No Safe Place
Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash
It is easy enough to imagine the scene. The frightened man clings desperately to the horns of the altar (I Kings 2:28). His long fingers tremble. He has shortness of breath in his fear. Perhaps he peed all over himself in his panic. This pitiful figure, reduced to terror, is not the man he used to be. He used to be Joab, a mighty man of valor, who did all the heavy lifting for his beloved David. As military commander he ran risks, conducted ruses, and in every way he could he advanced the interests of his king. Now all of that is gone. He is a desperate, helpless man in fear for his life. Now his own chieftain, David, had decreed his violent death:
Moreover you know also what Joab son of Zeruiah did to me, how he dealt with the two commanders of the armies of Israel, Abner son of Ner, and Amasa son of Jether, whom he murdered, retaliating in time of peace for blood that had been shed in war, and putting the blood of war on the belt around his waist, and on the sandals of his feet. Act therefore according to your wisdom, but do not let his gray head go down to Sheol in peace
(I Kings 2:5-6).
That is the thanks he receives for all of his risk-taking loyalty.
He had made a major error of judgment. As the king grew old, it was time to select his successor from among his sons. Joab had signed on to David’s son, Adonijah (I Kings 2:22). But he had bet on the wrong horse. It was another son, Solomon, who had won the day and succeeded the throne. Solomon was filled with revenge toward those who had opposed him. His new dispatcher was a military man, Benaniah, a newcomer to power, who disposed of Solomon’s enemies. So he came for Joab. Fearing for his life, Joab had fled to the sanctuary, thinking the altar to be a safe place of sanctuary. But Solomon’s man seized him from the altar, striking him dead:
Then Benaiah son of Jehoiada went up and struck him down and killed him; and he was buried at his own house near the wilderness (I Kings 2:34).
In his dirge over Jonathan, David had sung:
How the mighty have fallen (II Samuel 1:25, 27).
He might have added:
How the vulnerable have disappeared.
Joab had been mighty; now he was fallen. He is readily banished from the royal narrative.
Joab had counted on the altar of YHWH as his last hope of a safe place. He had hoped—and assumed—that the protective presence of YHWH would be enough to thwart the dangerous, violent aggression of Solomon. But he had badly miscalculated. The king and his new hatchet man had no qualms about violating the holy place in their eager thirst for retaliation. So Joab was killed, buried at his own house, gone, not grieved by the court of Solomon.
We may readily see that Joab’s flight to sanctuary at the altar of YHWH takes place amid Israel’s thick affirmation of safe places of refuge. On the one hand the Torah makes provision for “cities of refuge” to which the innocent may flee from those who will harm them. Moses is said to specify six such cities of refuge (Numbers 35:11-15, Deuteronomy 4:41-43, 19:1-10, Joshua 20:1-9). Appeal to such safe places is highly circumscribed and limited, but it is allowed and guaranteed.
On the other hand, in the lyrical rhetoric of the Psalms, YHWH is variously said to be a refuge:
YHWH is refuge for the poor from the predatory pressure of the perverse (Psalm 14:3-6).
YHWH is a safe refuge when there can be appeal nowhere else:
On God rests my deliverance and my honor;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.
Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.
Those of low estate are but a breath,
those of high estate are a delusion;
in the balance they go up;
they are together lighter than a breath.
Put no confidence in extortion,
and set no vain hopes on robbery;
if riches increase, do not set your heart on them (Psalm 62:7-10).
In Psalm 91:2-3, 9 God is a refuge, protection from the “snare of the fowler.”
The phrase may call attention to the prophetic indictment:
For scoundrels are found among my people;
they take over the goods of others.
Like fowlers they set a trap;
they catch human beings.
Like a cage full of birds,
their houses are full of treachery;
therefore they have become great and rich,
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no limits in deeds of wickedness;
they do not judge with justice
the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy (Jeremiah 5:26-28).
YHWH is protection for the vulnerable from the threat of predators.
YHWH is protector of the “righteous and innocent” who face “wicked rulers” (Psalm 94:20-22).
If we take the confluence of the Torah provision for cities of refuge and the affirmation of the Psalms concerning YHWH as refuge, we may conclude (a) that life in the real world was known to be risky and threatening, and (b) YHWH offers a safe alternative to such danger. We may conclude that such imagery is more than metaphor and is a summons to praxis, so that the community gathered around the text had a responsibility to enact and perform the role of protector, specifically for the most vulnerable. The action of Joab here takes place amid a most threatening social environment and amid an ongoing affirmation of faith in Yahwistic protection. But Joab is left at risk precisely because he, as the hatchet man for David, cannot claim innocence as a perpetrator of violent murder. He can nonetheless hope that the protection of YHWH will outweigh the threat of vengeance that is everywhere on the loose around him.
We may readily recall other instances of such violation of a holy place for the sake of violent revenge. Perhaps the most dramatic case is the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, by King Henry II in 1170. The murder is memorialized by T. S. Eliot in his play, Murder in the Cathedral in 1934. The drama concerns the clash between the king and the archbishop (that is, between the king and the pope). The archbishop refuses to bend to the will of the king concerning the secularization of church authority and property in England, a long-running theme that culminated in the rule of Henry VIII. The death of Joab at the altar is reiterated by the death of Thomas in the Canterbury Cathedral. Only this time, the victim is not a hardened military man but a church prelate who was intent on protecting church rights, property, and freedom. The entire matter comes down to the whimsical wish of the king, “Who will rid me of the troublesome, meddlesome priest?” That is all the king said; but it was all the king needed to say. It was enough and left no doubt or ambiguity. The henchmen of the king took the royal wish as a command. Four knights from Normandy came and readily perpetrated the royal wish against the archbishop in the holy sanctuary. Yet again it turns out that when the raw power of the state knows no boundary or restraint, it is capable of required violence. Nothing— or no one —can be safe by hiding in a holy place. As with David, so too is Henry II quite willing and able to violate the holy place in the interest of royal greed and ambition.
It is unmistakable that Archbishop Oscar Romero was following in the train of Thomas of Canterbury. Romero was the much beloved archbishop of San Salvador and a great champion of human rights. His advocacy for elemental human rights was insistent and quite public. But that advocacy was an impediment to the government that was largely financed by US funds. Thus on March 24, 1980, Romero was gunned down just outside a hospital chapel. He was not quite at the altar as were Joab and then Thomas. But he was a holy man widely recognized for his brave advocacy. The killer was alleged to be Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, but the major surely acted on behalf of a broad rightwing coalition that sought to reduce peasants to a class of labor peons. The collision of Romero and the force of the rightwing eventuated in his violent death, so that Romero joins the roster of those denied protection and sanctuary.
And now our current administration! It is easy enough for me to see how this administration follows in the procession of Solomon, Henry, and Roberto, ready to act against anyone who impedes their policies, plans, ambitions or whims. Project 2025 includes, among many hardline policy proposals, a provision that ICE agents could readily make arrests inside schools and houses of worship. Thus one can readily imagine policy implementation that would echo and reiterate the brutality of the forerunners cited above. The power of the state could readily run roughshod over the rights, dignity, and safety of vulnerable persons who have no capacity for resistance, or any adequate provision for safety or protection. When the state claims for itself such limitless power, every person who is not connected to the regime and its whims is subject to victimization. We have sufficient precedent to see that such limitless, unrestrained power will not blink before the deportation or disposal of “unneeded” human persons. “Immigrants” becomes an easy summary term in the eagerness to dispose of inconvenient persons. There is, of course, no reason to think or imagine that such power of erasure would stop with immigrants, but could easily extend as well into other circles of “disposable” persons.
In the face of all these individuals, a strong, steady insistence upon human rights, human dignity, and human security for all persons is an urgent imperative. It belongs to the church to be a vigorous participant in such protective measures. Thus in the first instance the church can be a safe shelter for those taken by the brutalizing establishment to be disposable. Beyond that immediate shelter, the church—in its local congregational form—can be an insistent advocate for elemental human rights. I note with some appreciation that in my hometown the expansive overnight shelter for vulnerable and homeless persons is entitled “Safe Harbor,” that is, a place of protection from the storm of predatory greed. Beyond that, it is a happy reality that in our town members of the city council are committed to the wellbeing and expansion of the protective reach of Safe Harbor. It is no doubt true that the health of a community is measured by its readiness and capacity to protect its most vulnerable members. What a measure of “messianic performance” to see that Jesus spent his time and energy with such “ineligible” persons!
Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (Luke 7:22).
It is no wonder that he added, after this roster of restored persons:
And blessed is anyone who is not offended at me (v. 23).
The “movers and shakers” of his time and place were indeed “scandalized” that such a disposable population should receive attention and restoration. It is exactly that attentiveness and restorative work to which the church is summoned in its resistance to the impatient ruthless disposal by the dominant economic community. It is a scandal indeed, in such a context of predatory capitalism, to insist upon the dignity, security, and wellbeing on offer for the nonproductive. It is, as Lutherans are wont to say, a ready offer of grace amid a culture committed to the “law of productivity.”
