NRS Judges 16
4 After this he fell in love with a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah. 5 The lords of the Philistines came to her and said to her, "Coax him, and find out what makes his strength so great, and how we may overpower him, so that we may bind him in order to subdue him; and we will each give you eleven hundred pieces of silver."
15 Then she said to him, "How can you say, 'I love you,' when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not told me what makes your strength so great."
16 Finally, after she had nagged him with her words day after day, and pestered him, he was tired to death. 17 So he told her his whole secret, and said to her, "A razor has never come upon my head; for I have been a nazirite to God from my mother's womb. If my head were shaved, then my strength would leave me; I would become weak, and be like anyone else."
18 When Delilah realized that he had told her his whole secret, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines, saying, "This time come up, for he has told his whole secret to me." Then the lords of the Philistines came up to her, and brought the money in their hands. 19 She let him fall asleep on her lap; and she called a man, and had him shave off the seven locks of his head. He began to weaken, and his strength left him. 20 Then she said, "The Philistines are upon you, Samson!" When he awoke from his sleep, he thought, "I will go out as at other times, and shake myself free." But he did not know that the LORD had left him.
21 So the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze shackles; and he ground at the mill in the prison. 22 But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved. 23 Now the lords of the Philistines gathered to offer a great sacrifice to their god Dagon, and to rejoice; for they said, "Our god has given Samson our enemy into our hand." 24 When the people saw him, they praised their god; for they said, "Our god has given our enemy into our hand, the ravager of our country, who has killed many of us." 25 And when their hearts were merry, they said, "Call Samson, and let him entertain us." So they called Samson out of the prison, and he performed for them. They made him stand between the pillars; 26 and Samson said to the attendant who held him by the hand, "Let me feel the pillars on which the house rests, so that I may lean against them." 27 Now the house was full of men and women; all the lords of the Philistines were there, and on the roof there were about three thousand men and women, who looked on while Samson performed.
28 Then Samson called to the LORD and said, "Lord GOD, remember me and strengthen me only this once, O God, so that with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes." 29 And Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, and he leaned his weight against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other. 30 Then Samson said, "Let me die with the Philistines." He strained with all his might; and the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So those he killed at his death were more than those he had killed during his life. 31 Then his brothers and all his family came down and took him and brought him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of his father Manoah. He had judged Israel twenty years.

Have you ever resolved to read the whole Bible? You know, a little each day until you will have read the entire Bible? Some people take a chapter by chapter approach, while others follow a reading plan like the one included in our hymnals (page 1121). If you've ever undertaken such an effort, then you know that the Bible is not always easy reading. Many times the people's names are hard to pronounce, the places are often unfamiliar, and sometimes the stories themselves are, well, less than uplifting. Someone once said that the Bible is inspired, but not everything in the Bible is inspiring. And as we've heard in the stories of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rebekah, Joseph and his brothers, sometimes the Bible's greatest heroes behave very badly, lying, cheating, stealing. But even more distressing, I think, are the Bible's tales of war and conquest, especially those stories where whole cities are put to the sword, not only the men but also the women and children and cattle, too. Worse yet, God is often portrayed as commanding these acts of wholesale slaughter. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses lays down this law to Israel: "But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them…just as the Lord your God has commanded" (20:16,17).

We typically discount or dismiss these passages as part of the Old Testament, and therefore sub-Christian and inferior to the sweetness and light of the New. But in the New Testament, too, you can also find plenty of references to divine violence. In the Book of Revelation, when the angel of the Lord swings his sickle and gathers a vintage that he throws into the great wine press of God's wrath, the blood from that wine press blood will flow, says Revelation, "as high as a horse's bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles" (14:19,20). That's a lot of blood. And while Jesus never takes up the sword, his words often cut just as deep. In a passage that I always have a hard time preaching, Jesus said, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34; cf. Luke 12:51). In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus himself envisions a judgment in which the mighty Son of Man will separate the righteous sheep from the unrighteous goats, with those at his right hand invited to enter the kingdom prepared for them, and those to his left consigned to "the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matthew 25:41).

Whether human or divine, violence is a major issue in our reading of the Bible, and an unavoidable one when it comes to today's/tonight's biblical bad boy and bad girl, Samson and Delilah. The stories of Samson date from the period of the Judges. Before Israel was united as a kingdom under Saul, the descendants of Jacob lived as a confederacy of tribes, without any real central government. But when a crisis would arise, God would call forth a judge, not like the judge in a court, but more like a military leader who would beat back Israel's foes, after which the people would go back to their tribal homelands. The Book of Judges tells the stories of twelve such charismatic leaders, eleven men and one woman, who between the time of Joshua and Samuel commanded Israel against a host of foes, the fiercest and peskiest being the Philistines.

The Philistines were a mixed group of people who settled on the coastline of Palestine at just about the same time the Israelites were moving into Canaan. Organized into a league of five city-states, the Philistines were expert iron workers who seem to have peacefully coexisted with the Israelites for several centuries. But as the Philistines prospered both commercially and agriculturally, they began to expand their territorial holdings into Canaan, eventually coming into direct competition with Israel, both politically and religiously.

The Book of Judges is written from the theological perspective of reward and punishment. When Israel does what is right in the sight of the Lord, they prosper; but when they do what is evil, Israel takes it in the neck. More often than not, the Philistines are God's chosen instrument for testing the faith of Israel, whether they would obey the commands of the Lord or do whatever they saw as right in their own eyes. At the time of Samson's birth, Israel had again done "what is evil in the sight of the Lord," and not surprisingly, for forty years the Lord had given Israel into the hands of the Philistines.

The birth of Samson has all the hallmarks of great and wondrous promise. His mother-to-be is childless, but an angel of the Lord appears to her announcing that she will conceive and bear a son. Unlike other judges, Samson is called from his mother's womb. The son is to be consecrated a nazirite, which means he is not to drink wine or any other alcohol, he is to have no contact with any corpse or anything ritually unclean, and his hair is never to be cut. This son, says the angel, "shall begin to deliver Israel from the Philistines" (Judges 13:5). We are further told that from his birth God's blessing was upon him and that soon "the spirit of the Lord began to stir him" (13:24,25).

Samson turns out to be not so much a great hero as a blunt instrument in the hand of the Lord. Samson himself never raises an army to overcome Philistine oppression, but instead he becomes a kind of one man wrecking crew that the Lord unleashes against the Philistines. Rude, crude, and prone to devastating violence, Samson has a fondness for foreign women that the Lord also uses to launch him into a kind of guerilla warfare. After Samson forces his parents to arrange his marriage to a Philistine woman from the town of Timnah, Samson starts into his bridegroom's feast that leads to a challenge that leads to threats that leads to Samson killing 30 Philistines from a neighboring town. When the father of his bride gives her to another man (big surprise!), Samson catches some three hundred foxes that he uses to set fire to the Philistines' fields, vineyards, and olive groves. The Philistines retaliate by burning alive Samson's bride and father-in-law, whereupon Samson falls upon a host of Philistines, striking them down "hip and thigh with great slaughter" (15:8). The Philistines counterattack by setting up camp against Samson's kinsmen in Judah. His own people become so perturbed with Samson that they go get him, bind him up, and turn him over to the Philistines. But when "the Philistines came shouting to meet him … the spirit of the LORD rushed on him, and the ropes that were on his arms became like flax that has caught fire, and his bonds melted off his hands. Then he found a fresh jawbone of a donkey, reached down and took it, and with it he killed a thousand men" (15:14,15).

When Samson falls for "a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah" (16:4), the lords of the Philistines bribe her to find out the secret of Samson's mighty strength. After Delilah nags and pesters him until "he was tired to death" (16:16), Samson finally spills the beans about his consecrated hair. When Delilah has him shorn of his locks, the Philistines pounce on Samson, gouging out his eyes and carrying him back Gaza where they put him to women's work, grinding at the mill in the prison.

Some see Delilah's betrayal as Samson's come-uppance for his reckless life and casual faith, but I think God abandoned Samson into the hands of the Philistines to get him exactly where God wanted him. Samson may have believed that he got his strength from his hair, but God knew it was the spirit of the Lord that made him strong. When the Philistines celebrate Samson's capture with a great sacrifice to their god Dagon, they bring Samson out in his bronze shackles to entertain them in his humiliation. With his hair regrown, Samson positions himself against the pillars of their temple and prays to God that "with this one act of revenge I may pay back the Philistines for my two eyes" (16:28). Crying "Let me die with the Philistines," Samson pulls down the whole place, in his dying killing at least three thousand Philistines, more than he had killed while alive.

So now see if I've got this straight? God uses a violent man, Samson, to wreak violence on the Philistine people that God had allowed to violently oppress Israel for the violent evil the Israelites themselves had done in God's sight. That's complicated! Doubtless, the Philistines had overstepped the bounds of their God-given role as Israel's faith-tester. The Philistines boasted, "Our god has given our enemy into our hand," a claim that God could certainly not let stand. But even when Samson kills himself and all those Philistines, has anything really changed? At the end of the Book of Judges, the Philistines are still in control and Israel has gone back to doing whatever is right in their sight, with disastrous consequences.

Because I love and revere the whole Bible, including the stories of a brute like Samson, I can entertain the possibility that God might use violence as an instrument of God's mercy. The problem, of course, is that men always confuse their violence with God's mercy, and I think that may be why God ultimately repudiates violence, and becomes in Jesus the violated one.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.