Rescued

Let’s imagine a wealthy and powerful person rescued a group of young adults from a life of slavery in a brothel. Let’s imagined this person brings these poor unfortunates to this person’s great estate. On the estate are all that this group of former slaves needs for life. They just need to settle in, grow some food, build a life. What would you imagine would happen to this group of young people?

It would be entirely believable that very quickly this new community would decay into a cruel anarchy. We’d love to imagine that the experience of slavery and deprivation would make the formerly enslaved sex workers noble and high-minded, but unfortunately experience with human beings leads us to imagine that it would not be unlikely for some of the more powerful former slaves would quickly figure out how to advantage themselves at the expense of others.

Rules for Living One the Estate

Let’s imagine the wise liberator understood this about the former slaves and so decided to give them some rules for living on the estate. We would imagine this liberator is entirely within her rights to lay down such rules, given that this is her estate. He would likely select rules that are not too strange to the culture of the former slaves and not too strange to the neighbors of the estate with which the new inhabitants must now get along. The liberator wishes for the conduct of the estate’s new inhabitants to reflect the character of the liberator, to enhance her reputation and to be a positive influence in the community of his neighbors.

If the new inhabitants of the estate were to violate the rules set down by the liberator what would the liberator be entitled to do in response?

We would probably imagine a wise liberator would in subtle and gentle ways encourage following the rules and discourage breaking them. She would probably wish for this new community to set up structures by which they would police themselves, embracing the order freely out of gratitude to the liberator and for their mutual well-being and peace.

The Presence of the Liberator

Now let’s imagine that the liberator is a humble person who, in many ways, would like her glory shared. Some might imagined that such a wealthy and powerful person would have her image and likeness presented prodigiously throughout the estate.

Many might think the liberator to be a strange person, expending so much time and energy on the happiness of some poor sex slaves. But what is stranger still about this liberator is her humility. One of the rules she makes for estate is that they are to in now way create a drawing of her, or cast her in stone or metal. They are not to make an image of her in any way.

Let’s make the story stranger still and imagine that the liberator’s rescue of these poor unfortunates was accomplished without ever actually showing her face. She had co-opted a former slave and with his help and some other use of her power freed them and delivered them to her estate. What she most wanted was their well-being and that their community would be an inspiration and a light to the neighbors of the estate.

One of the commands the liberator gives is that the residents of the estate pass on these rules to their children through proceeding generations. The generations of slaves will die off and the children won’t remember the deliverance or the deliverer. This is why the liberator wants the story rehearsed, and even passed down in traditions and ceremonies so that the context of life on the estate won’t be lost or forgotten.

Deuteronomy 4

The little story I made up above is in some ways the story of the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy serves multiple purposes

• It is the second giving of the law for the new generation that has emerged from he desert wanderings and the death of the rebellious generation
• It is the “swan song” of Moses as he revisits what the people will need to enter the promised land.
• It is the formulated covenantal document that sets out how the vassal will inhabit the realm of the great king to which they have pledged allegiance and to which he has pledged protection.

The story of the liberator and the former slaves helps us fill out the picture of the relationships between the parties.

Contemporary Intuitive Readings of Deuteronomy

What’s interesting to me is the different ways we have approached this covenant document and the rules within it.

• People who keep these rules will be blessed, often understood as getting what they want out of life, like happiness, prosperity, security, etc. People who break these rules will be cursed. There is a blessing and cursing section later in the book but we should pay attention to the way we unconsciously and often selectively make it apply directly to us as it did to ancient Israel in the specific, covenantal context for which it was given.
• People who keep these rules get to go to heaven and those who break them go to hell. We should note that there is nothing in Deuteronomy about heaven or hell. It is about living in the promised land.
• People who keep these rules (selectively, see point 1) get to stay in the church and those who break them get kicked out. Again, there isn’t anything in these rules about the church.
• These are old, archaic rules that just express the superstitious notions of a long dead people. The rules themselves are functions of ancient society are should be ignored or forgotten. Paying any attention to them or trying to discern how they might inform contemporary conduct, public or private, individual or societal is at best a waste of time and at worst dangerous.

Reading Deuteronomy as Christians

You can find all four positions in the broader church today. I think if we want to read the book of Deuteronomy as Christians we need to take a bit more care with it. This will involve a few key steps.

• We must always understand the rule giving in the context of the larger story. This is why I told the story of the slaves and the liberator. It helps frame the rules in a more helpful light. It tempers the automatic and machine like “qualification” and “disqualification” scenarios we imagine. If frames rule making and rule keeping in a larger story about rescue, about life, and about what makes for well-being and glory.
• We must understand where this story fits in the much larger, longer, and broader story of Yhwh and his people. In this story the relationship between the former slaves and the liberator, and themselves, and their neighbors goes very very wrong. The liberator tries through numerous generations to make things work on the estate, only to finally give up on the project and send the descendants of the slaves away into the broader world. The liberator, however, never gives up on the slaves but sends her son, who will be killed by the slaves but this will be the start of a new story.
• The stories of the laws given by the liberator, and how it worked out with the slaves becomes data for those who wish to stand in ongoing relationship with that liberator. Christians believe that they do in fact relate to this same God and that while the past relationship should be read and understood within a particular cultural context the laws given have revelatory value for living in gratitude for our place in the narrative arc of the story.

We Really Like Rules to Distinguish and Qualify

The Christian approach to reading Deuteronomy has been around for a very long time, has been taught, practiced, and re-articulated again and again in Christian history. I’m amazed at how often it is forgotten or ignored not only by Christians but also be well-informed non-Christians who have had a lot of experience with the Christian church. Why is this?

I think the first reason is that we really like rules. Rules are very handy things to help us distinguish ourselves from others, usually at the expense of the other, and qualify ourselves for privileges we’d like to keep exclusive to ourselves and our friends. In most case any imagined sheen of divine revelation is unnecessary but surely advantageous. Generally speaking we love to employ rules but resist having them employed upon us. This is a basic impulse of our heart.

Common Counter-moves Against Rule Promoters and Appliers

The way the game is played is that some of us find some rules against certain groups of people and we apply these, usually selectively in our own favor. Those against whom we’ve applied the rules then protest.

• There has been selectivity in applying the rules. If one selects differently the rule appliers (or accusers) can also be shown to be rule breakers.
• “The rules are old, archaic, from a different culture associated with defeat or obsolescence and therefore the rules are invalid.” Few who apply this new rule stop to reflect on the rule implicit in their new “old rules don’t count” rule. Again, we are ardent rule makers when rules seem to progress our own interests.
• You can employ my critique of this rule by asserting a new favorite rule: “Rules are promoted and applied by people with power who wish to progress their own advantage and privilege at the expense of the weak.” This is often a true and helpful observation to make, but it itself is a rule and suffers from the weakness it highlights.

In all of this we begin to see a habit of suspicion within our own hearts. We have trust issues. This again is why it is important to once again return to the liberator story I began with.

Becoming Our Own Judges of Well-being

Perhaps the most subtle of the forms of resistance and rebellion to the rescue of the liberator is deciding to think for her and taking advantage of her absence.

The slaves might, having been given the rules, decide that what the liberator really wants for them is their flourishing and their happiness. They might then imagined that the liberator, although generous, is perhaps uninformed or naive about what former slaves want or need for happiness and flourishing. They then decide that the best thing to do would be to amend or replace the rules given by the liberator to ones that suit them better. After all aren’t they the ones who know best what flourishing looks like or feels like and aren’t they the ones who are in the best position to judge whether or not the rules are really working?

There is something to be said for this insight of the residents of the estate. In this way our story breaks down a bit because our imagined liberator is herself just a human being. If the liberator is an all wise, all powerful, all knowing God, the argument is undermined.

Yet as we saw last week  this God is interested both in opening himself up to our influence and willing to adapt the laws according to our appeal.

We ought, however, to not forget that this community of former slaves will have their own biases and interests in play that will shape, for better or for worse, their perspectives. It is easier for us to imagine this of this imagined community of former slaves than it is to imagine it of ourselves. We of course have a self-serving bias that blinds us to our own biases and exaggerates the biases of others. Any community will have these kinds of biases too.

Remembering the Context

We must begin by reminding ourselves that the liberator was under no obligation to rescue the slaves. The liberator was under no obligation to allow the slaves to reside on her estate. Perhaps the most questionable call of the liberator was to get himself involved with the slaves at all and then to enter into a permanent relationship with them. Most of us have learned in our lives that people are problematic, especially if they have been wounded in ways that one might imagine in the sex trade. We try to keep such people at arms length from us. We set up institutions and “halfway houses” so that such people don’t actually live with us because we can easily imagine all the drama that would be involved in such an arrangement.

It would be natural for the former slaves to be suspicious of the liberator. These people have been victimized and abused. How do they know all of this generosity isn’t simply a ploy to gain their trust only to abuse them again?

The Demonstration of the Liberator’s Intentions

The suspicions of the slaves are not unreasonable. The favor and generosity of the liberator may all be a ruse. How might the liberator communicate her good intent to the slaves and earn their trust?

Misery: This is of course in the Christian story where Jesus comes in. Yhwh liberates Israel from Egypt, gives her the law but Israel has perpetual trouble. Israel has trust issues. Israel imagines again and again that

• the estate really belongs to her
• the liberator can be replaced by other new masters that seem to promise more
• that she can make life work on her own

Deliverance: Into this mess Yhwh sends his Son, to be abused by the descendants of the former slaves who finally kill him. He raises Jesus from the dead to make the point about the heart of the liberator and his intention for their good and welfare.

Gratitude: Within this whole context we should begin to see what the law was for and how it should work in our lives and community.