The American satirist PJ O’Rourke
once remarked that, ‘God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a
stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules
and regulations.’
We spent last night in church looking
at Exodus 21, one of those passages which contains a long list of instructions
for various scenarios. Perhaps, PJ O’Rourke has read Exodus 21 too, and he
reckons it’s texts like this which represent such a drag on God’s reputation. But
as I’ve spent time thinking about Exodus 21, I’ve begun to think about similar
OT passages in a new way.
One of the strangest things about
Exodus 21 is the subject matter of the opening verses: how to treat slaves. Given
that the people of Israel have just been delivered from the bondage of Egypt,
this is the last thing you would expect to read. It seems like such a letdown
to contemplate that in the post-Exodus landscape there will still be those who
are owned by others, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is still a
world which is governed by some harsh economic realities. However, Exodus 21
does at least affirm that in Israel’s life slaves are to have certain
fundamental rights, disappointing to us but a significant piece of progress in
1200 BC.
Thinking about these instructions, I remembered
Jesus’ words about divorce in Matthew 19, where he says that Moses only allowed
such measures, ‘because you were so hard-hearted.’ These rules and regulations
don’t exist to make us better people, they exist to safeguard us and the
community when things, inevitably, go wrong. I was also reminded of how, in his
letters, Paul seems to have recognised the gap between God’s ideal and what was
achievable in the circumstances of his day. In a moment of lyrical rhetoric he
proclaimed to the Galatian Christians that ‘there is no longer slave or free,’
but several years later, when he writes to the Ephesians and Philemon, he
appears to be much more pragmatic on the issue of slavery. He is still a voice
for change, in that he calls on masters not to threaten those they own, but his
thinking also seems to be grounded in the realistic understanding that the
abolition of slavery would have had catastrophic economic consequences at that
point in history.
What has also struck me as I’ve
reflected on these passages is the room for manoeuvre offered by many of the
rules and regulations. For example, Exodus 21:12 instructs that a sentence of
death for anyone guilty of deliberate murder, but the following verse offers
the potential for leniency, if the act was ‘not premeditated but came about by
an act of God,’ a clause which seems to provide ample scope for flexible
interpretation. When I read the Gospels, it seems to me that Jesus never speaks
of the law as harsh or restrictive (in fact he says he hasn’t come to take away
one letter of it), but he is at his angriest when he finds the Pharisees
applying the law with no flexibility, no willingness to look with compassion on
what lies behind people’s actions on certain occasions.
I wonder what lessons there are for
us from Exodus 21. It seems to me that one of the basic assumptions behind
these rules is that you will never guarantee perfect behaviour. People will
sin, people will make mistakes. But Israel is given a set of guidelines for
knowing how best to minimise the impact of the mistakes on individuals and the
whole of the community and we might want to think in that light about our own
commitment to Christian standards. So often, it feels like our default option
when relating to the world is to throw the rule book at people. We think we
have the right to control others, and we forgot our calling is to model
something more attractive, and to lovingly help when things go wrong.
