Scripture Weaponized: Jezebel, Lynching and ICE Raids

A question for women: how many of you have ever been told you are difficult? My homiletics professor in seminary taught me that when a woman shows up in scripture, preach about her, the subtext being that in 2000 years, women, with the exception of Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, haven’t made it into many sermons. So today we’ll spend part of our time with Jezebel. 

The Jezebel of scripture was a Phoenician princess, a foreigner, who married Ahab, the King of Israel. 1 Kings 16:30, lists the ways King Ahab was evil, beginning with his marriage to Jezebel, evil because she was an outsider. He’s also condemned for worshiping the pagan gods Baal and Asherah. Elijah is called to eliminate idolatry among God’s people, which is the crux of his conflict with the evil queen.

The word “jezebel” is part of our lexicon. Merriam Webster defines “jezebel” as an impudent, shameless, or morally unrestrained woman. The slur has become a pejorative term for any woman who is deceptive, seductive, or dangerous. 

Sometimes the name “Jezebel” is weaponized by men against women they don’t like, women they consider too self-confident or intelligent or independent. “She has a Jezebel spirit” is a way of shaming a woman for not making herself small enough or subservient enough. The writer of Revelation, John, mints this insult first, referring to a woman in Thyatira who was an opponent of Christianity, 

. . . I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols. (Rev 2:20)

Anyone who has been wounded by the church knows in their body that Scripture can be weaponized. Scripture was weaponized by Europeans during the slave trade. The “Slave Bible”—not a different Bible than ours but an interpretation of the same one we read—the “Slave Bible” was used by enslavers to justify kidnapping human beings from Africa and separating enslaved families for profit. 

Christian missionaries used scripture to separate Indigenous children from their families, placing them in Christian schools where their traditional language and religious practice was deemed sinful. 

Black theologian James Cone writes hauntingly of the intimate relationship between Christianity and racism. Cone was born in Arkansas when lynching was still legal. Does this sound like ancient history? When my husband, Joseph, was applying to grad school, he was accepted at Union Theological Seminary. James Cone would have been his assigned advisor, had he not gotten better financial aid at a different university. Cone died only a few years ago in 2018.

James Cone relates that lynching in Arkansas was not some shadowy event held under cover of darkness. Lynching was a public affair, “announced in advance in newspapers and over radios.” Cone writes, “. . .white racists preached a dehumanized segregated gospel in the name of Jesus’ cross every Sunday” (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, xv).

In the early part of the 20th century, upright people like ourselves would go to church in the morning and go to lynchings in the afternoon. 

Similarly, today in the name of the law, unidentified, often masked agents pick up women and men off the street, sometimes on their very legal way to immigration offices, scooping up parents and sometimes leaving their children on the sidewalk.  I am certain many of those same “agents” are at churches across the country this morning, unmasked and in their better clothes. 

James Cone writes of Arkansas, “The lynchers were the ‘good citizens’ who often did not even bother to hide their identities. They claimed to be acting as citizens and Christians as they crucified blacks in the same manner as the Romans crucified Jesus” (The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 159).

As any atheist will be happy to tell us, millions of people have died in the name of Christianity. Heretics persecuted in the early Church, Catholics in the Reformation and Protestants in the Counter-reformation, Muslims and Jews and so-called heretics in the Crusades, enslaved Africans and countless First People in the New World. How very carefully we must interrogate our faith. How humbly we must bear the title “Christian.” Jesus himself did not suffer such fools lightly, especially those who professed outward religiosity that did not match their inward inclinations.

Jesus rebuked such people harshly saying, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Mt 23:27). We must continually discern that we are doing the good work of the Spirit, the fruits of which are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23).

Back to Jezebel. To be fair Jezebel wasn’t a kind person. When she learns that the Prophet Elijah has killed 450 prophets of the false god, Baal, Jezebel sends a messenger to Elijah, saying, "So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow” (I Kings 19:2). Meaning, she wants to make his life like that of a dead prophet.

One wouldn’t think a man who has just slain 450 men with a sword could be afraid of a homicidal queen, but scripture records that he was, so afraid in fact, he flees to the wilderness. Our omniscient God asks, “What are you doing here?” more to make a point than to get information. 

Elijah, despairing, begs God to kill him, so afraid is he of Jezebel, and fully expecting her to make good on her threat.

Elijah then takes a depression nap, wakes and eats and eats and sleeps some more until God appears to him to guide him. And in the final verses of the chapter, God appears to Elijah in the silence, and—because scripture is often political—gives him the names of the men Elijah is to anoint King, one of whom will “bring about the ignominious death of Jezebel” (Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 3, p.151).

When you are exhausted and have lost hope, remember that Elijah thought all his good works had come to nothing. Remember that it was through retreat, sleeping and eating, rest and good food, that his exhaustion and discouragement was transformed. 

The Prayer for Quiet Confidence in our prayerbook states “that in returning and rest we will be saved, in quietness and confidence will be our strength” (BCP, 832). It is rest that enabled Elijah finally to rise, to walk to the door of the cave and encounter God waiting for him in silence.