People of the Book: Joshua
In the Book of Numbers, we see that Moses is denied entry into the Promised Land, even after leading the Israelites out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and into the wilderness for 40 years. At Kadesh, God instructs Moses to strike a rock with his staff to elicit the flow of life-giving water for his people (an event seen to prefigure Christ providing the “living water” to the woman at the well, and to us in baptism). It is unclear exactly why God claims “Because you did not have trust in me, [Moses], you shall not lead this people into the land I have given them” (Num 20:12). Some scholars believe it is because Moses strikes the rock twice, in a kind of insurance policy that God would fulfill his promise to provide for his people. Others think an episode that painted Moses in an unflattering light has been consciously removed from the text. Either way, it is not Moses, but instead Joshua who leads the people to take possession of the “land of milk and honey.”
One of the last strongholds to fall to the conquering people is that of Jericho. At God’s command, Joshua leads the people to the walls of the city with the Ark of the Covenant. At this the walls crumble, and the Israelites come to inherit the city.
Multileveled spiritual insights can be gained by a close reading of this passage, one that strikes modern sensibilities (at least my own) as somehow patently unfair or aggressive toward the self-sufficient Jerichoians.
How often in our own lives do we construct walls, fences, barriers? Like the inhabitants of Jericho, we erect, one brick at a time, mighty fortresses of self-interest, emotional and psychological protection, and insular egocentrism. It is these walls, not the legitimate monuments of self-dignity, flourishing human potential, protection for the vulnerable, or separation from dysfunctional situations, that God seeks to bring to ruin. In the end, we all know that our ramshackle huts of isolation crumble before the awe-inspiring power of ultimate forgiveness and love.
C. S. Lewis speaks to this attempt to hermetically seal ourselves off from the entanglements of authentic engagement in his book “The Four Loves”: “There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable; impenetrable; irredeemable.” In effect, it will die. God is always attempting to splinter that casket built with human hands, like he did the walls of Jericho.
After the walls fall, Joshua instructs the Israelites to “keep away from the sacred things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by touching any of them” (Jos 6:18). This sheds light on a universal human reality, what the phenomenology of religion calls the “ambivalent quality of sacred power.” Some things — priestly vestments, sanctuaries, amulets, icons, shamanic people — are in every civilization removed or separated from the mundane or profane. In such anthropological studies, observers of any religion see that contact with such numinous realities brings about not only holiness, but also mortal danger. As French sociologist Roger Caillois puts it, “The divine and the accursed, consecration and defilement, have exactly the same effects upon profane objects. They render them untouchable.” Think of the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were instructed not to touch the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, “lest you die.”
The strange and uncanny power of the Ark of the Covenant applies here as well. Rudolf Otto called this human tendency the drive toward mysterium tremendum et fascinans, loosely translated as the tremendous dread, awe, intoxication, and might of the unfathomable. Theologian Paul Tillich called it “the object of ultimate concern.” However one names it, we see in the Book of Joshua the frightening and electrifying power of God which can always be experienced in, but never contained by, the human and finite. We should prayerfully accept such a condition, always resisting the fruitless urge to safely lock up the roaring Lion of Judah in a proverbial petting zoo.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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