“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’¹ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person…” [NIV]

OK.  This passage is revolutionary for more than one reason, but here I’m focusing on what it has to say concerning our relationship with scripture.
More than one author has pointed out the anti-religious nature of what’s happening here.
Jesus is essentially saying “The scriptures say one thing, but I’m telling you otherwise.”
Or, more to our understanding, “The Bible says one thing, but I’m telling you things have changed!”

You know, I was taught (and taught others) that if you believed something was “of the Spirit,” but it contradicted the Bible, the Bible took precedence.   It took me most of my life to realize we were basically treating the Bible as a god.  Worse, actually, we placed (if not in word, certainly in practice) the Bible above God.

Jesus repeatedly turned the religious use and understanding of scripture on it’s head.  Scripture, after all, was to point us to Jesus, not the other way around.  (John 5:39-40)

This adherence to a literal, legalistic view of the Bible is what keeps getting so many people in a certain segment of our society (and in politics) in trouble.  They are still mistaking book-worship for God worship.

If everything God had to say was already in a book, then God would no longer need to speak.
But, the thing is, God is still speaking.
God is still speaking, and the Bible, a precious book indeed, still points us to Jesus who came, in part, to correct our misunderstandings of who God is. Many of these misunderstandings were rooted in the scriptures.

People “hear” God, if at all, in different ways (rarely anything resembling an audible voice, although I’d never rule that out completely).  More often a thought, an “inkling,” a meditation, nature, a baby’s cry, a gypsy dolphin² or through a homeless man’s eyes.

I know.  I know.  ”But if you say that, someone will say something crazy and say ‘God said so.’”
Well, they’re already doing that.  Always have. Always will.
AND they often quote the Bible when they do so.³  So that fear, while technically accurate, doesn’t stand as a valid argument.

So, when we hear God say “You’ve heard it said (even if in the Bible), BUT I’m telling you something different,” we have a choice to make. Will we let our holy book be “useful” (2 Timothy 3:16) or will we kill for what we perceive to be the literal interpretation (2 Corinthians 3:6)?
Will we let scripture point us to Christ, and hear God’s voice, or will we continue to let the Bible be the thing that keeps us from better knowing God?

- df

Notes:

¹ As Rob Bell (I think) pointed out, the whole “eye for an eye” thing was not a sanction for revenge.  This was a “baby step” towards a more peaceful approach.  It was a limitation to ensure the punishment was more in keeping with the crime.

² from “Calling Me Home” by Barry McGuire

³ Think of the very UN Christ-like statements of people like Pat Robertson, Todd Akin, etc.

Also read:

Velvet Elvis

A New Kind of Christianity

When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.

The situation is pretty specific: a woman seeks to help her husband by grabbing the “secrets” (so named in the KJV) of the man fighting with her husband, and in return, she gets to lose her hand.

Harsh, no?

Well, maybe not. The passage just before this speaks of the woman whose husband dies and leaves her childless and the extreme shame that comes upon the brother-in-law who won’t due the duty and get her with child so that her husband will still have a name in Israel. Children–and not losing the ability to sire them–is a pretty big deal to God.

As I see it, a woman who grabs in that context is going to grab to injure, and if she succeeds in injuring, she has murdered all the children the man could have had and all the children of those children. A hand is not that much to lose in that case, no?

Did it ever happen? Did a woman do this and get her hand cut off? I don’t know, but I suspect rare would be the woman whose desire to help her husband would override her desire to keep her own hand.

This passage also reminds us that a man who has injured secrets cannot enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut. 23:1), another reason the woman ought to be dissuaded from grabbing at the secrets. Would to God that God-fearing men everywhere would read that passage and stop volunteering to have their own parts injured.