Thursday, August 21, 2025
Memorial of Saint Pius X, Pope
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Vows
The Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah.
Or so it seemed.
Jephthah, like David, was born out of wedlock, his mother a prostitute (Judges 11). Eventually his brothers drove him out of his father’s household, and he settled on the edge of the desert, at first alone but then a “gang of scoundrels gathered around him.” In a short time he earned a Robin Hood-like reputation as a mighty warrior. Following the needle of his name, which means “set free,” Jephthah and his family (wife and daughter) lived a set-free life on the edge of things.
300 years earlier the Ammonites lost their battle with Joshua and the Lord’s army of Israelites. Now they were back seeking revenge, and in fear the Israelites in Gilead looked to Jephthah for help. Uncertain of victory, he made a deal with God.
If you deliver the Ammonites into my power,
whoever comes out of the doors of my house
to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites
shall belong to the LORD.
I shall offer him up as a burnt offering.
Are you kidding me? What kind of an offering is this? What kind of God did Jephthah think he was praying to? I guess like most of us most of the time, he saw God through his childhood experience with family and with himself.
The Lord delivered the Ammonites into his power, twenty cities in all.
Word of Jephthah’s victory spread fast, and when he returned home his delighted daughter came dancing out to greet him.
Oh, no! Jephthah’s joy collapsed around him and he tore his clothes in grief and shame. But this likely twelve year old, innocent, proud of her dad, accepted her fate.
Do with me as you have vowed.
Let me have this favor:
Spare me for two months, that I may go off down the mountains
to mourn my virginity with my companions.
“Go,” he replied.
Would she return? She returned, and Jephthah “did to her as he had vowed.”
His vow was foolhardy, but so are ours. I vow never to forgive, I vow that I will accomplish impossible things, and kill myself trying. I vow to eat the right foods and exercise every day, and if I don’t I’ll punish myself. I vow to keep track of everything I read and watch and eat and do, for what reason exactly? If I fail to keep this record, my vow insures that I feel like a failure. I vow to write this devotion every day. I missed a day last week, for the first time in years. I feel a bit compulsive about writing something for that day, something to post so I can rest.
Vows seem so ubiquitous that I don’t recognize most of them until I fail. I am sure (almost) that Jephthah forgot his own vow until he approached the door to his tent and then suddenly, before they appeared, realized the danger he was to his daughter and his wife.
Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who turns not to idolatry or strays after falsehood.
I cannot promise to keep my vows, because I am human and not God. When I do what I say I’ll do, praise the Lord. When I don’t, I must still praise the Lord. In Fully Human, Fully Divine, Michael Casey writes about Paul’s confession in Romans 7 … “What I want to do, I do not do; what I do not want to do, I do.”
This is not a case of my individual deviancy, but it is the universal human condition. This native inconsistency is like a preexisting state of sin, innate wickedness lurking at the door (as it is described in Genesis 4:7), ready to erupt in actions that are more or less deliberately malicious. “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn 1:8). We exist in a state of disorientation because the “body” aspect of our being seems to prevent our living constantly in the presence of God. (p. 38)
As this is true, so am I humbled to recognize that I am made, not the Maker. I am human and therefore ultimately untrustworthy as a vow-maker. To know this and accept it allows me to surrender my supposed entitlements as a child of God and simply BE that child, letting God lead me in the way everlasting.
(Judges 11, Psalm 40, Psalm 95, Matthew 22)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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