A Family Affair
For Obadiah, Edom’s main offence is not what she did but to whom she did it. It was within the family — a crime against a brother. She saw her brother being robbed and pillaged, and did nothing. She behaved no better than foreigners (v 11). She even gloated over him, visited him in his time of trouble and started throwing her weight about, walked off with what little was left (vv 12-13), cut off the retreat of those who tried to escape and handed over any who survived to their enemies (v 14).
For her brother this was a crisis — ‘a day of calamity’. Yet Edom could not even just pass by quietly on the other side as if not to notice and, if exploitation were not enough, she waited her opportunity for the satisfaction of kicking him when he was down. She just joined in and behaved like everybody else.
With relatives like that, who needs enemies. What victims need most of all in that sort of situation is somebody they can rely on; they also need hope that one day things might be different, faith in a God of power and justice, and vv 17-21 read almost like a freedom song arising from the horror to be read alongside the ‘creed’ in Nahum 1. All victims need to know that their enemy is his enemy. All oppressors need to know that in God’s ‘book’ they will never get away with it.
Jesus then invites us to ask, ‘but who is not my brother?’ All women are our sisters, all men our brothers. The whole human race is one family. The globe is a village. So how do we treat those who are victims of injustice and misfortune? Perhaps the crucial question is not ‘who is my brother’ (Luke 10:29) but ‘who is my victim?’ and a practial response to Obadiah (and Nahum) could be to identify that person or group staring us in the face and desperately in need of our help, whether it be women, the gay community, ethnic minorities, victims of debt, or whatever.