pawn

Pul the king of Assyria came against the land, and Menahem gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that he might help him to confirm his hold on the royal power…2 Kings 15:19

“Which one is the possessor of heaven and earth: He who has a thousand houses, or he who, with no house to call his own, has ten at which his knock arouses instant jubilation?” George MacDonald

Jeroboam II reigns for forty-one years and then dies, his son Zechariah reigning in his place for six months. Then he is murdered by Shallum, who now reigns for two months before being offed by Menahem – who then goes on a rampage in Tipshah because the region wouldn’t acquiese to his rule, upping the ante of cold inhumanity by ripping up the women with child. Menahem pays dearly to secure his hold on power by tribute delivered to the king of Assyria – but ultimately death can’t be so easily bought off and he dies after a reign of ten years. Menahem’s would-be dynasty comes to an abrupt end when his son Pekahiah is then eliminated after only two years on the throne by Pekah, son of Remaliah – another man with big dreams. He makes his dreams of power stretch for twenty years before being struck down by a conspiracy driven by Hoshea. And when Hoshea makes his own power play by betting with Egypt against Assyria, he loses – as does all Israel as the northern kingdom falls into oblivion in the shadows of Assyrian captivity.

Exchange the names with those of any language or culture or time or place – the story is the same. It’s always the same in our kingdoms, isn’t it? An endless quest for power and control, seeking to direct events and using people like consumables to achieve our ends, to build a dynasty, maintain a legacy – all for the greater good, of course. Some are generous in how they do it, others brutal. But in the end, despite whatever good intentions or malicious will all the kingdoms we build ultimately collapse under the weight of our own fallen humanity.

Made me think of one of the few psalms to be essentially repeated twice in that divine hymnal:

God sticks his head out of heaven.
He looks around.
He's looking for someone not stupid—
   one man, even, God-expectant,
      just one God-ready woman.


He comes up empty. A string
   of zeros. Useless, unshepherded
Sheep, taking turns pretending
   to be Shepherd.
The ninety and nine
   follow their fellow.

Don't they know anything,
   all these impostors?
Don't they know
   they can't get away with this—
Treating people like a fast-food meal
   over which they're too busy to pray?


Night is coming for them, and nightmares,
   for God takes the side of victims.
Do you think you can mess
   with the dreams of the poor?
You can't, for God
   makes their dreams come true.

“Treating people like a fast-food meal over which they’re too busy to pray.” People as commodity, as resource or filler or fodder, taking a seat in our kingdom chair as we, like Sweeney, send them down the chute to be part of tomorrow’s menu. These kings consume each other as readily as their culture consumed the poor “and panted after the dust on their head, selling the needy for silver, the homeless for a pair of shoes.” And all of this for what? For a kingdom and reign and rule and control that was but a breath, and of which we can only read in an ancient tome as we stumble over the pronunciation of their names.

And standing apart is the son of man who, rather, emptied himself to “make the dreams of the poor come true.” Consumed rather than consuming. Moved about as a pawn himself by the powerbrokers of his day from high priest home to religious council to praetorium to flogging to skull hill. The ultimate object of contempt moving along his via dolorosa. “It is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish.” A small price to pay for preserving their kingdom…for another few decades, anyway – for like everything else we build it too surrendered to its own inevitable demise.

While the contrary kingdom, moved itself as a pawn and launched from skull hill, grows to a mountain that fills the whole earth. A mountain in which every one is valued, where none are used and discarded, where there are no kingdoms to build or control to maintain, but only life to enjoy, meaning to explore, beauty to realize, and wonder to discover in each other’s faces.

Is there really such a place?

Must we simply surrender to using and being used as so many ancient – and very much dead – kings?

Joktheel

He struck down ten thousand Edomites in the Valley of Salt and took Sela by storm, and called it Joktheel, which is its name to this day. 2 Kings 14:7 ESV


Seizing the rock city of Petra in Edom by storm was no small feat for a king.

I remember at least seeing the narrow passageway leading to the Rock city in that third Indiana Jones flick (one day, maybe, I’ll go there myself…but not holding my breath). Amaziah seems to have been right proud of his accomplishment. Calling it Joktheel (“The Lord Subdues”) he slathers his deed with God’s name – and who knows, maybe this is what God wanted him to do and what he did through him. But the pride that surfaces in the rest of his story makes me wonder if this wasn’t more about him that God.

Just gets me to thinking about our own “Joktheel” monuments and achievements – all those trophies we tend to collect with God’s name on them, but about which he may well be saying, “Please, don’t bring me into this!”

Reminds me of a picture I saw today:

So in one little, obscure name that I just noticed and researched for the first time in my recollection comes a pointed and personal reminder to be wary of making pronouncements of what God just did through me.

And btw, the city isn’t called Joktheel anymore.

and God ran

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him.
His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. Luke 15, MSG

And God ran.

I’ve always been blessed by the popular song about the prodigal son with that refrain – “and God ran.”

The scandalizing picture of the dignified father running with his robe flapping wildly in the wind, his heart pounding, tears streaming down his face. What did the son do? Did he stop in his tracks unsure whether he was going to be tackled or embraced? Did he start running towards him? Did he want to turn on his heel and start running away – again? Doesn’t seem to have mattered to the father one way or another. He ran to and embraced his wayward son.

It’s a picture I can’t escape as I read this story in Kings.

The northern kingdom was wayward from start to finish – and there’s plenty of fire and brimstone, blood and mayhem along a journey that ultimately leads to captivity and final destruction. But what strikes me increasingly as I walk through these pages is God’s relentless pursuit of his wayward northern sons.

Ahab is described as one who sold himself to do evil, as the worst of the worst. Despicable me. Yet amidst the pronouncements of judgments, God continues sending prophets to warn him and even to guide him in his strategies and campaigns. And when God pronounces the final doom of his entire household after the murder of Naboth and the seizure of his vineyard, Ahab mourns and walks about in sackcloth…and God takes notice. God more than takes notice, he actually delays the punishment.

I grew up hearing preachers quoting the blind man in John 9 – “now we know that God does not hear sinners” – as gospel fact. But that simply doesn’t square with his dealings with Ahab – or the rest of us, for that matter.

Then there’s the Jehoahaz story in 2 Kings 13. “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat” and so “the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he gave them continually into the hand of Hazael king of Syria.” Typical judges type scenario setting up. And then, “Then Jehoahaz sought the favor of the LORD, and the LORD listened to him, for he saw the oppression of Israel, how the king of Syria oppressed them.” No indication that Jeroboam’s calf-idols were removed, that the worship at the shrines had stopped, the altars destroyed (it would be a future southern king that would do that). And yet God listens. He hears Jehoahaz when he asks for God’s favor and mercy. And God moves not because he sees efforts at reform in his northern sons, but because he sees the heavy, oppressing hand of Syria upon them. And he sends them a savior – a “Jesus,” a “Joshua,” one who saves. And “nevertheless, they did not depart from the sins of the house of Jeroboam, which he made Israel to sin, but walked in them; and the Asherah also remained in Samaria.”

Yes, God visits the northern kingdom with wrath, just read the rest of the story. But he keeps running after them, running to them at any sign of turning, running to them in endless attempts to inspire a turning. He runs to them in the faces of Elijah and Elisha, the faces of Jonah and Amos and Hosea, and of a host of other and unnamed prophets and saviors.

For nearly two hundred years.

Two hundred years…

How heavily and how naturally we lean into judgment after the barest, most surface exposure to the hearts of others – a leaning often derived from these very stories. And in so doing we remain oblivious to the persistent tipping of the divine hand on these very pages; a hand leaning heavily into a compassion and mercy that runs to wayward sons rather than skewering them on the third strike; a tipping of the divine hand that point us to the full revelation of that hand, pierced and bleeding, that leaves the indelible, blood-smeared final revelation that “mercy triumphs (boasts loudly over, taunts, jumps up and down laughing) over judgment.”

grace capacity

Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the LORD, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.” So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing. She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.” (2 Kings 4:1-7 ESV)

Contemplating the widow and Elisha and all those jars...

A simple but profound (for me) realization, really.

God’s supply of oil is infinite. What was poured out was only limited by the number and capacity of the containers. And so the widow was told to bring “not a few.” When the limited capacity of the containers was reached, the flow of oil stopped. Makes me wonder just how much fine wine Jesus would have made if he had more than those six stone jars (oh that there had been seven!).

Takes me to Paul’s statement in Romans, which I’ll give here twice, first in the ESV:

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now in the Message:

Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. God’s grace is only limited by our capacity to contain it. How sad when we realize with a sigh and many tears that, alas, after all, we only have six clay pots and there are no more. Too few! The oil has stopped, the wine expended.

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn't, and doesn't, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it's sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that's the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. God’s grace is only limited by our capacity to contain it. How sad when we realize with a sigh and many tears that, alas, after all, we only have six clay pots and there are no more. Too few! The oil has stopped, the wine expended.

Oh for just one more jar…

the way out of this maze of myself

I've been reading Story by Steven James - an author/poet who works his way through the biblical Story in his own poetic and storytelling way. Here's an excerpt that seems fitting as we proceed through the assorted kings and dynasties of 1 and 2 Kings...

deep in the center of dawn
the echo returns.
floating on the edge of your words
i hear hope circling around my heart
    "soon, soon, the savior will arrive.
     soon, soon, the king will come."
when will you arrive and show me
the way out of this maze
of myself? i'm feeling more and more lost
every moment i'm here.


splintered.

I heard a story about a king whose brother tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him. As punishment, the king imprisoned his brother in a room with a window facing the sea. The room had a normal-sized door that a normal-sized person could walk through. They must have built the room around the guy, though, because the king's brother wasn't normal-sized at all - he was way overweight.

So all he had to do to be free was lose enough weight to fit through the door. But every day the king's servants brought platters of fine food to him. They set the food in the window. That was his sentence - overcome his addiction or die in that cell.

And he died in that cell.

Just as the king knew he would.

And the person in the story I can identify with most is that imprisoned brother, staring at the gulls and the open water, eating another mouthful of rich food and telling himself that tomorrow he'll deal with his problem and walk out the door. Yeah, he'll start tomorrow. Or someday. Whichever comes first.

But neither did.