Sermons
Sunday 9th November 2014, 3 before Advent, evening
Judges 7:2-22
by Revd Chris Palmer
There’s an old Lenten hymn, somewhat beloved by my training incumbent I remember, which starts like this:
Christian, dost thou see them one the holy ground,
how the troops of Midian prowl and prowl around?
Christian, up and smite them, counting gain but loss;
Smite them by the merit of the Holy Cross.
I can’t say it’s ever really appealed to me. But recruiting the Midianites from our first reading as a metaphor for sin, the flesh, and the devil is interesting. Or rather useful, because it lets us take a story of rather dubious interest – part of the discourse on Israel conquering the land – and make something of it.
And there are two motifs in the story that are found in other Old Testament stories too. The first is the motif of God reducing the strength of Israel’s army, so that it’s clear the victory is God’s work and not a human achievement. I could preach a whole sermon around that theme. It’s one of my favourites.
But I’m intrigued by the other motif, which is of Gideon making a secret recce into the enemy camp, to investigate their strength, to know their vulnerabilities, to discover the value of conquest. You remember, Joshua made a similar recce when he visited Rahab’s house. Let me remind you what happened to Gideon.
“When Gideon arrived, there was a man telling a dream to his comrade; and he said, ‘I had a dream, and in it a cake of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian, and came to the tent, and struck it so that it fell; it turned upside down, and the tent collapsed.’ And his comrade answered, ‘This is no other than the sword of Gideon son of Joash, a man of Israel; into his hand God has given Midian and all the army.’” [Judges 7.13-14]
Gideon is able to eavesdrop on the story his enemies are telling. And he discovers they are telling the story of their own defeat. They’ve been sent a message – a warning that they will be routed. And this intelligence, this spiritual insight as it were, delights Gideon’s heart. God turns the fear Gideon feels into joy. God turns his paralysis into action. God turns his disbelief into faith.
When we take the story as a metaphor for the spiritual life, and the Midianites as a metaphor for sin, the flesh, and the devil, this is like an insight into the mindset of the forces that woo us away from following God. There has been something of a tradition in the Christian church to describe the tactics and mind of the devil when tempting us. And even if you’re one of those people who believes that the devil itself is a metaphor for the persuasive temptations we face, it is still quite instructive.
The most colourful and intelligent modern example of this is C S Lewis’s Screwtape letters. There the senior devil writes to his nephew, giving advice on how to tempt his charge away from the things of God. As the book goes on, the simple temptations don’t work, and more complex temptation is needed, the tempter disguising himself as an angel of light in order to lure the disciple away from the way of God subtly.
Interestingly, the book was written during World War Two, and the war features in the book – the threat and fears of war becoming temptations the devils use. But all to no avail. The disciple remains true to God and is killed in a bomb attack and taken to the joy of heaven. And the last chapter has Screwtape in vengeful mood telling his nephew that he will be consumed for his failure. But even in failure, Screwtape can’t quite believe in defeat: ‘All that sustains me is the conviction that our Realism, our rejection of all silly nonsense and claptrap, must win in the end.’
Of course Screwtape is the purveyor of ‘nonsense and claptrap’, not its resister. But he’s so delusional that he can’t recognise his own defeat.
But I’m not sure that’s right. I suspect that the story of Gideon and the Midianites is nearer the truth: to the extent the devil is a conscious being at all, his defeat is seared into his being. The cross and resurrection of Jesus fill eternity with the announcement and knowledge of God’s defeat of all that alienates us from God, however we name it: Sin, Satan, Alienation, Hopelessness, Temptation, Death, Despair, the Flesh, Rebellion, Enmity. And they know it. The problem so often is that we don’t know it.
Nearly every temptation is postulated on the suggestion that there is some small victory in the destructive path. That life will somehow be improved by taking the path of wrongdoing, contrary to all wisdom, to all experience, to all sense of God’s voice.
Sin is capitulation to the ultimate lie that we are in control. If we steal this thing, indulge in this deceit, commit this infidelity, avoid this responsibility we will be better off, more powerful, more pleasured. But these are fleeting realities. The deeper reality is that despair, bitterness, distrust, and hostility grow.
If only we could live out of the knowledge that ‘God has delivered Midian and the whole army into our hands’, we would be the more powerful.
If C S Lewis is the most colourful description of the workings of temptation, almost certainly the descriptions of S Ignatius of Loyola about the work of the good and bad spirits is the best formulated and subtle description of the way the devil works in the western spiritual tradition.
Like C S Lewis, Ignatius recognises that the tempter is sometimes unsuccessful with ordinary temptations and must disguise himself as an ‘angel of light’. But his greatest insight was that temptation works utterly differently in different spiritual condition.
Ignatius names these different traditions Consolation and Desolation. Consolation means the times we feel in love with God and are filled with his hope and joy. It can also express itself in tears either in sorrow for our sins or out of compassion for Christ’s suffering. [Rules for Discernment of Spirits, First Week, Rule 3] Desolation, by contrast, is everything that tempts us away from God: disquiet, doubts, lack of hope, being tepid, being drawn to base things. [Rule 4]
They are the conditions we see in the bible reading between Gideon before he’s made his reconnaissance into enemy territory (desolation) and afterwards (consolation). He moves from fear to joy, from paralysis to action, from disbelief to faith – from desolation to consolation.
Now, says Ignatius, in times of desolation it is fundamentally the bad spirit that advises, whereas when we are consoled it is the Holy Spirit. [Rule 5]. So in times of desolation what seems to be common sense is probably not good sense at all – but rather a temptation away from God. If we start on this path, our inclination will be towards apparent pleasures from greed or lust, and God’s Holy Spirit will rather prick our conscience and disquiet us to bring us back to the right path. [Rule 1]
By contrast in times of consolation, it is the Holy Spirit that advises. The Holy Spirit seems naturally to lead us towards God, and what feels natural and right can be trusted. If we continue on this path, then the Holy Spirit encourages us towards greater and greater love of God, and the bad spirit will discourage and disquiet us, seeking to turn us away from discipleship with false reasoning. [Rule 2]
In short we could put it like this:
In times of desolation the bad spirit encourages (to love of worthless things) and the good spirit discourages us from this.
In times of consolation the good spirit encourages us (to love of God) and the bad spirit discourages us from this
Therefore, says Ignatius, we need to be especially careful how we act in times of desolation. First, it’s a time to stick with the spiritual habits we’ve decided on when we felt close to God [Rule 5]. And it’s a time to resist temptation by choosing more prayer when we desire to do less; more service when we are tempted to less and so on [Rule 6]. And it’s time for patience – because in time God will lead us back to feeling his love [Rule 8]. In other words, desolation is a time for drawing strength from the times of consolation, from the moment we recognised that the enemy really is defeated [see Rule 10].
And this is the most hopeful thing: because this means that moments of desolation and temptations can be moments that turn us towards God. The devils greatest strength is in fact his moment of weakness. Exactly what Gideon discovered! Ignatius says that our weakest point is the point where the enemy attacks [Rule 14]. But by the grace of God, our weakness can become the means of triumph.
