"The Sinister God"
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Reading: Judges 3:12-30
We’re in a series this summer on the book of Judges. It’s the time between Joshua leading the people into the promised land and the nation’s first king. It is a grim time, as the people run amok. The book ends on this sad note: “all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” Judges is an anatomy book of moral chaos. Here’s the pattern to the story: the people misbehave, God raises up their enemies, the people repent, God sends a judge to make things right, the judge dies, and things are worse than ever. Call it “the judges cycle.” And today it repeats with some exquisite variations.
First, it’s the Lord who raises up the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Amalekites against Israel. Sobering that it’s God who fights against Israel here: “the Lord strengthened King Eglon of Moab against Israel, because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (3:13). The God of Israel is not above disciplining his people with foreign nations. And he is not, as is sometimes claimed, a tribal deity. He is Lord over the whole earth, and though he has a favourite, his elect people Israel, when we misbehave God rallies against us.
We cry out—uncle!--and God relents and sends an anointed leader to bring us back to faithfulness and favor. Ehud, a left-handed man. The text actually says that he is lame in his right hand. He is disabled, we would say. He is also clever, crafty, sinister. He makes a blade and wears it on his right thigh. That is, he wears it wrong, backwards, from how real warriors wear their weapons. The Moabites may not have even thought to check his right thigh. Proper warriors are right-handed, check their left leg from which they draw their visible swords. Ehud’s prison shank is under his clothes on his right and no one thinks to check.
In JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga, Gandalf thinks out loud about the fellowship’s strategy against mighty Sauron
Let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, andweighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it.
Who would ever destroy their access to all power there is? And who would value other things over power—things like friendship, or courage? Only good hobbits. Ehud’s folly is his cloak in Judges. Disabled as we judge these things, unarmed as his opponents see things, he approaches the occupying king. Claims to have a message from God. All the king’s courtiers are dismissed. How could this lame Israelite do any harm?
There’s a sort of trope of the fat, lazy, indigent king. David himself would become something of this later in Israel’s story. Of the stories I grew up with Star Wars shows this best I think—Jabba the Hut, disgusting glob of a creature. For more grownup fare, a young Vito Corleone takes his vengeance against Don Ciccio in Sicily, a rival family boss A teacher of mine often takes a prophetic stance against his and my home of origin, the USA: money makes you stupid, he says, and in America, we have a lot of money. Oof. Fat King Eglon is not just making poor dietary and exercise choices. He’s also grown fat on the tribute Israel brings. He’s an occupying foreign king living off the fat of the land that is meant to feed God’s people alone.
So Ehud is alone in the presence of the fat enemy king. And remember he is left-handed, sinistre, if you prefer your descriptors a francais. It is often the case that left-handed people are looked down on, corrected. My wife’s best friend when they were little girls told her she couldn’t be left-handed, nobody was, so Jaylynn corrected for it. She still brushes her teeth and swings a bat left-handed. In sports today it can be a real advantage to be left-handed—athletes are so good that the micro-seconds needed to adjust to an opponent coming from the “wrong” direction are all they need. In another franchise, Rocky Balboa is a southpaw—all the blows come from the wrong direction, helps him out. The bible has nothing ill to say about left-handers, in fact the tribe of Benjamin seems to have been full of southpaws. And it’s helped Ehud conceal a weapon into the foreign king’s presence.
One of the ways the church has imagined Jesus’ saving work for us is that he tricks the devil. That ancient adversary took advantage of our ancestors Adam and Eve, and imprisoned all their descendants. Until Jesus comes. Now, the devil is not any sort of genius. In our popular culture evil is always cool, sexy, and smart. Not so in the bible. Evil is sort of stupid actually, barely sentient, and not at all cool. The devil is like a great sea monster, a beast of prey, Adam and Eve in its jaws. It sees Jesus, and thinks, hm, looks even better. So it lets Adam and Eve go, and chomps down on Jesus. But it doesn’t realize Jesus is actually God. Smashing its great jaws on Jesus just breaks his teeth, destroys his power. And like a great sea catch the devil is now strung up in the boat, thrashing about. Adam and Eve have gone free. The devil is still dangerous, mind you, as a shark thrashing in a small boat would be. But he is dying. Kind of a dramatic way to look at Christ’s work, isn’t it?
Let’s see how our Israelite forebears tell the story of how to deal with evil. Ehud is in the palace of the hated foreign king. He gets the man to come close for a secret word of news from God. And he unsheathes the weapon from his right thigh. Remember the king wouldn’t even think to look for danger from that direction. And he plunges that prison shank right into Eglon’s fat. So deep the whole sword goes through, hilt and all, and the fat closes over the wound. The dirt comes out. And the enemy king falls with a great crash.
Do you know why they drive on the left side of the road in commonwealth countries? I know that’s just what you were wondering about as I told the story of King Eglon’s demise. In the middle ages, if you’re walking on the left side of a path, or riding a horse over there, you can draw a sword with your right hand and protect yourself from someone coming the other way. I know in Canada we drive on the right, but remember we’re often confused over whether we’re more American or British. Funny how habits around sword carrying still affect our lives today.
And poor King Eglon did not expect a sword to come from someone’s left hand, to come at him from his right. And the dirt comes out. These stories are not really PG13. That dirt is precisely what you guessed it—Eglon’s bowels are pierced. This is important in the telling of the story too—as Ehud escapes, Eglon’s men coming running in, and they smell a terrible smell. And they figure, oh, the king is relieving himself. And they wait. This gives Ehud time to get away. This is how a storytelling people makes fun of its adversaries. The foreign king was so fat the sword went all the way in and he grew a second anus. And our judge got away scott free, and our people conquered our oppressors. Farewell King Eglon, so fat you’ve need exit holes in the front and back.
This story celebrates what we might call the trickster tradition in Israel. Like Jacob our ancestor, swindling his oafish big brother Esau out of his birthright for a bowl of soup. Or the Hebrew midwives, charged by Pharaoh to kill all the Israelite babies. They won’t do it—midwives deal life, not death. Why not? Pharoah demands to know. The Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, they say. Hebrew women are strong, before we even get there, they’ve given birth! The implication is that Egyptian women are weak and pitiful, crying out in need and unable to help themselves. The Hebrew midwives not only stop a potential genocide, they also mock their oppressors’ women in the process. When the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon hid 10,000 Jewish kids from the Nazis, they would call the children “Old Testaments.” Nazi goons would demand to know if there were Jews in a house. Jews? No, just these Old Testaments. Would the soldiers like some bibles? They’d stomp off. A village of 5000 French folks saved twice their number in Jewish kids. Not too bad eh? Folly was their cloak. The devil might have expected the Lord to come in military might, on a charger with an army. Instead the Lord comes as a baby, with a bunch of loser disciples, acclaimed by children, strung up on a cross. What danger could that be? Uh, all the danger there is. Watch out.
There was a time, perhaps in the Victorian era, when religion was reduced to moral how-to’s. There was even a version of the famous love chapter 1st Corinthians 13 that read this way: “if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but am not a gentleman, I am nothing.” Faith reduced to making little boys gentlemen. Faith became little more than minding manners, tucking your shirt in, not saying naughty words. But there is nothing to imitate in this story. Please, if you’re visiting a foreign oppressive king, don’t shank him in the belly with a homemade blade, ok? It’s bad form. Don’t think you needed a bible story to enlighten you on that potential scenario. So what is the point? Why do we have stories like this?
I was at a conference of ministers and rabbis last week looking to combat anti-Semitism in our city. It’s hard for us gentiles to remember that our Jewish neighbours feel embattled—one synagogue represented has been vandalized 9 times. 9. With recent deadly attacks in Washington DC, Colorado and elsewhere, our Jewish friends ask themselves whether they can wear a kippah or Star of David in public. This is a scandal. The rabbi who responded to my paper said something that shocked me. He said for anti-semitism to be defeated in this country we need a return to Christianity. Come again? Well, he said, with churches withering and closing that gives way to moral chaos. Into that chaos step anti-semites who use hate to gain power. So for Canada to be safe for Jews, he wants the church back with strength. Ok, I asked, when will we see a Jewish Institute for Strengthening Christianity? That’s the kind of crafty way God works, the tricksy way Jesus gets his way in the world. A rabbi challenges us: hey, for Canada to be Canada, we need you Christians to be bolder about your faith in public in the world. Now get busy!
There was a commencement address at a top flight American university some years back. The then-highest ranking civic official on the African continent addressed the graduates and their families. She was Tanzania’s ambassador to the UN I believe. And she thanked the Maryknoll sisters for the education she got in her village. Without those Catholic nuns, she said, she would never have left the village or represented her country on the world stage. Polite clapping. But then things got . . . a little testy. I see that now in the west you don’t care about educating little African girls. Because you’re not sending missionaries anymore. If you want talented girls to be able to lead in their villages or on the world stage you’ve got to start sending missionaries again. Stunned silence. No clapping this time. I find this again and again—that we in the post-Christian west are ashamed of our mission history. But those who received those missionaries, who are now models for Christian faith worldwide, are not ashamed. They’re glad God worked through people as imperfect as Europeans and North Americans. Sure, that was all intertwined with colonialism and other sins, but God used it for good. Nelson Mandela used to say the world would have never heard his name without the Methodist missionaries who ran the school in his village. That’s tricksy God. Using the children of mission schools to shame us back into faithfulness.
Happy Canada Day everyone. It’s good to be proud of our country—of our health care, of our vast geography, of our diversity, the works. I’m prouder of my Canadian passport than nearly anything else I own. I love that Ontario was the first province in the British empire to be anti-slavery from our founding. Lieutenant governor Simcoe is still standing tall in a day of cancellation. Saw this extraordinary photo recently of a Canadian services soldier in the Korean War. Bless him and those who serve today. Also read recently of a flying fort in the Second World War that took ten or twelve direct hits. Inside one of the shells was a note from a Czech slave worker, put to making munitions by the Nazis: “this is the only thing we can do for you now.” He’d sabotaged the shell, made it a dummy, fighting against his oppressors from within. A glimpse of God in this trickster tradition, the sinister One who works unfairly to free people.
A teacher of mine was especially close to church leaders in South Sudan, had taught some of their bishops, wanted to help them with their own seminary in Juba. She said to me once, “I am unscrupulous in working to help my friends.” Unscrupulous—I won’t play nice or polite. I’ll bend the rules to help those who need it. A glimpse of God there. The sort of God you want on your side in a bar fight.
For God to be for us, truly for us, it helps to know God won’t play fair to get to us. Think of it—we’re in a prison we can’t escape from. And God won’t rest or pay fair until God has redeemed us. God is the kind of friend you want on your side in a street brawl. I mean, God wrote the rules in the first place. God can bend them if God wants—to get to his most beloved creature. You. In Tim Keller’s words,
God is showing the world that his salvation will not come in a Hollywood way at all. It will come from an outsider born in a manger, through weakness, not what the world calls strength, through defeat, not what the world calls victory, through folly not what the world calls wisdom. We are not to make the mistake Eglon did as he looked at God’s chosen deliverer, and ‘esteem him not’ (Is 53:3) we look at Christ and see ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24).
When the devil was fat and happy with his conquest of humanity, God didn’t send a champion to fight for us, a Goliath to kick in the doors. God sent what looked like a weakling—an enemy loving, child-blessing rabbi. Ok, let’s have the Romans take care of this guy. But his death meant the undoing of death for the world, the emptying of hell and the raiding of evil. The instruments meant to terrify—abandonment, arrest, imprisonment, torture, mock trial, and execution—instead brought life to us and to all. And God taunts evil: what are you going to crucify my Son? Ok, I’ll use that to bring life to the world. What else you got, you fat smelly evil king? There is nothing evil can do that God can’t turn around to make into life and salvation for you and others.
So now I wonder. That fat and happy enemy king gloating at you. Sure you’re under his thumb. Ok. How is God going to undo that one? End his reign and bring life? The end of our story says Israel had peace after Eglon for 80 years—for generations. I can’t wait to see how our unscrupulous sinister God is going to bring life in your midst next.