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Saved by an Ass
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 11, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Numbers 22: 22-38 Matthew 11:16-25
One Sunday morning the preacher was sermonizing on Balaam and his ass. He say Balaam this and Balaam that and his ass go this way and that way and…when the sermonizing was over…preacher stood at the door shaking hands, saying, “Come again next week, Brother; mighty fine to see you today, Sister.” Folk tell him, “Sure liked your sermon this morning, Reverend,” and all that until one man name of Jack Hawkins come along. This man been sitting all through the service looking sour about the whole thing. He tell the preacher, “Reverend, it was a powerful sermon you preach today, except for one word.” “What word you talking about brother?” “What I’m talking about, Reverend,” Jack Hawkins tell him, “it’s that word ass you been saying in your sermon. It surely surprise me to hear you saying it from the pulpit in the House of God.’ Preacher put his hand on Jack Hawkins’ shoulder. “Uncle Jack,” he tell him, “don’t think no more about it. That word don’t mean what you think it mean.” “Don’t it?” Jack say. “I am mighty glad to hear it. But what can it mean except what it mean?” “In the Good Book,” preacher tell him, “there is quite a few words that have a different sense. When the Good Book says ass, in particular when it speak of Balaam’s ass, it don’t mean what you got on your mind. What it really mean is a jack mule like the one you do your plowing with…You get the point?…You got to know the language of the Good Book.”… Well, about three-four weeks later, something happened on Jack Hawkins’ place. His jack mule took sick and died. Jack …don’t have any idea where he was going to bury that mule ’til his wife tell him, “Jack, bury it at the fence out by the road.” So he take his shovel and went out to the fence and begin to dig. Just then the preacher come riding along in his gig. When he see Jack digging there he stop, say, “Morning, Brother, ain’t it a mighty fine day for doing fine work?” “It’s a fact, Reverend.” “Ain’t seen you in church for a couple a weeks….Glad to see you all right…It’s a blessing to see you working so,” preacher said. “…What you digging then, a post hole?” “Post hole?” Jack Hawkins say, scratching his head. “No Reverend, this ain’t no post hole. Leastwise that ain’t what the Good Book call it.” (Treasury of African-American Folklore, Harold Courlander) “Don’t mean what you think it mean,” said the preacher to Jack Hawkins; “But what can it mean except what it mean?” said Jack Hawkins to the preacher. And with that, this African American folk tale dares us to ask after the meaning of the folk tale before us today in the Book of Numbers, the tale of Balaam and his ass. “It means” says Princeton Old Testament Professor Jacqueline Lapsley of this story “shedding the human tendency to interpret in service to our own interests….” It means seeking and speaking the truth that offends us even as it saves us. Contrary to this truth, it seems that way back in biblical times there were prophets who made it their business to tell the king what the king wanted to hear. Hard to imagine such people in the halls of power today! Balaam was just such a prophet. He came on the scene when Israel entered the land of Moab--where the Jordan River and the Jabbok meet--a stone’s throw away from Jericho and the Promised Land. You surely can understand how, when the Moabite King Balak saw what the Israelites had done to the Amorites and so began to anticipate the same swollen numbers of Israelites gathering on his own border, the King became obsessed with the security of his land. Actually not only was the king fearful, but all of Moab with him “was overcome with fear of the people of Israel.” Clearly their ill-equipped army was no match for a nation that had God on their side, a detail that leaves us confused about which side of this story to claim as our own! More frightened than confused, King Balak found himself suddenly in the market for a prophet, for an advisor who could see what the nation was up against and, after consulting the gods, would assure the King of victory in the impending war. “The practice was common in the ancient Near East,” notes Old Testament professor Dennis Olson. “Kings often hired royal prophets to advise them, and these messengers of the divine word were under pressure to give the king what he wanted to hear [lest they] lose their financial support or their lives.” In this regard, Balaam was certainly the man for Balak’s job! He was a consummate professional with little conscience in the matter, having made a living for years as a royal prophet. Mentioned elsewhere in the Bible, albeit in an unflattering light given how the Book of Numbers ends (evidently Balaam was found later to have given Israel bad advice, making the Israelites act treacherously), Balaam’s name was also unearthed about fifty years ago at an excavation in the east Jordan Valley where an Arab worker found a lengthy inscription dated to the late 8th or early 7th century. The first line of the inscription about a seer who had night visions from the gods read: “The story of Balaam son of Beor, who was a seer of the gods.” In haste, leaders from Moab are sent out with cash in hand to hire the man whose curse of the Israelites appeared to be the only thing standing between their survival and the Israelites’ immanent attack. When the men arrive at Balaam’s door, he invites them to spend the night while he turns in to consult omens (in his dreams) from the usual gods. But to the surprise of those who first told the tale, this non-Israelite finds himself in the presence of the living God. “You shall not curse but bless the Israelites,” God commands. Caught between royal messengers and the Rock of Ages, Balaam declines the King’s fee, announcing his intention to obey God. Still believing that anyone can be bought for a price, the king next sends a group of higher officials back to Balaam with a blank check. Says Balaam this time, “Even the King’s house of silver and gold would not change my mind,” though many have heard Balaam’s protest as a bid to up the ante, as a ploy for an even higher fee. Now God again speaks and curiously tells Balaam to go with the messengers but to go as God’s prophet rather than the King’s. Balaam obediently gets up in the morning, saddles his ass and sets out. God’s anger in response is instantaneous. Unwilling to trust in the word of a prophet for profit’s sake, we can only suppose God is angry in anticipation of being double-crossed. Here, then, is where we join the story this morning, on the way to the capital, at a turn in the road, as Balaam is about to be saved by a talking ass. Put more delicately in the latest revised translation, Balaam’s donkey is one of two talking animals in the whole of Scripture. The other, you will recall, is the serpent. Both creatures manage, by their interpretation of God’s will, to open the eyes of the human beings with whom they speak. At stake in these conversations is the truth of God each character is thereby led to see. “In the garden story,” writes Old Testament scholar George Savran, “the serpent and the woman engage in a dialogue of interpretation about the correct meaning of the divine prohibition.” Deliberately misquoting God’s command, the snake confuses the woman, setting the stage for our fall from grace. The truth, in other words, appears to be convenient. By contrast, the ass’s action and speech lead Balaam to hear God’s truth and see God’s will in the nick of time. Says the angel to Balaam, “If the donkey had not turned away from me, surely just now I would have killed you and let it live.” In the end, the snake’s self-serving interpretation of God’s word leads to death while the ass sees God and, by his refusal to speak the word Balaam wants to hear, saves the seer’s life. We are beginning to understand the difference honest interpretation makes! Yet even after his life has been spared, Balaam still cannot speak truth to power. Rather he continues to hold out for an interpretation of God’s word that might please God and, in the same breath, profit his own coffers. Not until, in a final effort to get Balaam to say what he wants to hear, the king says “I was going to reward you richly but Yahweh has denied you the reward,” does Balaam make it clear he is no longer for sale. What in the world could this folk tale have to do with our lives lived in response to God’s Word? Moses’ plea a few chapters earlier comes to mind: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” That is to say, you and I inhabit this time and place as people addressed by God. Granting that God’s word is never direct, is always mediated--through a community of faith, through the text under which we have chosen to live, and supremely is mediated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ--our unbearable responsibility is to discern God’s will for our common lives. Our abiding temptation, of course, is to interpret even and especially the gospel in the service of our own interests. You could say we are a religious version of Ahmad Chalibi: royal prophets for our times—some paid, some volunteer--who say what we know those in power want to hear, who see only what will benefit our own ends, who believe what suits our fancy as well as our pocketbooks, our predilections, our prejudices, our preconceived notions of God’s will and way. We have believed the serpent who convinced us in the beginning that to know with certainty good from evil would be to be like God; we have beaten and so defeated, no matter the side of the aisle or ocean or pulpit they occupy, all who refuse to carry us any further down the “slippery slope” that is (literally translated) the path taken by royal prophets. Our hope, in this matter as in all others, is Jesus Christ, the Word-made-flesh in whose light we may hear God’s Word not as we want but as God wills. The rub, of course, is that Jesus has certainly been read to serve the interests of power and privilege, though God knows he finally will not be had for the price of the church’s survival or the nation’s security or a generation’s foolish prattle. Woe to you, he begins to say of us…to say of us! Can you imagine? And suddenly, in Jack Hawkins’ sense of the word, we realize we are having to do with a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. “Don’t mean what you think it mean,” said the preacher to Jack Hawkins; “But what can it mean except what it mean?” said Jack Hawkins to the preacher. “It means shedding the human tendency to interpret in service to our own interests….” It means seeking and speaking the truth that offends us even as it saves us. It means following him who will neither turn in the direction we want him to turn, nor speak the word we have paid good money to hear, because he has come to save more than the hind part of our anatomy: he has come to save us from life without him. “Thank you,” he prays to the God whose eternal life he quit lest the snake have the final word with us. “Thank you because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants”: have revealed them, in the meaning of the Good Book, to an ass. May we be given grace enough to see and believe! Thanks be to God! |