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Reflection for August 21, 2005

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The Destruction of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, / And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; / And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

I remember being so impressed by that poem of Lord Byron when I first read it out of my freshman high school literature book so many years ago. It's all about the destruction of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's army - decimated by a plague during its siege of Jerusalem.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, / That host with their banners at sunset were seen: / Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, / That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

Today's first reading dates back to that crisis in 701 BC when, after conquering and deporting the ten 'lost tribes" of Israel several years earlier, the ruthless Assyrian army under Sennacherib came back to do Jerusalem the same favor. And so a siege ensued and things looked so hopeless that King Hezekiah was willing to ransom the city with every piece of gold he could lay his hands on. But to no avail. The Assyrian would settle for nothing but surrender and deportation. So sure were the Assyrians that the Hebrew God would prove as helpless as the gods of other nations they had conquered that the Assyrian general held a parley beneath the city walls with the Shebna and Eliakim mentioned in our first reading, shouting for all to hear: "Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad and Samaria? Which of the gods of all these lands has ever rescued his land from my hand? And do you expect your God to rescue you?"

Well, according to the context of today's first reading, Shebna, the master of Jerusalem's palace, was intimidated enough to put the finishing touches on his ornate sepulcher and it was this loss of confidence that led to God's transferring his office to Eliakim. Of course, given the circumstances of Jerusalem's imminent destruction, this was like being appointed Jefferson Davis's Secretary of State two weeks before Grant took Richmond. But apparently Eliakim had enough confidence to merit the office and it did not go unrewarded. And here we return to Byron's poem: an apparently lethal epidemic hit the Assyrian camp, weakening its army so badly that it hightailed it home where - to boot - Sennacherib himself was assassinated one year later by two of his sons. And so peace came to tiny Judah - temporarily.

And how many times in the course of the past two thousand years has the Church, as the perpetuation of Jerusalem, been besieged - by Roman emperors, barbarian invasions, ecclesiastical and theological infighting, the Reformation, the Age of Reason and today by the dynamics of an electronic era? And yet it has survived. And not by the destruction of the forces that have besieged it (though that might have been the wish of many) but more often by the subtle assimilation of those forces, so that somehow it has remained forever old yet ever ready to be new! Could all this be attributed to Christ's guaranteeing Peter (as a figure of the Church) the durability of a Rock while also presenting him with the keys that might open up the future to fresher dimensions of faith, hope and love?

Of course Jesus in using the term keys refers to the kind that open doors and gates. But the term has other applications. For instance we speak of the keys of a piano. And isn't the present Pope said to be quite an accomplished pianist? So let's hope he applies the keys he's familiar with in such a way as to make of our future something musical and thereby save the human race from things somber - as when "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold . . ."

-- Geoff Wood