort of jagged edge.

Even in isolated instances like this, finding enemy talk in the Bible can be pretty unsettling, all the more so when war rages today in these very spots in the Middle East. Worse yet, Nahum’s not alone in being vocal about what ought to happen to the enemies of Israel.  The Psalms are sprinkled with vengeful references to enemies as well.

          Don’t you find yourself cringing when you run across words like these in Scripture? Shouldn’t someone have come along and cleaned this up before publication?  Smoothed over the rough edges? Or at the very least not allowed it quite so dramatically to fly in the face of Jesus’ words about loving our enemies? If a text like the Sermon on the Mount describes a high calling to which we’re called, setting out ideals to strive for; if Jesus speaks in that context about what we’d say and do and be if we could say and do and be our very best . . . then other parts of Scripture come off looking more like the “before” shots in a spread of “before and after” photos. 

But perhaps that’s the point – while some biblical texts call us to a higher plane, others just tell it like it is.

          Eugene Peterson has this to say in regard to Hebrew poetry, which runs throughout the psalms and the prophets: “Poetry grabs for the jugular.  Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.  It is root language.  Poetry doesn’t so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what is … overlooked, or suppressed…Knowing this, we will not be looking here primarily for ideas about God, or for direction in moral conduct.  We will expect, rather, to find the experience of being human before God exposed and sharpened.”[1]

          I’ve talked on other occasions about the importance of remembering what kind of material we’re reading as we approach different parts of the Bible.  This is absolutely essential when we read through a book like Nahum.  Other parts of the Bible offer guidelines for behavior, charge us to “go and do likewise.”  Not so here.  The prophet isn’t worried about saying what nice polite people are supposed to say.  He’s just calling it like he sees it.  The people of Ninevah have done unspeakable things; unspeakable things, he feels, should happen to them in return. It’s a natural human reaction to cheer when the bad guys get it in the end – if we do it in movie theaters, how much more are we inclined to do it in life, especially if we’re the ones who’ve been wounded.

          As good Christian people, people of grace and forgiveness, the emotional reactions that come across in texts like these aren’t necessarily ones we’re proud of.  But whether or not the word ‘enemies’ has a deep resonance for us, we’ve all known anger; we’ve all known hurt, or bitterness.  The fascinating thing to me about the Bible is that this stuff gets blurted out before God. It turns out we do have here in Nahum a book of truth – even as 2 Timothy claims – it’s just important to recognize that it is truth of a different sort.

And for all its brutal honesty, for all its jagged edges, I find there’s also something instructive about the way Nahum frames his predictions of the fall of Ninevah.  Something that makes this far more than an angry venting session.   For underlying it all is a fundamental recognition that God’s in control, and that God’s justice will one day prevail.

This is so important, because let’s face it, the fact that the book stands here as a biblical word makes Nahum pretty dangerous reading material. But again, Nahum’s burden is NOT a prescriptive word – nowhere does the prophet call his fellow Israelites to arms to rain down this vengeance on the Assyrians themselves. The author doesn’t say this is what we will do, but this is what should happen to them for their brutal crimes. God is God, the prophet remembers even in his rage, and I am not.  What happens to me, to my enemies – it’s all in God’s hands. As we read just a few moments ago in Nahum: The Lord is a stronghold in a day of trouble; he protects those who take refuge in him; He, the Lord, will make a full end of his adversaries. (Nahum 1:7-8)

I wonder if another important message of Nahum may simply be the reminder that God has standards for moral conduct, and will ultimately reach a point of saying: Enough is enough! God does not tolerate oppression. Some actions are far too destructive to condone; they must be condemned.  It may be shocking, but perhaps this, too, is a biblical truth: that to those who insist on abusing or annihilating others, the Lord may turn and say, as we read in Nahum 2:13 “I am against you.”

            This, then, is what the book of Nahum offers.  The natural question, of course, is what on earth do we do with it?  As followers of the Prince of Peace how can we not want to rip dangerous words like these right out of the Bible?

          I don’t have a satisfactory answer to that question.  All I have is a few thoughts that may point in the direction of an answer…

          When we are victims of cruelty, there’s no question it is comforting to know that justice will be done. But living as we do in a world so racked with violence, do we necessarily want the justice to come in this form?  Nahum’s words proved true, in that the Babylonian Empire eventually came in and wiped the Assyrian Empire off the map.  But is that really what we want to happen for all eternity?  One bully punished for his cruel behavior only by being beat up by another bully, and then another? Satisfying from the point of view of simple crime and punishment perhaps, but certainly not satisfying when what we long for is an end to the cycle of violence.

          Thank God we’ve been offered a new way.  “You have heard it said, but I say to you…” offers Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, as he outlines entirely new, nonviolent approaches to catching one’s enemy off guard.

Thank God, too, that justice can be done without any need for further violence.  Thank God that the penalty for every crime that has ever been committed, or ever shall be, lies in God’s hands.  God’s taken care of it. 

          Where?  The New Testament teaches, first of all, that it happened on the cross.  The atonement is God saying: “I will not pretend you have done nothing wrong.  The full penalty for your sins must be paid.  But I will pay that penalty myself.”[2]

          We’re also promised in Scripture that all will be set right at the end of days.  This too relieves us of the burden of trying to exact vengeance ourselves, here and now.

          So that both the gift of the cross and the promise of future resolution to come free us to move on, creatively and peacefully, toward reconciliation.

So it’s ok to pause for awhile in the neighborhood of Nahum – important, even, to have included it in our walking tour of lesser known Old Testament books this summer – but I, for one, am grateful our Scriptures also include so much more than this.  Offering us a far broader context within which to try to make sense of these words.

Read as an honest account of the anger victims of extreme cruelty would naturally feel, Nahum makes all the sense in the world.  Victims have every right to express feelings like these, and to long for justice to be done.  Far be it from me to muffle their voices – pain this intense deserves a hearing. 

          My prayer is simply this - that God will help our deeply troubled world embrace a more peaceful way, so that fewer and fewer of God’s children will ever have reason to utter such words.