Thursday, October 28, 2010

Habakkuk 1:1-2:4

A Funny Way of Doing Things

If we didn't throw in 1:5-17 we would miss the blockbuster epic of the Chaldean march to victory, but more importantly, we would miss the magnificent complaint of 1:14 against the God who uses megapowers to ride down other countries:

              You have made people like fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. (1:8 NRSV)

This sounds eerily like those future dystopias in summer teen flicks where the Statue of Liberty lies in ruins among bands of weapon-toting mutants looking to snatch a loaf of bread from among scattered bodies. Is this the kind of world we can expect? Big fish eat little fish? Sure, there is a hint of a divine limit on Babylon's war machine: “Then they sweep by like the wind; they transgress and become guilty; their own might is their god!” (1:11 NRSV) Still, one has to wonder, is one marauding army checking another the way God gets things done? If God's agenda is justice, theirs certainly is not.

Habakkuk is not the the first to complain about the miscarriage of justice. The complaint is peppered across the psalms. But this prophet has his own tete a tete style with this Sender of Chaldeans.

Rolf Jacobson at workingpreacher.org makes the case that we must read Habakkuk as a whole, enlightening the folk in the pew to the prophet/God exchanges of the book so as to see how the parts connect to what really matters in the closing confession: to believe in God's justice against the evidence (3:17-19) – and call it faith. Is such blind trust not, after all, faith in its purity? And, by the way, what a fitting theme for Reformation Sunday! In other words, he has thematized the text.

I am not discounting this approach. We need themes. We learn by drawing out a big picture (“context” - [yawn - this word needs to go on the 'reserve pop jargon' list I suppose]) and then moving to the details. But contexts run on more rampant trajectories than any single frame of reference can map. Thematic reading is a kind of skewing of facts on the ground. A faulty GPS routing that fails to take into account the local geography. A denial of options. A buffer against the polysemantic character of texts. There is something to be said for resisting the “big picture.” Why, after all, even read the first two chapters of Habakkuk, if it's really just about 3:17-19?

It's one thing to say God will eventually take care of the victims of marauding power. It is quite another to find food for your son when the soldiers have just burned your fields and carried off your daughter. You can pick the time and location to illustrate this point: Judah. South Sudan. Chechnya. It is then that waiting and faith take on a whole new meaning. Habakkuk holds forth that it really doesn't matter if the marauders are Judean or Babylonian. It's all the same. As the Girardian commentary puts it:

Any way you look at it, it's all violence -- which is what Habakkuk seems to be complaining about. This is what tends to happen at times of sacrificial crisis: even the attempts at righteous violence appear to be unrighteous. It all looks like plain old violence.

Doesn't it, though? If the marauding Chaldeans are the cure for the marauding Judeans, then it is true, after all, that two wrongs, contrary to the usual moral dictum, do make a right. Or pose as such. Faith without deliverance is merely institutional ideology. An ornament for a holiday where we can once again tell the story of Martin Luther and his hammer.

On matters of justice there is no question that we have to wait. Ours is, after all, a fallen world. Evil does go unchecked long enough for people to get hurt and maybe die. Religious waiting is a kind of art. We have a whole church season – Advent – coming up, that is devoted to it. Waiting and watching, and with watching, hopefully, seeing what God is up to. This is what God speaks back to the prophet in 2:3:

     For there is still a vision for the appointed time;

     it speaks of the end and does not lie.

     If it seems to tarry, wait for it;

     it will surely come, it will not delay.

But it will delay. Vision is a powerful force in a person's life, as seen in the faces of victims who would seem to have no apparent reason to celebrate God's goodness, yet still do. But not because of speedy justice. In fact, the legal maxim “justice delayed is justice denied”, for all its altruistic sentiment, is neither realistic nor biblically warranted. Justice delayed is an attribute of everyday life. God finds a way to us despite the lack of it. Truly, God's vision, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, works through us in ways that we cannot fathom. This we trust, especially by the testimony of the victims who inspire us to trust. But we can scarcely call it justice.

By and large, our Creator wants to work through the players on the stage – the grimy flesh and blood of ignoble armies and often impious religious institutions. Instances like Elijah calling down fire from heaven to consume the promoters of Baal are more the exception than the rule. Divine interventions don't generally happen that way. They happen through people. Through the retrospective and prayerful observations of those who see that even in the initial terrors of the Babylonian captivity, God worked to transform the religious faith of the exiles into a new form that carried the seed for reconstituting the structures of justice in the evolving Jewish faith.

Here's the thing. Our deliverance comes at the hand of God through real people who die real deaths and are raised into real new life. Flesh and blood all the way. It's a real mess, too, and God has not chosen to clean it up or oversee the housekeeping from afar. He has chosen to step right in the middle of it. So what about faith? This state of affairs makes faith vastly more complicated. Fire from heaven would be so much easier. But it also makes our relationship with our Maker vastly more intimate. We are, for better or worse, wed to one another.

O Eve of All Saints. Greetings and blessings.

© 2010 Andy Gay