Tearing Down the Walls by Rev. Sarah Buteux

“The walls of Jericho” meant the falsities that defended evils.

Secrets of Heaven (AC) 8815

I’d like you all to relax, open your minds, and imagine something with me for a moment. Now, this may be a stretch, but I want us to imagine that we are all part of a small, no scratch that, very small—all right let’s be honest, compared to everyone else we’re miniscule—I want us to try and imagine that we are all part of a teeny, tiny, and yet vibrant, extremely vibrant, spiritual community. Do you think you can do that with me? Good, then let’s continue.

A community with its own unique language and rituals and understanding of God, a community with a long and venerable history, a community with so much to offer the world, and yet a community that could easily disappear into the annals of history if we can’t somehow find a way to hold it together and face the seemingly insurmountable challenges ahead of us with absolute courage and unwavering faith—you got it? Are you with me here? Do you feel it? Good.

Then you know exactly how the Israelites felt as they entered the Promised Land. After years of wandering, this tiny little band of chosen people has finally crossed the river Jordan and entered the land of Canaan. And they are ready—ready and willing to receive their divine inheritance and take possession of the land that was promised to their forefather Abraham. Only, there’s a slight problem. People already live there: namely the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and please don’t forget the Jebusites, and, well, these people haven’t gotten the divine eminent domain memo.

So if the Israelites want this land, they’re going to have to take it, and under the leadership of Joshua, this is precisely what they set out to do. They may be small and scrappy, they may have their own peculiar way of doing things and their own peculiar way of talking about the things that they do, but with God on their side there is no battle they cannot win, no people they cannot conquer, no city they cannot take.

And so the Israelites march right up to the first city, the city of Jericho, the gateway city that stands at the base of the promised land, and set up camp around the great wall. In accordance with the Lord’s instruction, they do not attack, but rather they march.

They march around the city every day for six days. The priests carry their trumpets, the soldiers carry their swords, but no one says a word or makes a sound. Then on the seventh day, the Israelites march around the city seven times, and at the very last moment the priests blow their horns, and the people shout with all their might; the walls of the city come crashing down and Jericho is given like a gift into the hands of the Israelites. It is a complete and utter triumph.

But then something happens, something absolutely, unspeakably horrible.

The people rush forward and put every living being—all the kings soldiers and all the kings men, yes, but also all of the civilians, the men, the women, the little children, and the tiny babies, all of the animals, the oxen and the sheep and the donkeys, the horses, the cats,and the dogs, (people, if there was so much as a hamster in Jericho that day . . .)—every living being, except for one woman and her household, are put to death by the sword.

It is a heartbreaking story, absolutely horrible, and I wish I could say it was an isolated incident within scripture, a bizarre little aberration in an otherwise unsullied narrative of divine love and mercy, but it’s not. There are several such stories in the Bible, not just stories of war, but stories of war wherein God commands the complete and utter destruction of every living being in an enemy’s territory, no matter how young or weak or vulnerable those beings might be.

But do you want to know what is unusual, what the really crazy thing is about this story in particular? People love it. Pastors lift the Battle of Jericho up in their sermons as a story of God’s favor and awesome power. Congregations and choirs sing some great songs about it. And as if that weren’t strange enough, we read it to our kids in Sunday School, in much the same way we read the story of Noah’s ark, as if genocide was the most natural thing in the world.

Yeah. It’s all a little strange when you really start to think about it, isn’t it? Wipe life as we know it off the planet and you have the makings of an epic tragedy, but save just two of every animal and you’ve got all the material you need for the most popular children’s play set of all time. Who knew? But seriously, once you start to look at the finer details of a story like this, it really is disturbing. Scholars and theologians have labored long and hard to try and make sense of this one, and I could tell you a bit about what they say, only I have the strange suspicion that you would all promptly tune out.

We’re Swedenborgians after all, and we already know that there’s a spiritual sense imbued within these letters full of a higher, more personal, and surely more useful meaning. Why slum about in the historical realm when you can soar and play in the celestial one? Why torment one’s self trying to make sense of the literal when one can revel in the spiritual?

Why? Because real people died that day in Jericho. Real mothers lost real babies, real husbands lost real wives, real people lost their homes, their livelihoods, their very lives in the face of an army that thought it was carrying out God’s will. And if we dismiss those people as no more than a means to an end, the literal fodder for a great spiritual interpretation, the only difference between us and Joshua’s soldiers is not one of kind but of degree.

That is, if we look at this story and somehow convince ourselves that our ability to draw a spiritual meaning from this literal historical event somehow makes the event itself okay, then what we are effectively doing is justifying the slaughter. Furthermore, when we jump right to the correspondences and begin playing with spiritual interpretations, we miss the opportunity to question the event itself, to question what it says about God, and what it says about us, to question whether or not Joshua was even right, whether or not the slaughter was necessary.

And I’m afraid that if we miss that opportunity, then our understanding of Swedenborg’s correspondences, however interesting they might be, is bound to become corrupted in the process.

Because, you see, if Joshua was actually wrong on the literal level to cause such destruction, then simply transferring his methodology up the correspondential ladder, if you will, probably won’t yield better or more lasting results for any of us. So let’s take a closer look, first, at how this story is traditionally understood on the literal level, and see how a few well placed questions on that end can add nuance to our standard spiritual understanding of this most troubling text. Are you with me? Wonderful. A little nervous? Me too, but here we go.

Traditionally, on the literal level, the genocide that takes place during the Battle of Jericho is understood as an unfortunate but necessary means to an end. When you are as small and as unique as the Israelites were, when you have so much to protect and so little to work with, then when you strike you must strike hard.

They couldn’t afford to fail, nor could they afford to be compromised, so when they conquered a people they showed no mercy. They wiped out every last person they could find, every last trace of culture or religion that could possibly lead their people astray. Only then, in their minds, could they truly be safe and prosper in the promised land.

And you know, on the one hand I can see their logic; however, there are still some pretty strange inconsistencies in this story that I’d like to point out to you, the first having to do with the promise itself. You’ll remember that a big part of the promise given to Abraham back in Genesis involved the Israelites not just inheriting the land of Canaan but being a—what to the nations? A blessing.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t quite see how killing first and blessing later is a really good strategy for fulfilling this promise. Does that seem a little off to you? Me too. And speaking of killing—and this is my second problem with the story—it’s one thing to kill those who have the potential to kill you—I mean even the poor, little, innocent babies could theoretically grow up to exact revenge someday—but killing all the animals seems like a needless waste to me. How could the animals have corrupted the Israelites I wonder?

Likewise, destroying the city itself with all it’s temples and art and literature seems a good plan if you don’t want the people to get seduced or tainted by falsities, but it’s exceedingly ironic, in my humble opinion, that in their mad dash to purge the city of all corrupting influences, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, that the one person they do save is—anyone remember her name?—Rahab, yes. And what did Rahab do for a living? She was a harlot. Rahab and all the members of her “household” were spared because she had helped the Israelite spies escape, a household that included her father and mother and brothers, I’m sure, but a household that in all likelihood probably included an unusually large number of “sisters” as well, if you catch my drift.

And finally, there is the issue of God’s part in this whole debacle, our God who we understand to be all loving and all wise. I have a really hard time understanding how our God could ever approve of genocide, and, truth be told, I see a number of little signs that indicate that, at least in this story, the all-out slaughter wasn’t really God’s idea at all. For one thing, when God says he will give the city to Joshua, he does so, but he brings down the walls with music rather than warfare. Victory is achieved without one drop of blood being spilt.

For another, although God does command the Israelites in other parts of the Bible to wipe out entire cities, in this particular passage, if you read it closely, he never once tells Joshua to kill all of the living creatures inside of Jericho. God says,

“See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and valiant warriors,”

but it is not God who commands that the Israelites put all of Jericho to death, it is Joshua.

All of which sends me back to reconsider that strange little exchange Joshua engages in with an angel days before the battle even begins. Joshua asks the angel, “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” And the angel says, “No,” which is kind of a strange answer to an “either/or” question. “Rather, I indeed come now as captain of the host of the Lord,” says the angel. That is, “I’m on God’s side, human, not theirs, but not yours either.” Joshua wanted to know if God was on their side, but what he should have been asking each step of the way is not whether God was on their side, but whether or not they were on God’s.

Now, I bring all of these little quirks to your attention because I think it is extremely important for us to question scripture, to have enough respect for the literal sense of the word to wrestle with it and not accept it as simply a text for imitation or as a spring board we can utilize uncritically to reach a more interesting spiritual interpretation.

The Bible isn’t always showing us who we ought to be. Sometimes it is only showing us who we already are. And in those instances, our job is not to meekly accept the charge, but to wrestle with the image before us and, God willing, strain for something higher.

Unfortunately, most of the Swedenborgian literature that deals with this passage in particular fails to question whether or not Joshua was even right. It plows right ahead and concludes that if Joshua dealt with the evils of Jericho in this way, then we ought to deal with the evils in our own lives this way as well. But what if Joshua went overboard?

Now please understand, I’m not calling the correspondences themselves into question, but I’m questioning what we ultimately do with them. I think the correspondences Swedenborg outlines actually stand up very well. In Secrets of Heaven (8815) he explains that the walls of Jericho represent the lies, half truths, and rationalizations we use to justify our own evil actions, and it is clear that those walls really do need to come down if we are going to live our lives to the fullest as God intended.

If we truly want to overcome our evils, then we must, with the help of God, examine the defensive strategies we have built up around them to keep them safe, just as the spies appraised the defenses of Jericho. We need to be patient and obedient to what we know is good even when it doesn’t feel right yet, just as the Israelites did when they walked about the city each day for six days wondering what the heck they were doing. And finally, we need to trust not in our own power, but in the power of God to bring the walls down on our behalf.

These correspondences are powerful and exceedingly useful. Indeed Swedenborgians, and Grant Schnarr in particular in his very helpful little book, Return to the Promised Land, have put them to good use, especially around issues of addiction and spiritual recovery. How many of you have benefited from his work? I’m not surprised.

He makes it clear in his book that if you’re caught up in a web of sin or addiction, the only way to break the chains that bind you to destructive behaviors is with the truth. With the help of God you can tear down the walls of lies that keep you going back to the bottle for solace or drugs for happiness or pornography for love, just to name a few examples.

But I think we get into trouble when we follow Joshua down the road of believing we can not only rid ourselves of all the lies that give evil power over us, but succumb to the belief that with enough determination we can actually rid ourselves of evil itself once and for all. It would be nice if we could, but I don’t think evil works that way anymore than God does.

At the end of Grant Schnarr’s chapter on Jericho he writes: “After the walls fell down Israel wiped out the enemy so as not to be perverted by their immoral spiritual practices. Spiritually, the lesson is one that cannot be overstated: we must wipe out that hideous evil completely. Once we expose the defect, we must show no leniency. When the walls of illusion crumble, it’s time to destroy those defects before they can re-arm and destroy us. Knock them out with the sword of truth and annihilate them. Not until then will there be peace.” (pp. 165-166)

Well, that sounds really good, and I can see a lot of usefulness in what Rev. Schnarr is saying, except for one small but pesky detail: war never leads to peace, at least not the true, just, lasting peace that we all long for.

In my experience you can make war on drugs, you can make war on terror, you can make war on poverty, you can make war on most anything that is harmful, but war is, at best, only a temporary solution. Peace is not what you get when you finally destroy everything or everyone who could potentially harm you because that battle never ends. Peace only comes from the hard work of making peace.

Add to this the fact that, as it says in Divine Providence, the Lord does not annihilate the evils in our lives when we repent of them, but simply removes them to a place where they have no power over us, and you start to wonder, “Hey, if God doesn’t destroy evil, who are we to think that we should or even could, if we wanted to? “

So perhaps the story of Jericho is here to tell us that ultimately Joshua was wrong, as are we if we think that the best way to combat evil is to obliterate it rather than neutralize it. War did not eternally secure the Promised Land for the Israelites back then, anymore than war is securing it for them right now. Maybe the most powerful spiritual lesson to be found in this passage is the knowledge that our job is not to wipe out evil, because evil doesn’t work that way, and when we go after evil, too often what we really end up going after is each other. No, our job is not to fight evil with force but to join with God in peacefully dismantling the lies that give evil power over us and over others. “Peace,” in the words of Frederich Beuchner, “is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of love.”

And believe it or not, there is actually a little bit of love in this story, a modicum of mercy, if you will, an exception made in the midst of Joshua’s headlong rush to obliterate a people he feared would corrupt his own, and it is in her that we find redemption, not just for Joshua but for all the world. Remember Rahab, who we mentioned before, Rahab the harlot?

If there was a top ten list of people most likely to corrupt the purity of the Israelites, Rahab and her “household” would have been in the top five. But Joshua made a curious exception for Rahab and showed her mercy. He compromised to save a person of dubious character, and it was this very compromise that ultimately led to the greatest in-breaking of the divine upon our world.

For you see, Rahab was taken in by the Israelites, and, in time, she had a son named Boaz who grew up and married another compromised gentile girl by the name of Ruth, whose great grandson was none other than King David, whose line eventually culminated in the birth of a tiny baby boy in a little town called Bethlehem by the name of Jesus. Because Rahab the prostitute was allowed to live, Jesus the messiah was able to be born.

Coincidence? I think not.

Providence? You better believe it.

So maybe the battle of Jericho is not a story that glorifies war after all, but a story that lifts up the true blessing that comes from showing mercy and making peace.

My friends, preserving one’s identity as a small people and protecting one’s integrity as a people set apart for God is a high calling. As such we are called to dismantle the walls of lies that protect and nurture all that is evil and corrupt in this world. But when we do so at the expense of one another, when, in our headlong rush to destroy evil we destroy one another, then we have lost our way.

For our highest calling is not the tearing down but the building up of a new city. Not a new Jericho, but a new Jerusalem, a city built not with bricks and mortar, but with hands reaching out to one another, especially those who are other, hands that build up with love and reach out with mercy, and hands that make room, no matter what the cost, for God’s love and God’s light to break in upon our world. This is our calling. Amen and Amen.

As published in “The Messenger,” Volume 230 • Number 7 • September 2008