Heroes and Saints

"There is a significant difference between the kind of story that is told about heroes and the kind of story that is told about saints. The hero always makes a decisive intervention at a moment when things are looking like they could all go badly wrong. The hero steps up and makes everything turn out right. In other words, the hero is always the center of the story. By contrast, the saint is not necessarily a crucial character. The saint may be almost invisible, easily missed, quickly forgotten. The hero's story is always about the hero. The saint is always at the periphery of a story that is really about God." - Samuel Wells

My pastor is in the midst of a seventy-two week series on Judges. Our church is not for wimps! (He also makes us memorize scripture every week as a congregation, but that's another story.)

As I've been reading the book of Judges for the past four and a half months (yes four and a half months...and we just finished Chapter 10 this past week), I have been struck by the minor characters. Most people have heard of Gideon, Deborah, and Sampson. But those are only a few of the saviors of Israel. Some of the others are judges mentioned by name: Othniel, Shamgar, Tola, and Jair, for example. Some are even more obscure, such as Jael who killed the commander of an enemy army by hammering a tent peg through his head. Some are not even named.

Judges 9 tells the story of Abimelek, one of the sons of Gideon. He murdered his seventy brothers and became the leader of the town of Shechem. When a man named Gaal earned the confidence of the people of Shechem to stand against Abimelek,  Abimelek massacred not only Gaal and his army but the entire city of Shechem by burning down the tower in which they had taken refuge. (It seems crazy to kill every person in the city you lead, but Abimelek seemed a little crazy.)

Abimelek then moved on to the town of Thebez, for no apparent reason. The citizens of Thebez also took refuge in a tower. But this time the fire plan did not work out so well. As he approached the tower to set fire to it, a woman dropped a millstone on his head and cracked his skull (Judges 9:53).

Oh, the drama!

I can just imagine the people of Thebez all rushing into the tower in a panic and then running around inside saying, "Ah! Abimelek! He's going to kill us! We're all going to die. Ah! Ack!" Meanwhile this woman looks out the window at this crazy man running towards them, eyes the millstone, and then lets it fly. Suddenly all the people hear the crash and look at each other for a split second before they rush past the woman to look out the window. They look down just in time to see Abimelek ask his armor-bearer to finish him off so it can't be said that he was killed by a woman.

In the meantime, the woman has probably gathered her things and headed back downstairs to return to her life. That is probably why her name isn't recorded in the biblical account. She seems like someone who just quietly got things done.

I've given a lot of thought to what it means to be successful: as a Christian, in ministry, on behalf of the kingdom of God. And while there are a few Gideons in the world, a lot of times they end up with crazy kids who go on killing sprees. (Maybe that isn't super common, but there are some crazy preacher's kids.) What are more common, though, are anonymous people who accomplish God's purposes through spontaneous acts in the moment that just seem like the right thing to do.

I don't know who this is, but she seems saintly.

That woman was probably a hero in Thebez, but the writer of Judges doesn't even give her name because as Samuel Wells observed, hero stories are about the hero, but saint stories are about God. Verse 53 reads, "Thus God repaid the wickedness that Abimelek had done..." This is a story about God's justice enacted against a wicked man, not a story about an awesome woman.

The world and even the church pressures its leaders to be famous, to be successful, to be impressive. We spend a lot of time in my denomination tossing around names--who knows whom, who worked with whom, who studied under whom. But the story of the saints is one of anonymity. It is not about who knows whom, but about who knows God. Making it into God's story by the name of "a woman" is a great place for a saint to be.