I am leaning on Anna Carter Florence again this morning to fill out the story of Rahab and to offer some insight into why she is important enough that the gospel writer includes her in Jesus genealogy. We started this series by mentioning that the Gospel of Matthew works hard to prove that Jesus was indeed the one to fulfill the prophecy that the Messiah would be of David’s line. This is why the gospel starts with Jesus’ family tree. This tree consists of 47 names – 42 men, and 5 women. Each of these women play an important role in linking Jesus to the house of David. The challenge is that each of these women have a bit of a sketchy story – they are women who lived at the margins, who were foreigners, not all of them were Jewish, and each of them did risky things in order for them to survive in their context.
This morning we heard the story of Rahab, who is considered one of the heroines of the Israelites. Typically, we don’t hear her story during the the three rotation of the Lectionary – which is kind of strange given the importance she carries in history. I wonder if her profession – she’s a prostitute – makes people too uncomfortable. Easier to leave her out than wrestle with the less “acceptable” aspects of her life. So today, in defiance, we open our hearts and minds to the incredible story of Rahab.
Rahab plays a role in Israel’s second secret mission to check out the status of Canaan. Moses had led the first one some forty years before our story. But, as a Canaanite woman who lived and worked in Jericho, she really should have been a target, not the heroine of the story. Fortunately for her, and unfortunately for the Israelite spies, she ended up being the better spy… for she blew their cover within seconds of their arrival at her establishment – why they chose her place as the first stop on their journey into Jericho no one knows. Maybe they surmised (correctly) that a prostitute who lived within the walls of the city would have knowledge and insight into the workings of the people living there. Maybe they were confident (incorrectly) in their abilities to blend in with the people of Jericho, so confident that they thought they could take a few free unsupervised hours to do what ever they wanted before locking into their spy roles.
No matter how it is that they ended up at Rahab’s door, she made them as spies as soon as she saw them, which ended up being a good thing for them – because Rahab wasn’t the only one to spot them for what they were. The spies blending abilities were poor to say the least. News of their presence in the city made its way to the king, who scribbled a note to Rahab demanding that she bring them out so that the king’s guys could bring them to him. We all heard what Rahab told the king: “well, they did come here, but when the city was closing for the night, they went on their way. I have no idea which way they went… I was cleaning up. You’d better go after them, you may be able to catch them still.” In the meantime, the two “spies” were hiding on her roof convincingly covered by stalks of flax. When the coast was clear, the two Israelites snuck down off the roof, and that’s when Rahab made her deal with the now “compromised and greatly in-her-debt spies.”
As they sheepishly climbed out of her window to make their escape she followed their instructions, trusting that their promise would keep her and her family safe when the Israelites did finally come to sack Jericho. They followed her instructions to get out of the city safely and she followed their directions fully, tying a red cord in the window. That little bit of red cord would be a sign to the Israelite soldiers to spare the people in the house… now, if you are thinking that you’ve heard something like this before, indeed you have. This red cord echoes the blood on the lintels of the Israelites homes In Egypt when the angel of Death passed over sparing their lives. In the same way, the red cord served to spare the lives of Rahab and her family – they were the only ones to survive the siege. According to scripture, from that moment, Rahab and her family went on to spend the rest of their lives living in Israel.
Rahab’s superstar status as a woman of courage and faith hasn’t changed over the centuries, which is saying something, especially given “her triple threat marginalized status (‘harlot/prostitute’ is the big hit, but ‘woman’ and ‘Canaanite’ pack a punch too).” Somehow these just add to the mystique of her story. Biblical commentators through time have ranged from being embarrassed by Rahab’s harloting ways and prefer to gloss over it by referring to her as an ‘innkeeper’ – a far more respectable profession. While other commentators have skipped the embarrassment and went straight to calling Rahab a prophet, a heroine and the most beautiful woman in the world. Regardless, what we do know about her is that she is right there in Jesus’ genealogy, and she is the only woman to show up in the roll call of faith found in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
She is also more complex than this and way more difficult to pin down, which makes biblical interpreters lives more challenging. Some of this comes down to the book where we find her story. The book of Joshua is an account of the military conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, and quite honestly holds some pretty scary stories. For too many years, the book of Joshua has been read with the point of view that it authorizes violence in the name of chosenness… like it’s the manifest destiny for God’s chosen people to go about conquering, killing and enslaving other lands and people. In some ways it’s a text of terror and it needs a massive disruption. And yet not even Rahab can get out from under the theological toxins in her story. As a Canaanite who converted to Judaism, she has been lauded as proof that the violence was justified; as the Canaanite who conspired she’s been called a sell out and a collaborator. Somehow she has been characterized as pawn in someone else’s story, not a disrupter at all. Which is not at all the person we meet – she is not a pawn, nor is she some wilting flower who is going to lay down and let things happen.
Rahab is like a certain kind of stock character in literature: not an upstairs manor leading person but rather a downstairs servant whose cleverness will ultimately save the day. When we meet characters first impressions paint them as unimportant, merely there to support the leading character. But we underestimate them to our peril – as those manor owners usually find out. They are often more brave, clever and noble that those upstairs inhabitants with character traits that show the weaknesses of the privileged ones. Doesn’t matter if these supporting characters are chauffeurs or maids or prostitutes – what does matter is that they are survivors.
Rahab is one such character… a prostitute living on the edges, inside the city walls quietly going about her life. From the edges she sees things differently, she sees the truth where many don’t or won’t. Knowing this truth, she seizes the opportunity when others might waver. Her life is saved, even though (and this is always an irony in Scripture) it wasn’t a life that many in the city would have thought to save in the chaos that comes with violence. But she survives, and her family too, because she saw the chance, saw the slight opening, and continued pressing on when many wouldn’t. In our biblical texts, this kind of persistence is characterized as faith.
And she is so much more than that… and here I want to directly share what Anna writes: “For us, as we read her story today, she is the downstairs stock character for OUR manor house. Rahab is an unseen, listening presence inside the walls of the things we human beings construct in the name of God. Our buildings. Our theologies. Our political platforms. Anything that delineates an “us” and a “them,” anything that claims to know who is chosen and who is not, anything that sanctions divine violence as a final solution, is a hollow wall where Rahab needs to be listening – and plotting. If necessary, she may even be plotting against us. And in the end, that may be the very thing that saves our lives. Some texts, even OUR texts, are in need of massive disruption.
Rahab is the one to do it. She’s the only one in the story who seems to know the first thing about disruption: how to change sides, choose allies, plan escapes, and betray her city, when these are necessary – so she and her family can survive. She’s not the owner of the house. But she knows all the hidden passageways, and she’s classic double-agent material. That red cord in her window is for us.”
