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Pastoral Points
Recently, someone sent me an essay about some of the ways Jesus turned his culture upside-down. There were many traditions and rules that had built up over the years, mostly in an attempt to faithfully follow God’s laws. The result was often burdensome, however, and ended up drawing people away from the heart of God’s laws, which are given for human flourishing.
Even beginning in the law codes of the early days of God’s people, we hear the guidance that injuries can only be punished equivalently—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn, life for life (Exodus 21, Leviticus 24). To our modern ears, this may sound like a severe penalty, but in fact it was a great improvement for the time. The purpose was not to impose a harsh punishment, but to limit punishment to something relatively reasonable!
In the cultures of the ancient world, the typical vengeance for an injury would have been much more extreme — perhaps even a life taken in retribution for a minor injury, depending on the social status of the people involved. The values of the Bible (sometimes referred to as the Judeo-Christian tradition) are the primary force that shaped that Western civilization through the centuries. Secular critics of the church often champion values like inclusion and justice and the dignity of all people (which are unquestionably wonderful ideals) but they consistently fail to recognize that those values don’t exist outside of a biblical, Judeo-Christian framework.
Virtually no other cultures of any time or place have had that kind of value system. Nothing in history tells us that these ideas are inherent to our fallen human nature. Quite the opposite, in fact! The vast majority of cultural values are some version of “might makes right,” where the powerful can do whatever they want and everyone else has no rights.
Certainly that was the norm in the ancient world. This is why God called his people to be set apart, to build a way of life very different from Pharaoh’s Egypt, where they had toiled as slaves to the benefit of a very few.
This is also why Jesus overturned the ways of the world into which he was born. That’s what Mary sings about in her beautiful song, the Magnificat, which sets the tone for the whole gospel story: “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1).
For more on this, I recommend the book Dominion by Tom Holland (who is himself neither Christian nor Jewish). It is important for us to recognize the beauty, goodness and truth inherent in the Christian way of life, and to safeguard it from the forces of the world — including those within each of us — that are always seeking to return to the might-makes-right ways of Pharoah’s Egypt.
