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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
O God, who declarest thy almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Mercifully grant unto us such a measure of thy grace, that we, running to obtain thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 21)
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The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Judith 5:22-6:4, 10-21
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Judith 5:22-6:4, 10-21
✛
Judith
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The book of Judith, read at evensong tonight and for most of the coming week, is an old story of small people changing big events. I will speak first about the book, then about Judith herself, and then about life, the universe, and everything. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.
Judith, the book, seems to have been written originally in Greek (that is, there doesn’t seem to have been a Hebrew or other original text behind the Greek). It includes a number of historical and geographical inaccuracies. No one knows the author or the time of composition, although it seems to have been sometime in the last five centuries before Christ or in the first century A.D. Judith, the character, is not known to be historical, and the events of the book as a whole seem to be something of historical fiction. Thus there are many reasons for the book to be placed rightly in the Apocrypha—those books of the Bible that are useful for moral instruction and inspiration.
The first half of the book of Judith concerns a campaign of Nebuchadnezzar. He asked for support from all the people to his west, from Assyria over to the Mediterranean and down into Egypt. Among the place names there are Carmel, Gilead, Galilee, Samaria, Jerusalem, and Bethany—places known to us as Bible readers, and dear to us as places of the great Bible story. All these people refused to help Nebuchadnezzar, who, in a rage, resolves to kill all the inhabitants there; in particular, “all Judea” is mentioned. He plots revenge. It is carried out, waves upon waves of destruction, gradually moving to the west, to the Holy land of the Bible story. Some of the people of his wrath, seeing the destruction coming towards them, make peace; but the terms of peace include that the subjected people would worship Nebuchadnezzar alone, and in every language call upon him as a god.
In chapter 4, the Israelites, alarmed, terrified for themselves and for the temple at Jerusalem, take defensive action, both by establishing control of the geography and by calling upon God with fervor and fasting. The Lord hears their prayers. And now we are at chapter 5, in which tonight’s lesson picks up.
We are taken into the counsels of the Assyrian army, whose captain, Holofernes, is incensed that the Israelites have taken the mountain passes to block his advance. Who are these Israelites, who dare to stand in his way? He has never heard of them. A leader of one of the other local peoples gives Holofernes a thumbnail history and concludes it with prudential counsel. Part of the history, as he tells, is that whenever this people, the Israelites, sinned, their God punished them; but on the other hand they prospered whenever they followed their God. So (this man concludes; his name was Achior), if the Israelites are not guilty, the captain should leave them alone and pass them by, for their God will protect them, and then we, the Assyrian army and all attached to it, will become a laughingstock in the sight of the world.
Holofernes is further incensed by this counsel and, as we heard, denies there is any god save Nebuchadnezzar, denies that the Israelites’ God can have any power over his army, swears that he will overwhelm and squash the Israelites, and then, to cap it off, expels Achior from his sight and has him abandoned outside the camp. There the Israelites find him and hear his tale. And they pray to their God to defend them.
This first half of the book of Judith is, many have noticed, about fear. The second half of the book is about beauty. Judith, an Israelite woman, was beautiful. And if I may spoil the plot (although I think you know how this is going to turn out), she uses her beauty to insinuate herself into the enemy camp; she manages to be alone with Holofernes; she chops off his head and puts it in a basket and, leaving that camp, returns to the Israelites. You can see pictures of this in the Met, I believe.
Achior had been told by Holofernes, when he threw him out of his sight: “you shall not see my face again from this day until I take revenge on this race [the Israelites].” But Achior did see his face again: when Judith brought it back in her basket.
It is a great story, even if the details are sometimes hard to follow (and, as I said, historically dubious). The woman, thought to be weak, becomes God’s agent in dispatching the wicked and blasphemous enemy. She is a small person caught up in big events, who arose, with faith, with courage, with initiative derived from her own practical counsel, to cut down the tyrant who had himself destroyed peoples upon peoples. One person, one woman: then no more Holofernes, no more Assyrian army, no more oppression, no more idolatry; now once again there is freedom to worship God and to live righteously as his people.
My thought about “life, the universe, and everything” is a simple thought. This story celebrates the great action of a simple, pious woman, a decisive moment when she moved out of her private life and became public, indeed, political. There is no denying, within the story, that her great action had decisive consequences on the world-political stage. But that great action of Judith’s life was the action of a very short period of time—something to be measured in weeks or even days. There was much to her life both before and after. The book sets us up with the political problem of the impending devastation of war from the tyrannical empire, then it turns to the defeat of that empire brought about by God raising up out of obscurity the pious woman Judith. And then, at the end, as a brief appendix, we are told that Judith lived a long life, that she was honored all her days, that many men wanted to marry her after her husband died (she refused them all), and that she was 105 years old when she died. She never again engaged in public action as she did in that one brief, great period of her life. Apart from a very small bit of her 105 years she was a pious and decent, but ordinary, person.
We often say that we don’t want to be political here at Saint Thomas, and it is certainly true that our sermons and teaching are not directly engaged with what in our day goes by the name of politics. Indeed, in my view, our world is too political, and too many people try to find too much self-validation in the world of politics. Politics has, in a way, taken the place of God. But what Judith shows us is, I think, that politics for believers is at once inescapable and limited. Judith was just a pious woman, but God had prepared her for decisive action. Similarly, you may be just a pious person trying to live a simple and good life, but God may call you for some part of your life to significant participation in public action to advance his good purposes. Nonetheless, although the tales of the age will speak of our heros and heroines, the majority of a good life is spent in unremarkable activities: divine worship, fair treatment in everyday transactions, study and prayer and sacrament.
To put it another way: those who belong to the City of God nonetheless care for and make a certain use of the City of Man. That Augustinian insight is another reason why Judith, the book, has its place in the Bible.
