Friday, Sept. 27
Exodus 22:1 – 23:19 Read it here
Today we continue with a collection of practical directions to the judges about how to resolve disputes. Some of the laws tell people how to act. Others provide direction for how to resolve difficult cases. Still others provide rules of punishment or restitution.
One thing that’s interesting is that most of the punishments are either death or monetary. The resources needed to imprison people are beyond what a nomadic people living one day at a time can afford.
The people would have been familiar with jails – their famous ancestor Joseph spent years in one, and even sent other people to jail. But jails only work in a culture that can build strong, fixed buildings and has the wealth to employ people to guard and maintain prisoners.
Another thing that’s interesting to me is how difficult it is to make the words support a political agenda, no matter how much people try to do that.
In U.S. politics, both parties pick and choose scripture texts to try to prove God is on their side. It’s easy to imagine a politician eagerly quoting “If a thief is caught breaking in and is struck so that he dies, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed.” Or maybe “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.” But probably not the same politician.
In Exodus, and even more as we get into Leviticus and Deuteronomy, we’ll read a lot of passages that have entered modern political debate.
Sometimes people agree with the text, and want to use scripture as a basis for gaining political support. Using less popular verses is condemned as trying to impose one’s religion on others.
There’s no easy way to resolve this. We live in a nation committed to religious freedom, and also to democracy. In a democracy, all people take their values with them into the voting booth; for the Christian, those values are shaped by scripture.
Christians have for centuries used their political power to support values they derive from scripture: the abolition of slavery, widespread education, dignity and safety for workers, equality for women, opposition to racism to name a few. But we also recognize that there have been times Christians have used laws to try to simply enforce conformity with sectarian preferences.
Deriving 21st-century political solutions from laws written for a very different culture and political environment more than 3,000 years ago is challenging.
It’s a challenge we have to embrace, though. God clearly wants justice for all people, and the Bible is the best guide we have for what that looks like. We need to approach the challenge with lots of prayer and abundant humility, though, and recognize we don’t always get it right.
And most of all we need to keep in mind that scripture is there to guide our beliefs. It’s not a weapon to use in support of whatever we’ve already decided. When it doesn’t say what we want it to, that means we have some serious reflecting to do.