THE INSISTENCE OF GOD
Readings:
Judges 11.29–end
Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh; he passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead he passed on to the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, ‘If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt-offering.’
So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them; and the Lord gave them into his hand. He inflicted a massive defeat on them from Aroer to the neighbourhood of Minnith—twenty towns—and as far as Abel-keramim. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel.
Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he saw her, he tore his clothes, and said, ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.’ She said to him, ‘My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has given you vengeance against your enemies, the Ammonites.’ And she said to her father, ‘Let this thing be done for me: Grant me two months, so that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, my companions and I.’ ‘Go,’ he said—and sent her away for two months. So she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity on the mountains. At the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow he had made. She had never slept with a man. So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.
Matthew 22.1–14
Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.” But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.
Then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’
Sermon:
Let me begin with a confession. I have a daughter. Just one. And I love her very much. But there are days—just occasionally, you understand—when I read Judges 11 and think to myself, “Well… maybe Jephthah wasn’t entirely wrong…”
I’m joking, of course. Mostly.
Because the truth is, Jephthah’s story is one of the most ghastly in all of Scripture. It’s gruesome, tragic, and infuriating. And yet—like the most unsettling parts of the Bible—it’s also disturbingly familiar. Here is a man who believes, like so many religious folks through the ages, that God is a transaction. A contract. A heavenly accountant.
Jephthah is on the brink of war. The Spirit of the Lord has already stirred within him. He’s inspired, energised, ready. But rather than trust in that inspiration, he panics. He makes a bargain. “If you let me win,” he says, “I’ll sacrifice whatever walks out of my front door.”
Let’s take a moment to admire the sheer idiocy of this proposal. What did he think would come out to greet him? A sheep? A camel? The family cat? He seems surprised when it’s his daughter. His only child. She runs to him with joy, tambourines in hand, and he tears his clothes in anguish.
And yet—and this is perhaps the darkest twist—he still goes through with it.
It’s a story that reminds us that the most dangerous ideas about God are often the ones that come with the most certainty. Jephthah is certain that God wants a deal. He’s certain that the divine is best approached through sacrifice, performance, exchange. He’s wrong. But he’s not the only one to think that way.
Which brings us to Jesus' parable in Matthew. Another troubling tale. A king throws a wedding banquet. The first guests refuse to come—so he sends his soldiers to burn their cities, which is… dramatic. Then, with remarkable generosity, he opens the feast to everyone: the riff-raff, the randoms, the good and the bad alike. But when he spots a man not wearing a wedding garment, he has him bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness.
You’ll forgive me if I say this is not the most cuddly of Jesus’ parables.
And yet, something is being exposed here—something uncomfortable, something essential. In both stories, the God-figure is troubling, even terrifying. But what if the point is not that God is a petty king or a bloodthirsty tyrant, but that our metaphors for God are always just that—metaphors? What if these stories are deliberately pushing us to confront the absurdity of trying to fit the infinite mystery of the Divine into our neat, contractual models?
You see, I don’t believe the Bible gives us a neat picture of God at all. In fact, I’d go further: I don’t think it’s trying to. It’s giving us something much wilder, much stranger. It’s giving us a long, tangled, sometimes violent conversation between human beings and the inarticulable mystery we have dared to call "God".
And Jephthah? He treats that mystery as a mechanism. He imagines the Divine as a kind of cosmic vending machine—offer a sacrifice, get a victory. But the text itself never tells us that God asked for any such thing. The initiative, and the horror, is entirely Jephthah’s own. This is not divine justice—it’s human delusion, dressed up in piety.
And in the parable, it’s the opposite delusion. The guest without wedding clothes assumes the invitation comes with no expectations. He treats the feast like a free-for-all, a divine happy hour. No reverence, no transformation, no preparation. Just turn up and tuck in.
Jephthah sees God as a negotiator. The wedding guest sees God as a pushover. But both are trying to domesticate the Divine—to make it manageable, predictable, useful.
But what if God is not a person at all? Not an old man in the sky with a ledger and a lightning bolt. Not a tyrant to be flattered or a bouncer to be tricked. What if, as John D. Caputo proposes, “God” is better understood not as a being, but as an insistence?
An insistence. A pressure. A summons. A disturbance in the heart. A restlessness in the soul. A holy nagging that calls us toward justice, compassion, mercy, love. The kind of love that cannot be bargained with or worn like a costume. The kind of love that requires something of us—change, repentance, the whole of our hearts.
The invitation to the banquet is wide and generous. But it’s not an invitation to remain exactly as we were. It’s an invitation to be changed. To clothe ourselves—not in literal garments, but in the fabric of grace, in the habits of love, in the rhythm of a new way of being human.
God does not demand burnt offerings, or grandiose vows, or theatrical piety. God is not flattered by our desperate promises or impressed by our spiritual fashion statements. What God does—what God always does—is insist.
Insist that there is a better way. Insist that the victim is not to be sacrificed but honoured. Insist that the feast is for all—but not without a transformation of the heart.
So, what does that mean for us?
Perhaps it means listening more carefully for that sacred insistence in the quiet corners of our lives. Perhaps it means laying down our attempts to control the world—even our attempts to control God—and letting ourselves be unsettled, called, changed.
And if, one day, my daughter should come running out of the house to greet me with a tambourine, I promise I shall not tear my garments or offer her as a burnt offering. I shall make her a cup of tea. Because the only vow I intend to keep is this: never again to confuse the whisper of God’s insistence with the roar of my own ego.
Amen.
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