Jephthah

You have to be careful how you treat people who want to be good.

In an ideological setting like a church community or a political arena, being good and being right have blurred distinctions, and being accepted easily develops into aspiring to leadership. Then, having secured leadership, this ultimate form of being accepted and right (and therefore good) expresses as policing everybody else, to make sure — to insist — that they are kept firmly within the ranks of what is acceptable, right, and good.

I have been thinking about our Prime Minister, and wondering if this may not be the psychological motivation underlying the courses of action he takes; to please, to be accepted, to be admired, to be right (or, in his case, Left) — and therefore to feel affirmed as good. He began, after all, as a human rights lawyer, a defender of the downtrodden, a saviour of sorts, championing the cause of the oppressed; they must have been grateful. I wonder if it has become an addiction. In an increasingly ungrateful country, I wonder if this (potentially) underlying psychology has begun to work against all of us.

It reminds me of the situation of Jephthah in the Bible. Almost never will you come across a clergyman preaching about Jephthah, so it would be understandable if you'd simply never heard of him. His entire story is in Chapter 11 of the book of Judges.

There were two things, really, about Jephthah. The first was his status as a mighty warrior, and that must have counted for a lot. He was renowned, people looked up to him — what mighty warrior is not admired by other men?

But there was something else. Jephthah was a son of Gilead — and we should carry in mind that this can mean either personally and directly Gilead's son, or simply a member of Gilead's tribe in some sense — but he was also the son of a prostitute. So on the one hand he belonged to the tribe, but at the same time he was an outsider. 

In his case, it seems that Jephthah was in a literal sense Gilead's son, because the Bible story says that his brothers, the sons of Gilead born to Gilead's actual wife (unlike Jephthah), drove Jephthah away on the grounds that he did not belong, he was not one of them, he was "the son of another woman".

He was one of them but he was not. He was an insider but an outsider. I think our Prime Minister is a bit like that. The most cursory glance shows you that he has "establishment" written all over him; and yet he chooses a career that involves taking up the cause of the outcast against the establishment. Inside but outside. Like Jephthah. And, tellingly — on the side of the right; restoring people to righteousness, back into the fold.

Anyway, back to Jephthah; when his brothers threw him out, what was he to do? He took refuge with bandits, who gathered around him and made him their leader. 

He wanted to be accepted, to be affirmed, to be important.

That's what I see in our Prime Minister. As the vote of the electorate evaporates over time, the Muslim vote becomes ever more important to Labour. The Muslim sector of the population now becomes the cause to champion, the outsider to welcome in, the people who gather round him and hail him as leader while the rest of the country turns against him. If the people with whom he culturally and nationally belongs reject him, he might inevitably and understandably look elsewhere for affirmation.

Hmm.

But that wasn't the end of Jephthah's story.

The people of Israel went to war, and needed a mighty warrior, so they came looking for Jephthah, offering a welcome back into the fold — what he longed for, to be accepted and affirmed and celebrated. 

So he was enticed back, and led his people into battle.

Is this what our Prime Minister is doing? Sabre-rattling, looking to rally the troops and lead us into war, to unite the people behind him and so regain popularity and assert dominance? Is it something similar? Is that what the drums of war are all about? The dream of being a hero?

But Jephthah's story ends with an interlude most bitterly sad, because Jephthah had a daughter. 

On the eve of battle Jephthah, desperate to do well, to be the hero, to be celebrated by his fickle family, begged the Lord God for victory in the conflict, promising in exchange to offer as a sacrifice whatever first met him on his return home. And that, as it turned out, was his daughter — coming out dancing with joy to welcome him home. 

Jephthah was devastated. Disaster! Who did he blame? Yes, I expect you've got it in one — her.

So Jephthah, being a man of his word and one to stick to his guns, let her have a little holiday and then offered her life on the altar of sacrifice.

Isn't that what our Prime Minister is doing? The girls who have fallen prey to the grooming gangs in Luton, Rotherham, Manchester, London, Oxford, Birmingham; and the little girls of Southport who also came out dancing, the girls of Epping, the girls of so many places in England now afraid to go out into the streets — he is deaf to their cause. Evidently they are worth the price. Evidently they are to be offered up for the bargain he has struck. They are, it seems, what must be sacrificed to honour the deal — with their lives are bought the vote, the favour, the admiration, the encouragement, of a soul insatiably hungry to be accepted, to be right, and to be good.

One cannot blame people for the hunger to be affirmed, and what it will drive them to. One can only try to understand. After all, it the book of Judges it began with Gilead, and Gilead's sons rubbed salt into the wound. Jephthah was just the first casualty of rejection in that story.

But in these times, as in those bygone days, I am left with a question — where is the God of Jephthah's nameless daughter?