Both I and my children grew up with Walt Disney’s Fantasia as part of our cultural experience. I hope children as well as adults still watch it. It’s incredible how the art of that animated concert has held up for 80 years. One of the most memorable pieces of Fantasia was the Mickey Mouse version of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a story based on a poem by Goethe and set to music by Paul Dukas. In it Mickey the apprentice, one day when the sorcerer is away, attempts to escape the drudgery of hauling water by enchanting a broom to do the work for him.
The result is soon disaster because Mickey does not know how to turn off the magic. Chopping the broom into bits only results in each bit becoming another animated broom which hauls even more water. Soon the sorcerer’s workshop is flooded.
In the Disney movie, Micky is rescued by the return of the sorcerer who is stern and angry with him. In the Goethe poem, the sorcerer tells the apprentice that only a master should summon such spirits. The line became a cliche in German, a line about “the spirits that I called,” used in regard to summoning help that one cannot control, particularly in politics. It’s an image that Christians might do well to recall in these times in America.
In a very little read or preached book of the Old Testament (no reading from it is in the lectionary), there is a passing reference to “magic” (or “sorcery” or “witchcraft”) in verse 4 of chapter 3 of the prophet Nahum. The overall context, both of the chapter and the small book as a whole, is a prediction of the destruction of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, in God’s judgment for its sins and its offenses against the people of Israel.
In the first few chapters of chapter 3, there is a poetic and graphic description of ancient warfare:
Hear the crack of whips,
the rumble of wheels!
Horses’ hooves pound,
and chariots clatter wildly.
See the flashing swords and glittering spears
as the charioteers charge past!
There are countless casualties,
heaps of bodies–
so many bodies that people stumble over them.
Then the reasons for this vengeance wrought upon the city of Nineveh:
All this because Nineveh,
the beautiful and faithless city,
mistress of deadly charms–
enticed the nations with her beauty.
She taught them all her magic,
enchanting people everywhere.
The magic in sight is not so much the literal working of spells, although that was part of ancient culture. It’s more the “magic” of that “mistress of deadly charms,” that seducing of the nations by Assyria’s wealth (described further on in verse 16, “Your merchants have multiplied until the outnumber the stars” and power. The power in particular seduced Judah during the reign of king Ahaz, who formed an alliance with Assyria against the northern kingdom of Israel. Assyria then turned and subjugated Judah under King Hezekiah and was only turned away from destroying Jerusalem by divine intervention.
Magic is really about power and control. Assyria’s magic was its ability to convince other nations of its power and even to welcome it, as the Assyrian general Sennacherib suggested to Hezekiah in Isaiah chapter 36. But both history and the biblical record, including Nahum’s prophecy, show that such power is of the sorcerer’s apprentice sort, a seductive illusion of control that soon overpowers those who seek to employ it.
Nahum reassures us that God is not blind to the destruction wrought by the magic of power and that it will have its own judgment. And our Gospel lesson about the vineyard in Matthew 21:33-46 show us how God ultimately responds to such power by submitting to it in the crucifixion and death of His own Son, which actually results in victory and vanquishing of evil power in the Resurrection.
For us right now, it would be well to heed Nahum and the sorcerer’s apprentice and beware the seductive magic of power, to be wary of the “spirits” we summon in a bid to control what happens in the world around us. Nahum reminds us that power belongs only to God and that our attempts to employ it, even for good, will often turn out like Mickey’s misadventure.