Soldiers, not Heroes

O'Donovan, in his (much maligned in my circles) The Desire of the Nations distinguishes two kinds of warrior tradition in ancient Israel:  the heroic, found in the story cycles of Jonathan and the young David, and the sacral, found in the prophetic corpus, much of Torah, and Joshua's story of divine punishment in Jos. 6.  These traditions are difficult for modern people to accommodate, and often that are shrugged off in a kind of embarrassment.  But if we are not to give over the entire public square to the powers that be, then we must, simply must, insist on YHWH's right to command the armies of the earth.  YHWH's cease fire in Jesus does not in fact make sense unless he holds the helm of the sword.  Horrifying as these texts can be, we must insist on their being absolutely expressive of YHWH's right to liberate. The public square is determined, at the basest level, by the right to dictate who dies, how, and why.  And the ascription of this right to YHWH cannot be done without the frightening entailment that sometimes the cease-fire may need paradoxical preservation by judicious force.  We cannot give YHWH command and at the same time know in advance that we will never be violent.  If God alone can offer peace, it is God's terms that must guide that peace.  And those terms may require, as I suspect they have, the willingness of some to be soldiers.  The brokenness of the world may be such, that is, that God's interaction with it requires people to do that for which they will later be rightly sorry.  And I suspect that if we are to be realistic in our endeavor to live faithful lives in this world, it is the sorry soldier at confession, and not always the crowned martyr, who can dislodge from us our cult of military heroism.