"I Still Want to Name a Kid Phinehas"

When my wife and I found out our third child was on the way, I made a case that if the baby was a boy, we should name him Phinehas. I had a whole speech involving zeal and covenants and a name nobody else would be handing out. She heard me out, which is more than the argument deserved, and said no, on the grounds that every single person under the age of forty would hear "Phinehas" and think of some kid named Ferb. I tried again with the fourth. Also a no, this time something about a platypus.. If you know my children, you know we have no Phinehas running around this house. 

I bring this up because I have been studying the actual Phinehas this week, the one in Numbers, and it occurs to me that I still want the name a lot more now that I understand the man.

Numbers 25, if you have never spent an afternoon there, is not a comfortable chapter. Israel is camped at Shittim, and things have gone sideways in the particular way things go sideways when a people forget who they belong to. There is intermarriage with Moabite women, there is worship of Baal of Peor, and there is a plague moving through the camp. By the time the dust settles on this story, twenty four thousand people are dead.

 In the middle of all this, while Moses and the elders and, frankly, everybody who should know better are standing at the door of the tabernacle weeping , wringing their hands at the entrance like men watching a house burn down from the sidewalk  an Israelite man walks straight through camp, in broad daylight, in front of God and everybody, with a Midianite woman on his arm. Not sneaking. Walking through like he's got something to prove.

Phinehas sees this and gets up, takes a spear, follows them into the tent, and while they are in the precarious act ends it, or rather ends them with one plunge.

And the plague stops.

I want to be careful here, because I know exactly what this story sounds like if you read it wrong, and I have no interest in handing you a permission slip for anything. This is a story about something much narrower and, I think, much harder. Zeal. Specifically, zeal that is not about you.

God's own commentary on what just happened is worth sitting with. He doesn't say Phinehas was angry, though he surely was. He says Phinehas was zealous for My sake (v. 11)

That's the hinge of the text. Everybody else at that door was grieving, but grief, by itself, can also be a sophisticated way of doing nothing.

Phinehas skipped the grieving and went straight to the acting, because what was happening in that tent wasn't primarily an insult to him. It was an insult to God, happening in God's own camp, in full view, and nobody else was willing to do anything.

That’s the difference between selfish anger and zeal. Anger asks, what is this costing me. Zeal asks, what is this costing Him. They can look identical from a distance  both of them get up out of the chair  but only one of them is safe to hand a spear to.

Here's where I have to be honest about my own so called zeal generally: it rarely costs me anything. Phinehas walked into a tent where the entire camp could see exactly what he was doing and precisely what it would cost him if he was wrong He didn't have the luxury of doing it quietly. And that's usually the tell for the real thing. Zeal that costs you nothing and that nobody will ever know about, isn't really being tested. The zeal that matters is the kind that looks like just doing the next hard thing in front of you.

I think about this with my own kids more than I'd like to admit. Not the spear part  I want to be very clear to whoever is reading this that I am not workshopping violence as a parenting strategy…... But the getting up part. There is a version of fatherhood that mostly just weeps at the door  that sees what's happening in the camp, feels bad about it, maybe prays about it, and never actually walks anywhere.

I have been that man plenty. It is so much easier to have the correct opinion about a thing happening in your own house than to get up and go do something about it while everyone's watching and it might make things awkward at supper.

There's a detail near the end of the passage that I love. God's reward to Phinehas is a covenant of peace, for a man who had just, by every appearance, brought the opposite of peace into the camp.

But that's exactly the paradox the whole story is built on. Real peace, the kind that actually holds a household together, sometimes has to be preceded by somebody willing to disturb the false peace everyone had been quietly settling for.

Peace that costs nothing to keep usually isn't peace. It's just an agreement to keep putting off the next hard thing until it's someone else's problem.

I don't know that I'll ever be asked to be Phinehas in the dramatic sense. Most of us won't. But I do think most of us get asked, fairly regularly, to be either the man weeping at the door or the man who gets up over something far smaller than a plague. A conversation you keep avoiding because it'll be uncomfortable at dinner. A thing your kid is doing that you've decided to call a phase because naming it would cost you an evening. The next hard thing, whatever it is, sitting there waiting on you to either do it or explain to yourself why now isn't the time.

I've got a next hard thing waiting on me most weeks, most likely. But I'm trying to let Phinehas remind me it's usually better done than explained.

Love you dearly. Jacob

Housekeeping note: I'm moving to one post a week instead of two. Not because I ran out of things to say I have four children, I will never run out of things to say but because two posts a week apparently requires a version of me that doesn't also have a job, a Bible class, and a small village of people who occasionally need things. Who knew.