The king commanded all the people, “Celebrate a Passover to the Lord your God following what is instructed in this scroll containing the covenant.” 22 A Passover like this hadn’t been celebrated since the days when the judges judged Israel; neither had it been celebrated during all the days of the Israelite and Judean kings. 23 But in the eighteenth year of King Josiah’s rule, this Passover was celebrated to the Lord in Jerusalem.
24 Josiah burned those who consulted dead spirits and the mediums, the household gods and the worthless idols—all the monstrous things that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem. In this way Josiah fulfilled the words of the Instruction written in the scroll that the priest Hilkiah found in the Lord’s temple. 25 There’s never been a king like Josiah, whether before or after him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, all his being, and all his strength, in agreement with everything in the Instruction from Moses.
26 Even so, the Lord didn’t turn away from the great rage that burned against Judah on account of all that Manasseh had done to make him angry. 27 The Lord said, “I will remove Judah from my presence just as I removed Israel. I will reject this city, Jerusalem, which I chose, and this temple where I promised my name would reside.”
28 The rest of Josiah’s deeds and all that he accomplished, aren’t they written in the official records of Judah’s kings? 29 In his days, the Egyptian king Pharaoh Neco marched against the Assyrian king at the Euphrates River. King Josiah marched out to intercept him. But when Neco encountered Josiah in Megiddo, he killed the king. 30 Josiah’s servants took his body from Megiddo in a chariot. They brought him to Jerusalem and buried him in his own tomb. The people of the land took Jehoahaz, Josiah’s son, anointed him, and made him king after his father. (Common English Bible)
“The Last Righteous King: When Josiah Reigned in Jerusalem,” Week Three
“What if?”
Two of the hardest, most difficult to pin down, least simple words in the English language, that open up a Pandora’s box of alternative universes, some in which the very worst did not have to happen to us, but also, sometimes, the very best also does not happen. Or, the very best does happen, but is then cruelly and prematurely taken away from us. And that can be true on a personal or familial level as well as on a collective, national level.
A Disciples of Christ pastor is at the heart of one such moment on that collective, national level, because he was also, briefly, President of the United States. James A. Garfield was a Disciples pastor by training who began a political career in Ohio that culminated in him gaining the Republican nomination for president in 1880. The current Republican president, Rutherford Hayes, was so detested that he did not even attempt to run for reelection, much less renomination—the Democrats despised him because he (in)famously nicked the presidency from their nominee, Samuel Tilden, in 1876, and his fellow Republicans disliked him because the price for Hayes’ Faustian pact was the end of Reconstruction.
James Garfield, on the other hand, was thoroughly incorruptible—a welcome shift from the less-than-above-board dealings of the Grant and Hayes administrations—and he was committed to civil rights, government reform, and ??. But only months into his presidency, he was shot by a resentful ex-follower who wrongly felt that Garfield owed him a patronage appointment. That was the first “What if” of the presidency of the Disciples pastor—what if he hadn’t been shot?
The second “What if” came afterwards, in his treatment. Germ theory was in its infancy, and Garfield’s doctors were not unanimous as to its veracity. Garfield very likely died not because of his wounds by themselves, but because the lack of hygiene by his doctors led to infections and illness that did eventually kill him.
And the third “What if” came after his death—his running mate, Chester A. Arthur, did not possess Garfield’s moral and intellectual acumen. He was a machine politician, and he was not so committed as Garfield was to civil rights. He signed into law grotesque pieces of legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act, which essentially banned Chinese immigrants from the United States solely on the basis of their nationality. Knowing what we know about Garfield, I cannot see him signing such a brazenly racist bill into law—I can only see him vetoing it.
Would Garfield have been more successful than his predecessor Hayes in binding up the country’s wounds, and more successful than his successor Arthur in championing the civil rights of others? I have to think so. But that is the core of the “What if” question, and it’s a question pertinent not only to America’s history and affairs, but to ancient Israel’s and Judah’s, including the demise of Josiah.
We return today to the story of Josiah, whose saga we spent the past two weeks unpacking together, and we will wrap his story up today. Josiah is remembered as the last righteous king of Judah, the southern kingdom after the unified kingdom of Israel split in two, before Judah is conquered by Nebuchadnezzar II just twenty-some years after Josiah’s death. But Josiah is also remembered as an uncommonly young king. He was crowned king at just eight years of age after his father, Amon, was assassinated after sitting on the throne for just two years—and this stood in marked contrast to the longevity of the reign of Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh, who reigned as king for fifty-five years.
Manasseh had reversed the pro-YHWH reforms of his own father, Hezekiah, in favor of idol worship, and the book of 2 Kings condemns him vigorously as a result. In his short reign, Amon continued in Manasseh’s worship of false deities. Josiah comes to the throne so young that he surely ruled with some sort of relative or royal advisor as regent. It was not until he was twenty-six and had already been on the throne for eighteen years that he begins his quest to reform the religious life of his kingdom and bring it back from worship of idols to the exclusive worship of God.
This quest for reform began two weeks ago, with the discovery of the scroll or book (likely a Torah scroll, or a fragment) in the Jerusalem temple to God. It is presented straightaway to Josiah, who last week brought it to Huldah, a prophetess of some renown, to be authenticated as the genuine article. Today, we have arrived at Josiah implementing his final religious reform, the reinstitution of the Passover meal, and his subsequent death in battle at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco.
Josiah has, spiritually and politically, represented a total good for Judah. Spiritually, he has reinvigorated the people’s covenant with God and brought them back into right relationship with their creator. Politically, he has for multiple decades now adeptly navigated Judah, a tiny kingdom, through the treacherous diplomatic waters of Egypt to the west, Assyria and Babylon to the east.
But Neco, the Egyptian Pharaoh who has just begun his reign and is likely eager to flex his muscles, begins a military campaign against Assyria (or Babylon). And the quickest way from the Sinai Peninsula that connects Egypt to the rest of the Near East is to go through Judah. Josiah’s decision to give fight to Neco may have been in the service of the Assyrians or Babylonians, but only so far as a the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend reasoning. Neco represented the immediate existential threat to Judah, and so while Josiah intercepting him at Megiddo may have served other foreign interests, it was fundamentally an act of national self-defense as well.
Josiah is killed in action at Megiddo, and a little more than twenty years after his death, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon will invade Judah, sack Jerusalem, and, per Babylonian imperial policy, take back with him into exile the ruling class of Jerusalem in order to leave the remaining Israelites decapitated, without a functioning government.
But even before then, Judah’s government quickly became dysfunctional. After Josiah’s death, his son Jehoahaz is crowned king. Jehoahaz, like Josiah, resists Neco, but so badly that within three months of Jehoahaz’s coronation he is captured and imprisoned by the Egyptian pharaoh, never to see Judah again—he dies in exile in Egypt.
From that point on, Judah is ruled by a series of puppet kings, installed by either Egypt or Babylon. Josiah’s next son Jehoiakim is installed by Neco, and Nebuchadnezzar II, realizing the situation, attacks Judah and forces Jehoiakim to switch his allegiance to Babylon. After Jehoiakim’s death, his son Jehoiachin is crowned king, and like his uncle Jehoahaz, he is deposed within months—this time by Nebuchadnezzar II instead of Neco, and Nebuchadnezzar II installs one final puppet king, Zedekiah, who rules until the Babylonian king decides to conquer Judah for good in 587/6 BCE, some twenty-two or twenty-three years after Josiah fell in battle in 609 BCE.
Thus ended the over four hundred years-old Davidic dynasty of kings in Jerusalem. But what if—what if Josiah hadn’t fallen in battle? Huldah the prophetess said that God would not let Judah fall so long as Josiah was king. What if Josiah had more time to prepare his sons Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim to be godly and effective rulers? What if?
I said at the beginning of my message that this question is just as searingly applicable to our personal and familial lives as it is to our collective, national identities. It is a question we so easily feel over any number of events in our lives. Sometimes it manifests as buyer’s remorse—what if I had bought this car instead of that one, or that house instead of this one? Other times, it is relational in nature—what if I had not said this thing to a loved one that hurt them and harmed our relationship? And still more times, it is spiritual in nature—what if my faith in God were stronger, deeper, less shakeable?
We can minimize those feelings and questions by taking control of those things we can control entirely, or control our small piece of. No, we by ourselves cannot control the outcome of an election, or an economic downturn, or even a sports game, but we can control our ability to contribute our small part to it, and when we do not abdicate that small part, I do think it reassures us to know that we left it all on the proverbial field. Knowing Josiah’s zeal the way we have gotten to these past few weeks, I’ve little doubt that he left it all out on the battlefield at Megiddo. He did everything he could for his small kingdom until he couldn’t anymore. God gave him that strength.
God gives us that strength too, to do all we can until we
can’t anymore, and our full devotion, our full commitment, to God ought to
mitigate the feeling of all those “What ifs.” Maybe they do not go away
entirely; perhaps they were never meant to, for they are a form of mourning,
and mourning is eternal. They are a very particular form of mourning, the
mourning of that which never existed, but had the hope of existing. We, with
our questions, mourn the ethereal, the hypothetical, the possible. We began this story with Josiah mourning that, rending his clothes and mourning what might have been if his grandfather Manasseh had been faithful to God and to God's covenant with the people. He was mourning not only what Manasseh did, but what he explicitly did not do, and Josiah spent the remainder of his kingship striving mightily to undo that ungodly legacy.
And we live, then, in this tension of both mourning and
striving, and the peace that comes with the latter. I think there was a peace
for Josiah, if not for his kingdom, and what followed was the mourning side of
that equation, of losing the possible. Josiah's striving may have led him finally, to some peace, even as there was mourning to follow. May that peace come to us, as surely
as it has come to Josiah, the last righteous king of Judah, for it is a peace that so many of us seek, but far
too few of us ever truly find.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
February 14, 2021