Obadiah 1-3, 10-21 (pp. 313-315 in Prophets)
“Cousins”
November 15, 2020 – Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost
I was Grandma’s favorite. At least, that’s how my sister and my cousins saw it, and sometimes still do. In their eyes, I always had the unfair advantage of being her first grandchild and of being born on her birthday. That coincidence was brought up by family members more than once just recently when my own grandchild was almost born on my birthday. But he forestalled that conflict of interest by popping out just three minutes before midnight the day before.
From my completely objective point of view, I don’t think that first grandchild or birthday thing played much of a role at all. Grandma simply liked me best on my own merits. Joking aside, I’ve been fortunate enough to have family that may kid me about Grandma’s preference, but with no real rancor. We get along well, all of us pretty confident that Grandma loved all of us very much and that it’s a good thing to love each other.
Sibling and familial rivalry is a familiar human experience and a fairly strong theme in Scripture. It’s there from the beginning in the deadly conflict between Cain and Abel. It shows up again as Abraham and Lot divide up land to which God has brought them. And it’s at the heart of the story of the third and final patriarch of God’s people, Jacob who was renamed Israel.
You may remember that Jacob was the younger, seemingly by just a few seconds, of twin brothers. Esau was born first, but it was Jacob who became his mother’s favorite. With her help he connived to steal the firstborn right of inheritance from his brother and forever become the father of God’s people, the one after whom they would be named. Esau resented that turn of events and plotted to kill Jacob. The memory of their conflict carried down among Jacob’s and Esau’s descendants for generations. They were distant, distant cousins, but their dislike for each other shows up centuries later in our text for today, the tiny book of the prophet Obadiah.
In Genesis 33 you can read what seems like a touching reconciliation between Jacob and Esau. Jacob’s clan meets Esau who has 400 men with him. But Jacob put the women and children out front and Esau greeted them and Jacob in peace. The two brothers embraced, kissed and made up. Yet if you read between the lines in what follows, you can see that Esau wanted to keep an eye on Jacob. First he offered to have his army accompany them, but Jacob begs off, saying the women and children would only slow them down. Then Esau tried to leave a smaller contingent to guard his wily brother, but again Jacob politely refused. So the brothers separated. They only met one more time to bury their father.
So there was never any lasting reconciliation between the children of Jacob and the children of Esau. Genesis 36 tells us that the descendants of Esau become the nation of Edom, many of whom lived in the land called Edom. At the beginning of Obadiah, on page 313, we heard the prophet speak to them as people who “make your home high in the mountains.” On page 314 the Lord talks about “the mountains of Edom.” It was a small, mountainous region south of the Dead Sea. In the modern world, the area is southern Jordan. There is an ancient city in that region which came later than Obadiah’s time, Petra, with buildings carved into rock and made famous by an Indiana Jones movie.
The antagonism between Israel and Edom was constant. After the Israelites escaped from Egypt they first tried to enter the Promised Land from the south. According to Numbers 20, Moses asked for safe passage through Edom. Still bearing Esau’s grudge against Jacob 400 years later, the Edomites refused and came out armed to prevent the passage. The Israelites had to go around to the northeast where they got the same antagonistic reception from the Amorites at the border of Moab. But that time Moses decided to fight. They killed Sihon, king of the Amorites, as well as Og, king of Bashan. Then they passed on through to the plains of Moab across from Jericho.
That enmity between brother nations goes on and on. Both Saul and David fought wars against Edom. During Solomon’s time Edom was controlled by Israel, then later by Judah. Then, when Jehoram was king of Judah, Edom revolted and set up a king of its own. That set the stage for what happened years later when Babylon began to invade the region.
Reading between the lines here in Obadiah and in Psalm 137, it looks like Edom had a defense treaty with Judah against the Babylonians. But Edom betrayed them, their, as Obadiah says in the middle of 314, “close relatives.” Literally there in what is verse 10, he complains about Edom did “to your brother Jacob.” At the end of verse 11, he says, “but you acted like one of Israel’s enemies,” implying they should have been allies.
It’s hard to know just what to make of Obadiah. No readings from it appear in the Christian lectionary. Hardly anyone preaches from it, although I’m trying my best this morning. A few church fathers wrote commentaries on it, but almost all of them just made it into an allegory of one kind or another.
On the surface, the prophecy of Obadiah looks just like what I’m suggesting, the last word in a nasty, bitter family squabble, with one side claiming the high ground and predicting an ugly end for the other side. Obadiah first chastises Edom for their arrogance on page 313, verse 3,
You have been deceived by your own pride
because you live in a rock fortress
and make your home high in the mountains.
Like other nations and cities on earth which imagine themselves secure because of the blessings of geography, the Edomites were proud of their high ground, sure that it would keep them safe.
Then in the middle of 314, beginning with verse 12, Obadiah lists the things that Edom should not have done to their relatives, to their brother country. Starting with “You should not have gloated when they exiled your relatives to distant lands,” there are no less than eight “You should not have”s there, from passively gloating and rejoicing over Israel’s suffering to actively stealing from them and killing them.
The Edomites apparently did cruel and vicious things to the people of Judah when Babylon invaded. A passage in the Apocrypha, I Esdras 45:45, suggests that Edom actually burned down the Temple in Jerusalem at that time. Psalm 137:7 says that, at the least, they cheered on the Babylonians as they tore down the city. But set that horrible violence aside for a moment and just think about the first accusation of pride and then the repeated accusation of gloating over the fall of Jerusalem, the exile of God’s people. Obadiah means to especially highlight that arrogant attitude in light of the family connection, the fact that Jacob was brother to Esau, that Israel and Edom are cousins.
We may want to move that lesson to our own time and remember the principle we’ve worked with a few times now in the prophets. You and I may want to consider whether it’s right for us to identify with the good guys in these stories, in these warnings. Are we actually the wounded victims and exiles finally getting justice, or is there just a touch of Edom in us, gloating over the losses of at least some who are our brothers and sisters in the Lord? In the aftermath of our American election, we may want to examine our spirits once again and repent of attitudes which draw very near to Edom’s sin of rejoicing at the misfortunes of others, especially if they are fellow Christians.
And even as I speak that warning about gloating to some of us, I have to note that there is a strange irony here in Obadiah. For his whole little book sounds a bit like prophetic gloating over the misfortune of the gloaters. He’s just a little too gleeful as he, in the voice of the Lord, turns Jesus’ Golden Rule on its head at the top of page 314 saying,
As you have done to Israel,
so it will be done to you
All your evil deeds
will fall back on your own heads.
As C. S. Lewis long ago wrote about similar words in the Psalms,[1] there is spiritual danger if we enter too wholeheartedly into sentiments like that. It’s as if we imagine God’s revenge on those who have wronged us to be one our rightful joys as people of God, instead of a reason to be sorry and sad for those who are judged by the Lord.
For that matter, take another look at that section of Obadiah I’ve just been quoting. It begins in verse 15 at the bottom of page 314 with God saying that he is about to “judge all godless nations.” It ends a bit down page 315 with verse 16 as the Lord says, “Yes, all you nations will drink and stagger and disappear from history.” While Edom is the particular occasion for the prophesy God gave Obadiah, it’s not limited to them. It applies to every nation that acts like they did, nations that forget God in their arrogance and persecute God’s people in their hatred.
Obadiah is not just a judgment against Edom’s betrayal of Judah, of Esau’s resentment of his brother. It’s a judgment of any nation, any culture, any people that arrogantly assumes it is safe and secure and can do as it likes to downtrodden people who ultimately belong to God.
So Obadiah is also a judgment of the Greeks and Romans who persecuted the Jews before Christ and then Jews and Christians after Jesus came. And it’s a warning against Muslim warriors who thought they did God’s will when they conquered Christian territory and enslaved believers in Jesus. But keep listening. It’s a pronouncement of doom against rulers and priests and preachers on almost every side who used the time of the Reformation to persecute and torture and put to the stake fellow Christians. And, as we talked about Thursday night, it is every bit as much a judgment on American Christians who turned aside and looked the other way as Black Christians were enslaved and then, later tortured and hung on trees, after being freed from slavery.
God will judge all godless nations, says Obadiah. And what is more godless than to gloat over the misfortunes of people we ought to own as brothers and sisters? What is more spiritually bankrupt than to be complacent about or even happy regarding the torture and murder of those who also name the name of Jesus? There are persecuted and starving Christians south of us who have been turned away at the border, imprisoned, separated from family, or worse as they attempt to enter this country. Will we escape God’s judgment if we ignore that or celebrate that or even aid and abet it?
Yes, the end of Obadiah seems pretty narrowly focused. It celebrates the day the Jews will escape from Babylon and go home to Jerusalem. In the middle of page 315, verse 18, it somewhat arrogantly celebrates the fact that
Israel will be a raging fire,
and Edom a field of dry stubble.
The descendants of Jacob will be a flame
roaring across the field, devouring everything.
There will be no survivors in Edom.
I, the Lord, have spoken!
In other words, those who burnt down the Temple will be burnt up themselves. No trace of them will remain.
To some degree, that’s what happened. The Edomites benefitted for a while from Judah’s exile. They took over towns there. But by the end of that century the archaeological record shows a change. At one location in Edom, Arabic names start to appear in records that were kept. Edom was slowly taken over by nomadic Arab tribes. Those Arabs, later called Nabateans, were the ones who built that fabulous fortress city of Petra, not the proud and treacherous Edomites descended from Esau. They dwindled away and, like Obadiah said, almost “disappear from history.”
Yet just before Obadiah in our usual Bibles, the prophet Amos declared that part of God’s rebuilding of Israel would be “In order that they may the possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by my name.” That seems to have happened too. Edomites pushed out by those Arab peoples moved westward a bit. In Roman times their land was named by a Greek form of Edom, Idumea. The area was controlled by Jews.
Herod the Great, king of Judea in Jesus’ time, had an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother. His father’s family had converted to Judaism. Herod was descended from Edom but Edomites had so commingled with Nabatean Arabs at that point, that at least one scholar of that time regarded them as Arabs themselves. Edom slowly disappeared from history with the remnant being absorbed on one side as Jews and on the other as Arabs. With the dawn of Christianity, the Nabateans then became Christians.
Those promises at the very end of Obadiah seem very local and specific. God says there on 315, in the last part of the book, that
Then my people living in the Negev
will occupy the mountains of Edom
Those living in the foothills of Judah
will possess the Philistine plains
and take over the fields of Ephraim and Samaria.
And the people of Benjamin
will occupy the land of Gilead.
The exiles of Israel will return to their land
and occupy the Phoenician coast as far north as Zarephath.
The captives from Jerusalem exiled in the north
will return home and resettle the towns of the Negev.
Those who have been rescued will go up to Mount Zion in Jerusalem
to rule over the mountains of Edom.
That was all fulfilled more or less literally with the Jews coming home from Babylon. Together with Jewish people left behind in rural areas around Jerusalem, they spread out north, south, east and west and to some extent took fresh control of areas like Edom to the south in the Negev and Samaria to the north and Gilead in the east and Phoenicia on the coast in the west. But it all pointed beyond those locales to something Obadiah may not have even imagined.
History also shows us that Jewish independence and control of all that territory was short-lived and always tenuous, maybe never quite real. Israel continued to be dominated by the Persians and then the Greeks and then, just before Jesus’ time, by Rome. They may have been able to gloat over Edom a bit, but their own power was pretty feeble.
That’s why the last bit of Obadiah is so important. “And the Lord himself will be king.” In many translations it reads, “and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.” With that one short sentence, Obadiah moves beyond everything he is saying about ancient sibling rivalry, a centuries long war between cousins, and moves toward something which supersedes and engulfs all of it. Like the other prophets, he points beyond what is fulfilled in his own time or in the immediate future to God’s great plan for the whole world, for all the nations.
Yes, there will judgment on the nations who do wrong, who betray each other and oppress the weak and poor. But even more God offers mercy and love and healing to all nations in a kingdom that belongs to none of them. Jesus came and taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” to “seek first the kingdom of God,” and to become like little children so that we may enter that kingdom. Jesus did not come to found a country or support this one or that one. He came to make the whole world God’s kingdom by inviting everyone to become brothers and sisters in His name. Even more than my grandmother tried to love all her grandchildren very much, God loves all His children very, very much.
The parable we heard from Jesus today about the use of talents could be seen as a warning to us when we get too much like Edom, too proud of what we have and our security and power in an earthly country. Jesus told us not to hoard our blessings and try to protect them, whether by burying them in the ground or building walls around them. He asks us to put whatever He’s given us to work in and for His kingdom.
As Beth and I contemplated our good fortune and safety and comfort, despite what is happening around us in the world, we decided a couple months ago that we needed to sponsor a child in Congo through a program of the Covenant church and World Vision. Some of you have decided to help fund children and women in Haiti through the organization for which Alison works. Others of you have donated or taken food to families in need here in our own community. As we heard two weeks ago, some of us work with and support many other kinds of ministry and mission, taking the love of Jesus to all creation.
As Thanksgiving and the Christmas season draw near, I hope that we will all redouble our efforts at ministry and mission to those God wants to know as our relatives, our cousins, our brothers and sisters in Jesus. Our business is not to build a fortress in the mountains, some secure territory where we will be safe forever. Our business as the family of God is to look forward to and take part in the kingdom which is the Lord’s, because the Lord himself will be king! And we are His children.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Reflections on the Psalms, chapters II and III in particular.