S4E8: Why would a Lamb's blood save you? Plague and the Lamb II

What do we need to make a better world? In a world filled with the news of wars, injustices, human-made catastrophes, what do we need? In a world where our future seem so uncertain and bleak at times, even with all of the marvels we accomplished and progress we’ve made, what will lead us to tomorrow?

And the Christian Bible poses an answer in the form of a symbolic act; long ago, God’s judgment came upon a land, upon every family and every living thing there, to strike down its future. But, that judgment “passed over” the houses marked with the blood of a lamb. Why? What did the lamb’s blood symbolize, and why is that what Jesus understood as what his own suffering and death would bring about? 

This is part two of the episodes exploring the final plague and Passover lamb in the Exodus account, and its significance to the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ.

Chapters

• 0:00 We have been at war with ourselves
• 4:06 How our past century struck down our optimism
• 13:33 The idea of human progress and Christianity
• 25:41 The meaning of the Passover Lamb in Exodus
• 33:16 How we are cursed and blessed by someone else
• 38:42 Why the blood of the lamb we kill saves our world

Transcript

Here’s a question for you: what do we need to make our world a better place? 

Is it some new technology that solves our problems? Or scientific breakthroughs that let us understand our world? Is it some social reform for a more just and fair society? Or is it perhaps a different lifestyle, which is kinder and more sustainable? Now, all of them do make our world better, in many different ways. 

But, we’ve found that there’s something deeper than what our technology, or society, or lifestyle, can reach; something that has overturned or distorted everything good that they’ve brought about so far. And that something is: well, ourselves.

It’s as if we’re in a never-ending arms-race with ourselves. We developed a powerful A.I that can design new medicine to save people, then found that the same A.I. can design new chemical weapons to kill them. We use the Internet to share information and bring us closer together, then found that we also use it to spread misinformation and hate- speech. We set up an economic system to make us prosper, then found that we game that same system to exploit the poor and harm our planet. We’ve fought for a society in which the people would get justice, then found that we’ve killed people en masse in the name of that justice. Our history has been a history of a war with ourselves. Don’t get me wrong: we’ve come a long way. But, it’s like we’re always tittering over a precipice, and there are times we wonder: what if the next step is where we fall? 

And we’ve already seen glimpses of what that would be like: the hollow, bombed-out cities of our wars; the dead, wastelands of our environmental catastrophes; the count- less mass graves of our totalitarian regimes. And maybe these are what hell is like, at least for us here and now; for they remind us of God’s original, primeval judgments. 

[ Pendulum ]

Long ago, according to the Hebrew Bible, that judgment of God fell upon every house, of every family, in Egypt. But, some houses had blood, painted on their door frames— the blood of a lamb. For God spoke to them a promise: that when He sees the blood, the judgment will pass over them. And then, two thousand years ago, a Jewish rabbi named Yeshua—or Jesus in English—met with his disciples for an evening meal, which commemorated that event. And during that meal, Jesus told his disciples that he’ll soon be betrayed and handed over to corrupt religious leaders and an oppressive foreign regime, and then, he’ll be tortured and killed. He then poured them wine—red, like the lamb’s blood that was painted on the door frames—and said, “This is my blood, which will be poured out for many people, for a new promise of God.”  

Yet, why? Why would God pass over His judgment upon a world, seeing the blood of a lamb, and why would Jesus identify that with what his own suffering and death would bring about? This is a question that we will struggle and wrestle with throughout this entire series. But, let’s begin exploring it here, again in this episode of…

[ music / ] 

… "What do you mean, God speaks?" where we explore important ideas, insights, and stories in Christianity, for the skeptics who want to understand religion, Christians who have questions about their own beliefs, and everyone in between. 

I am Paul Seungoh Chung, and this is our eighth episode of the fourth season, “Why would some lamb’s blood save you? The plague and the lamb, Part 2.”  

[ / music ]

At the turn of the 20th century, the West was at the height of its optimism for the future. 

The previous 200 years saw a meteoric rise of Europe and its nations. The entire world was now under their influence, if not their colonial rule. Their science and technology seemed to have unlocked the deepest secrets of Nature, from the atom to the stars. Their medicine was saving people who would’ve died in any other place or time. Their Industrial Revolution enabled them to produce goods and material at an unimaginably vast scale. They’ve established a society in which everyone was equal before the law, and a government that is elected by the people. And they’ve abolished slavery. People were now working on machines that would let them fly in the sky; others on boats that can dive into the ocean depths; some even dreamed of reaching the Moon. 

It seemed to them that soon, in a not-so-distant future, they’d rise above every ill that had plagued humanity. Their medicine would eradicate disease; their industries would ensure that no one will lack for anything; their society would be fair and just, with power and prestige given only to those who merit them. And surely they—the civilizations of the West—held that merit, to rule the lesser cultures and peoples they colonized. And responsibility too—to raise them up to their level. And as someone of non-European descent, I actually understand their sentiments; these people really did accomplish tremendous things, which we still benefit from btw, and which our generation does not appreciate enough. But, there’s always two sides to such things.  

There were rumbles, early tremors, from this other side, if you paid attention. The soot of their industrial machine blackened their cities; the life expectancy of their urban poor, the laborers in their factories, actually fell, as their mortality rate rose. More and more species of animals across the world began to disappear. Everyone was equal—except, in terms of race, or gender, or socio-economic class. Injustices and oppression festered in their colonies—and the peoples of those lands, ancient and proud, would remember those wrongs. African slavery was abolished, but they were still repressed socially and economically, and even that came at a cost of nearly a million lives during the American Civil War. And president Abraham Lincoln, whose words, “of the people, by the people, for the people,” now define democracy, came to a sobering conclusion. The terrible war was the judgment of God upon his nation, for refusing to face the evils of what they had been doing, enslaving fellow men—a judgement upon both those who enslaved others, and those who now fought, far too late, to stop them. Horrors of a war, which unfolded from our own making—what this series has called “a primeval judgement” of God. 

Then, the rumbles became the First World War, waged between the nations of Europe from 1914 to 1918. New technology brought new weapons, which killed indiscriminately and en masse, such as clouds of poisonous gas. Thousands died in a span of days for a desolate piece of land, the size of a football field, their bodies, abandoned and lost in the mud and mire. Among the young men who were drafted to fight the war, over 10 million were killed; over 9 million civilians were also killed, including those who were murdered by the Ottoman Empire, in today’s Turkey and the Balkans, which historians now call the Armenian genocide, which also killed Greeks, and Assyrian Christians. 

The war shook the West at its core. All this had happened not in some distant, foreign lands or colonies, which they had dismissed as “uncivilized,” but in the heartlands of Europe. A popular movement even emerged among the artists, called Dadaism, to intentionally make ugly and nonsensical things, as a protest against a nonsensical and ugly world—a world that only a scant decade ago, seemed to be headed to a paradise. People began to call this War, the “War to end all wars,” for surely no sane person would repeat these same horrors. And then, came the Second World War.    

The second war utterly eclipsed the first, both in scale and its horrors: 25 million dead among those who fought; even worse, the civilians who were killed, often deliberately, dwarfed that number with 50 million dead. Among them were the victims of the Nazi Holocaust: six million Jews, along with other ethnic groups, like the Romanis, Slavs, and Poles, as well as political dissidents, homosexuals, and the disabled. Millions were rounded up into camps, which were set up and operated with the efficiency of modern industrial progress: in essence factories, which produced death. Our human societies have killed people for the purpose of other things—lands, wealth, victory, or vengeance; but these, the sole purpose of these, were death. And the Nazis ran these camps at massive cost even when they were on the verge of defeat, and needed every resource they could spare—in fact, it was as if committing genocide was more important to them than surviving the war. This was so incomprehensible, that it overshadowed the horrific war crimes of others—such as the mass slaughter of millions of civilians and prisoners, by their ally, Japan, or by their enemies, the Soviets.

Science, which had so greatly improved human life and understanding, became part of the horror. And it wasn’t just that it was used to build new weapons that could very well end humanity, like the atomic bomb; scientific endeavor itself became a nightmarish evil in the hands of those like the Nazi scientist, Josef Mengele, or the infamous Unit 731 of Japan, who performed human experimentation on hundreds of thousands of individuals, in which no one survived, because no one was meant to survive. 

The years after the Wars continued to unfold new horrors. Atrocities that even the free nations of the West perpetuated upon peoples and lands they colonized, or influenced from afar, increasingly came to light. Some were deliberate mass-murder and cover-up, such as what Belgium committed in Congo at the turn of the 20th century, or the French in the 1950~60s during the Algerian Independence War. Yet, some still promised us a different world, a better world, with new ideas on how to run our economy and organize our society: a scientific society, free of old beliefs, a just society, where everyone would have equal shares. They set up new nations: nations like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Khmer Rouge; then, together they proceeded to imprison or kill tens of millions of their own people, for impeding their vision of progress, and oversaw the death of nearly a hundred million more in the numerous famines they caused, which they then ignored. 

We’ve also realized that for the first time in human history, we now hold powers that can literally end that history. We’ve built weapons that can wipe out the entire human race, and aimed them at each other. We’ve found again and again that we’ve been causing wide-scale ecological collapse around us—and that climate of our planet itself may be turning against us. Yet, we seem unwilling to stop ourselves. 

And so, we’ve come to learn a terrible truth: the shining course of human progress that the Western civilization spearheaded, has also brought all of us closer to the brink. Yet, even still, almost none of us who live in a modern, developed society, want to live in a different time or place; we want its freedom, its security, its technology and comfort. The truth is: our world is better in many ways. Yet, horrific wrongs still lurk beneath it; world-ending wars loom over it; environmental cataclysms we’re causing surround it on all sides. At the height of our civilization, we find ourselves also staring at the abyss. 

Our dreams of a better world can never seem to sever themselves from our nightmares. 

[ Pendulum ]

There’s an obvious but very important assumption underlying our question about how to make a better world. Which is: that our world can become better. And that implies, one, that it’s not as good as it can be, and two, that there are ways—that is, reality already holds many ways, which we can learn and follow—to make a better world. 

And I’ve specifically re-worded the second implication, to underline its connection to the idea of God. For the Christian idea is that our every endeavor to make our world better is an engagement with God, because every such effort requires engaging -reality- and the infinite possibilities it holds—and God -is- Reality. So, every discovery that teaches us new truth is hearing God speak, and our every step that unfolds a more just and fair society is walking with God. But, this also means that our failure to make a better world is a failure to engage God—they’re the same thing.

And according to the Bible, engaging God to make a better world is a responsibility that God specifically placed upon humanity. Now, you may have heard Christians who teach that the world God created was perfect until we brought sin into it. But then, what does it mean for something to be “perfect”? It may simply mean that nothing more should be added to it. And that makes sense for things with a pre-defined end-point, which we can measure with numbers, like conducting 100% of electricity. But, what about things like Storytelling? Can’t a perfect “story” lead to more stories? Or, if a parent exclaims that their baby is “perfect,” do they mean that the baby should not grow? At several points in the Genesis Creation account, God calls Creation, “good,”—and this actually implies that it’s “perfect”—but then goes on to create even more things. And the responsibility that God places upon humanity, as the representatives of God, is to tend to a garden, which grows and bears fruits. So, the “perfection” of God’s Creation is not something static; it grows, and our connection with God is a key part of how it grows. 

However, this Creation account in Genesis is then followed by its account of humanity’s fall from God, and their subsequent violence and corruption, which fill their world until it unravels into the Flood. What these accounts point out is this: our relation to God—to reality as a whole—which sets up how we act, think, and live in every way, unfolds the kind of world we make for ourselves, so something that corrodes that relationship, also corrupts that world. And that includes our efforts to change the world for the better. Or, in the words of a very old adage, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” 

And this is why Christianity has historically held a dual outlook on the idea of human progress—the idea that that we can make our world better, with new discoveries, or innovations, or social systems. On the one hand, Christians have believed that God is guiding us toward a better world, so that these endeavors are borne out of humanity’s genuine engagement with God, even when we don’t recognize that it is God we’re engaging. But, on the other hand, Christians have also been very wary of these accomplishments. For our relation to God is still distorted, and that may twist anything good that we do. 

And our modern society—including Christians living in it—forgot this dual-outlook on progress, so that in the past three hundred years or so, we’ve veered from one extreme to the other. The European West was at first enthralled by the notion of progress, or rather with their technological, industrial, and ideological progress. So, most of them didn’t recognize the actual harms they also caused, to the peoples their technological might conquered, or to the environment their industries devastated, or to the world their ideologies divided and repressed.[1] More recently though, some people have gone the other extreme, condemning progress almost as if it’s something that has only harmed our world. And there are proponents from both sides, who point fingers at Christianity. The first group accuses Christianity of standing against the idea of human progress; the second group blames it of unleashing that very idea upon our world in the first place. Now, this outright contradiction is rooted in a two-fold cultural amnesia. Each group has inherited only one side of the Christian outlook on progress, without remembering where that came from, while also forgetting why Christianity also held the other side.       

So, the first group often presents crass caricatures, like the image of modern medicine contrasted with fruitless prayers for miracles. Now, Christians will reply that there really are miracles and that prayers bear real fruit. But, more to the point, such caricatures severely misrepresent the far more complex role of Christianity in scientific and social progress. Universities—and in fact, hospitals—in the West were first founded as part of Christian monasteries and cathedrals. Early scientists did their work because they were Christians, and often worked for the Church. And they weren’t just pretending, to avoid persecution; Christianity was the world they lived and believed. It’s like how scientists today would affirm democracy and work for institutions established by a democracy. Same can be said for social reformers, like Bartolomé de las Casas, who defended the indigenous peoples in colonial Americas, because he was a Catholic priest, or William Wilberforce, who led the movement to abolish slavery because he was a Christian Evangelical. And yes, their opponents were Christians too, but that’s again like saying how today, every political leader, including mass-murdering dictators, claim to uphold democracy. Those who believed in progress, believed because they believed in God who speaks, beckoning and guiding humanity toward a better world.  

However, in the West, this optimism was taken to its extremes, well into the 20th century, and many Christians participated in the harms it caused. The most notable example is how such Christians conflated their Christian beliefs and message with their European culture and its colonial rule over the world. To them, the scientific and social progress of their civilization seemed like a seal of approval from God that spoke and guided them: a warrant for Europeans to conquer and colonize other lands, to impose their culture and rule, while overlooking any exploitation or injustice they committed in doing so. And Christianity has been severely—and rightly—criticized for its role in all of that. But, such criticisms still miss how those Christians forgot the other side of how their faith regarded human progress and the value of its great accomplishments. 

The Christian Bible is quite critical of what it often calls “the world,”—the human world— its “kingdoms,” its ways of life, its riches and splendor. Again, it does not deny the good that they’ve brought about; the Bible affirms that the knowledge and skills we’ve learned, the order and laws we’ve established, our buildings, artwork, and tools, are all treasures, borne from our engagement with God. They are good things that make our world better. The real problem is actually the opposite: with all those good things, we’ve still made a world that is violent, unjust, and full of lies. But, why? Is it that we haven’t progressed enough—that we need more? But, do really need some super-intelligent AI to know that we shouldn’t spread lies? Or, do we need some psychic enhancements to know that it is wrong to enslave other human beings? And we’ve even actively used the progress we’ve achieved to make our world worse—horrifically worse. And this isn’t just about some technology we misuse to build weapons or something. For example, the scientific theory of Evolution was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust—they systematically murdered millions of people, claiming that they were “evolutionarily inferior”. Even our greatest accomplishments, or the remarkable progress of our civilization, do not exempt us from the danger of unleashing a plague upon our world. And far too many Christians, just like the rest of the secular society in which they lived, forgot this sobering message of their faith—or rather they just believed it didn’t apply to them. Though why would you be Christian if you don’t think its message applies to you? 

But then, some other Christians went the other extreme; they became suspicious of almost everything in the human world—its scientific discoveries, its social reforms, and its laws. To them, only the things in their religion seemed safe: the cosmos it describes, and the society it prescribes. After all, they reasoned, their religion is from God, and so it must be free from those deadly flaws that plague us human beings. And this is one reason for the criticism that Christianity has been against human progress. 

However, those Christians missed that religion is just as much a human endeavor as everything else—something borne from our engagement with God, like everything else. And just like others, we can fail at it. Nor does appealing to the Bible solve everything, since it is we human beings who read and interpret the Bible; we bring our assumptions, limitations, and even our biases into it. And even the people in the Bible—those living in the times of Moses, or in the times of Jesus—were just as human as we are, with flaws and limitations, and if anything, without the benefit of many more centuries of experience that we’ve had since then. And the Bible emphasizes that God did not speak to them because they somehow shed those limitations; God spoke to them despite their limits, and spoke at their level. And above all, it was a pious and religious society, obsessed with strictly following God’s words in the Bible, which turned against Jesus Christ, handed him over to their foreign rulers to be executed, and then mocked him as he died.    

What the Christian message says of our endeavors to make a better world has two sides. One is that we should never give up, for at our best, we are engaging God—that is, engaging reality, by searching for truth, striving for justice, and working for peace. But, the other side is that that we must beware, for even our greatest accomplishments can become our greatest plagues. The millennia-long journey of the Christian Bible courses through the history of some of our greatest civilizations: Egypt, Babylon, Rome. Yet, Egypt enslaved Israel; Babylon destroyed Jerusalem; Rome killed Jesus Christ.  

For even our best will not save us from ourselves—not our science or technologies, not our institutions or social reforms, not even our religion.   

[ Pendulum ]

“I will bring judgment upon your greatest civilization, and upon all of its gods—all of its powers and accomplishments you’ve revered and placed your trust. The judgment will fall and strike down your future—the future of both humans, and every living thing under your influence. I have been calling a people to engage Me and unfold a different future for your world. But, you refused, over and over, to let them follow My call, because you thought of them as your property, mere tools to be spent away as you desire. So, your future will not change, and your world will perish with those you’ve shackled.”

That was in essence what God was speaking to Moses to convey to Egypt and its royal court. You can review why in the previous episodes of this Season. The greatest civilization of their time, built with the wisdom and ingenuity of its people, but also with the blood, sweat, and tears of its enslaved subjects, would now be struck down at the height of its power. The final plague would kill their future—their firstborn—as an extension of the Flood of Genesis, what we’ve described before as God’s primeval kind of judgment. And it would strike everyone; the judgment of God would fall upon the entire nation of Egypt, and strike every family, including that of the enslaved Israelites. For that is the nature of such judgments, because they are the catastrophic world we make for ourselves, which reality—God—then unfolds. And the cataclysms that have struck our civilizations in the past hundred and fifty years, in that sense, belong to this very class of judgment. 

But then, God speaks further to Moses: “So, each family is to take a male lamb from their flocks and herds. It must be a lamb without any flaws, and you are to bring that lamb into your home, and take care of it. Then, on the day when the judgment falls, at sunset, you are to slaughter the lambs. You are to then paint their blood on the door frames of your houses. That night, I will come to bring judgment on all people, and every living thing around you. But, when I see the blood, I will pass over you.” 

So, why the blood of a lamb? The simple answer is that shedding its blood is a symbol for something else, a key feature of reality, which saves us from the judgment of God— from the catastrophes that unfold from the world we’ve made. And lambs, specifically, because the ancient Hebrews weren’t vegetarians; mutton was part of their staple diet. And God chooses something they’ve always slaughtered and eaten as that symbol. 

So, what is it a symbol of? One answer, which I read was proposed by an 11th century French rabbi, Shlomo Yitzchaki, known as “Rashi,” is that this is about idolatry. The lambs symbolized the Egyptian worship of their animal-headed gods, and the Israelites were to reject their practice by killing the lamb. And they were to demonstrate that this was a deliberate rejection, and not some sudden act of passion, by choosing a lamb four days in advance. However, with all due respect to the rabbi—his commentaries of the Hebrew Bible have been very influential historically—I just don’t find this answer to be convincing. For one thing, when something is about idolatry in the Hebrew Bible, the texts tends to quite clearly say that it is. And when it’s about rejecting idolatry, people don’t kill some animals; they destroy the actual idols—sacred stones, or wooden figures. Also, lambs seem to be a poor choice to represent the gods of Egypt; there are better candidates, like falcons, which would’ve represented Horus, a key god of Egypt, or even just a fully grown ram. And lastly, if they wanted to show that their rejection was deliberate, it would’ve been better to simply mark the lamb for slaughter in advance. Why bring the lamb into their homes and then take care of it?

More clear connections are found in the ideas presented in the very story of Moses and the Israelites later on. The first is presented immediately after the account of the final plague, after every firstborn of Egypt dies overnight, except those who painted their door frames with Lamb’s blood. Then, God speaks to Moses that every firstborn of the people of Israel, both human and animal, now belongs to God. And this means every firstborn of livestock are to be set aside as an offering. But, for the firstborn of humans, as well as animals that cannot be offered to God, a lamb, once again, is to be offered as a substitute. The word used here is “redeemed.” If you’ve been around churches for a while, you likely heard that word before. The idea is that something or someone else has paid for what you owe. The life of the firstborn, which again signifies their future, is bought and paid for with the price of a lamb—it is “redeemed” by a lamb.    

The second is found in the book of Leviticus in the Bible, immediately following Exodus. God speaks to Moses regarding the various laws and religious rites that the Israelites were to follow, and one issue that is raised is how humanity corrodes their relationship with God, through wrongful actions and thoughts. And one step that the Israelites were to take in order to restore and maintain their relationship was an offering of an animal as sacrifice. It was one of the steps, because they needed to acknowledge their wrongs and desire to change. The offering of the animal then was a sign of forgiveness and restoration, a continued relationship with God despite their flaws and failures: the word used here is “atonement.” And for wrongs at a communal level, an animal like an ox was offered, whereas for an average individual, again a lamb was to be offered.

And like how the Israelites were to mark the door frames of their houses with the blood of lambs during the final plague, priests were instructed to mark their altar to God with the blood of these animals. The priests were instructed to then eat portions of these animals with their families, and burn the rest as an offering. And likewise, God instructs Moses and the Israelites during the plague, to roast the lamb whole, keeping its entire body intact, then eat some of it with their families, and burn any of it that remains. 

So, the Passover lamb of Exodus is connected with two ideas: there is something that restores and maintains our relationship with God—a proper relationship with reality as a whole; and this saves our world from becoming catastrophes borne from our failures and wrongs; and this something is the price that is paid for our future, by something other than us. The ideas of atonement and redemption.

[ Short Pendulum ]

The primeval kind of God’s judgment—the hellish world we make, which reality then unfolds for us—falls upon all of us. It does not distinguish between the guilty, and the relatively innocent. “Relatively,” because every one of us is part of it to some extent. 

This is because this judgment is about a world that we have all made, and now belong to: its systems, practices, patterns of thoughts and actions, which now are integral parts of our lives. And our modern era has presented us with a clear illustration of this in the global environmental crises caused by our societies: the toxins contaminating our water, earth, and air, the unprecedented rate of extinction of living species, the floating plastic waste on our oceans the size of continents, and the coming global climate crisis—which even now people are fighting about. And all of us are the cause; we may differ in degrees, but all of us are involved. It’s the wastes we produce, habitats we’ve taken, pollution we cause. And the problem is: these things are how our society exists now, so we can’t just stop. But of course, that excuse will not spare us from their consequences. 

And again, this is just one example. The same problem confronts us in everything else. It’s the lies we’ve told, then accepted, and then never questioned; misunderstandings we’ve formed, then held, and then refused to correct. It’s our casual cruelty, careless disregard, and unconscious contempt—everyday abuses, neglect, and prejudices that became our norm. It’s the properties, ceased long ago and never returned; the lives, destroyed years ago and never repaired. It’s the hostilities we’ve started, the hatred we’ve passed down, the violence we’ve escalated. It’s how we set them into laws and institutions. And once these things become part of the world we live, just by living in that world, we perpetuate them. So, even when we notice them, we feel bad for a while, but then will shrug helplessly and say, “Well, that’s how it is. What can we do about it?” But, ignoring it does not make it go away, and it certainly does not spare us from its eventual consequences. For that is what brings God’s primeval judgment down upon us. 

And we may decry that this is unfair. Other people did these things and passed them down to us. So, God is judging us for not fixing the decisions they made, the societies they established, and the technologies they developed! But, I notice that we rarely say the same for the opposite: we also benefit from things done by other people. Almost everything that each of us now depends on to live, was passed down to us from others: things they’ve done, or developed, or discovered, and we don’t say that’s unfair.

All of us are connected, so that the good things we do become a blessing not only for us, but to others—even those we’ve never met. That is how our reality is structured; and that how is God speaking. According to Genesis, that is what it means for humanity to be created in the image of God: to engage God together, which blesses not just us, but the rest of Creation. Our connectedness amplifies the good things we do far beyond what each of us can do alone. That is why we can make progress; we don’t start from scratch; we build upon what others did; that is how we raise up civilizations. And what would our world be like, if the things we’ve done so far have always been—or even just mostly been—good, and all of that had amplified each other? Yet, what amplifies the good can amplify the bad. We were meant to bless others, but we’ve cursed them too. So, because we were meant to be blessed by things we’ve done, as well as things we haven’t, we’re now cursed by things we’ve done, as well as by things we haven’t.

However, this also means: someone else can do what we should’ve done, but fail to do or refused to do; something else can correct the wrong we’ve made and ignored—yet it is us who will benefit from what they did. This, by the way, is not saying that we can just ignore our responsibilities because someone else will do it; that’s a very sure way to bring about God’s primeval judgment. This is not a prescription on how we can get away with things; it’s a description of what happened when we couldn’t get away. 

A price was paid for the correction: redemption that atoned. 

[ Pendulum ]

What will save and redeem us? Again, for Christianity, it is not some new systems, or reforms, or discoveries, but first and foremost a person—a particular kind of person. 

This follows the overarching Christian thesis that it is a person that presents us with the closest analogy of God—of reality that we are engaged with, at all times. All of reality is God speaking, and so every truth is hearing God speak; but, our truths are always one- sided, partial, and limited; so, what truly connects us to God that speaks is not this or that truth we hold, but the person who speaks the truth—the most whole truth we can grasp here and now. Also, reality is structured, so that justice and love is what lead us to flourish together, and that structure is God speaking; but, there’s an infinitely different ways to enact justice or act in love, depending on time, and culture, and needs; so, it is not this or that law or course of action, but the person who enact justice and act with love for each of those different times, who reveals God that unfolds a good future. And it is these persons who bring about a better world through how they engage God. 

However, our fallen world poses a tragic twist to this thesis. In such a world, that person must not only speak truth, but confront lies; not just enact justice, but end injustice; not just love others, but endure hatred. For our world is running at a deficit; it is not a world that is just rising up to the future, but one that is laden down by the past. And that world does not welcome a person who is like God. Because there are reasons we still cling to our lies, continue our injustices, or keep alive our flames of hatred—it has become part of our world: how we live, where we place ourselves, what props ourselves up. And so we will deny what they say, condemn what they do, and hate what they are.

And it is here that those who would change our world face a pivotal crossroad. How then will you change the world? How will you cure its ills, speak your truths, enact that justice? And too often, our answer has been to strike down those who stand against the better world we’re trying to build. So, inquisitors killed for their religion; the colonialists, for their civilization; the French revolutionaries, for equality, fraternity, and liberty, and the communists, for the People. That was their answer to the question I posed way back in the fifth post-season extra episode of Season One: “What does your truth entitle you to do?” They all invoked their vision of a better world to condemn and kill. And those who refused this answer in the past century are revered today as those who taught non -violent resistance to evil: figures like Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. But, I think their answer of non-violence is just one particular expression of some deeper truth. And its first layer is this: in trying to confront the evils of the world, we must never forget the evil that lurk in our own hearts. Or else, the “better world” we build becomes just another re-iteration of the fallen world we’re fighting.   

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, who survived the Nazi invasion of his homeland, and then the mass prison camps of the communist Soviets, wrote about it this way: “If only there were evil people… committing evil deeds, and [we need] only to separate them from… us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being…. During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place…. Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who harmed us, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the killers and we weren't.”

However, we prefer the other answer; we do not want to be told that even as we fight for a better world, we can become its new curse; that as we speak the truth, we can spread new lies; and as we enact justice, we can set up new injustices. We want to hear that the ills of our world are due—or at least mostly due—to the ones we are condemning: the other side, the fascists, the communists, the capitalists, the elites, the mob, religious hypocrites, godless seculars—in the Biblical language: the sinners. We want heroes who justify us, and condemn our enemies; but those who are like God in our midst, speaking the whole truth, and enacting untainted justice—they don’t side with us. And we can become terribly cruel to those who don’t—especially if they are one of us. Because they are in our reach, and our hands can shed their blood, for there’s no powerful patrons, no armed forces, no rioting mobs, who will shed our blood if we try. 

[ Music ] 

And so, from the dawn of human history, to our present day, we’ve blacklisted them, defamed them, imprisoned them, drove them to exile, and killed them. And so, Martin Luther King was hounded all his life, and was assassinated; Mahatma Gandhi endured violence and imprisonment, to see his country freed, only to be murdered by one of his countrymen, a Hindu, for defending their enemies, the Muslims. Sometimes, it was the mob, sometimes the government, and sometimes some cultural or moral figures, who stained their hands with the blood of such people. In the Gospels, Jesus spoke to the religious leaders of his own people, these words from God: “I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers, some of whom you’ll kill and others you’ll flog, and pursue from town to town. And this generation will be held responsible for the blood of them all that’s been shed since the beginning.” 

Just as the Passover lamb was taken into people’s homes and lived among them, these people have lived with us, spoke with us, and prayed for our world to flourish. But, just as the Israelites stained the door frames of their houses with the blood of the lamb they slaughtered, we’ve stained our world with their blood. 

But, why would bear the burdens of our world, only to suffer and be rejected even by their own? And the answer to that is the second reason why they refused to strike at their foes, and it is spoken by Jesus: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hurt you. Bless those who curse you. For then, you will be the children of God, who is kind to both the righteous and the wicked.” 

When you love the world that rejects you, when you toil to bring them a better future, even as they try to lock you out of it, your life—your blood will keep that world from the brink. You will be the people that God has called and sent to this generation. For our world, unraveling from our corruptions and violence—struck by God’s judgment—is given a reprieve. And when someone follows that call of God, we’re granted a future; God’s judgment passes over us because of someone else, someone we’ve rejected. That is how reality is structured, and that how is God speaking. 

Yet, who can truly follow such a call, without falling to bitterness and despair? And even if they don’t, should such a world be given a future? A world that continues only by the blood of those who loved it, yet are hated in return—those we honor only after they’re gone, if at all? For as Jesus commented drily, “Your ancestors killed the prophets, and then you decorate their tombs to honor them.” Maybe it’d be better if God ends such a world, and let the horrors of this world we’ve made, run its full, fatal course? 

And the Christian Gospels reply: so, God sent not a lamb, but the Lamb, who would confront not this or that particular wrong in our world or society, but the ever-present evil that lurks in all of our hearts—even in the best of us. Lamb who would love his enemies and pray for them, even as he died. And when we shed his blood, when his blood stained the wooden frames of a cross on a barren hill, it seemed that this was the final straw, the final betrayal, which would unleash the plague that God held back from our world, so that our world would finally fall headlong and unchecked, into the worst of our wrongs… Then, Jesus rose back to Life.    

And with him, came the promise that everyone who hoped for a better world, all whose blood was shed, and all who shed that blood and then wept in regret, would also rise.

[ Ending music ]

So join me next episode to continue exploring how God continues to unfold this journey that leads to that true Lamb of God, shedding his blood on a cross. 

Thank you for listening, and please follow, subscribe, and share this series with others, and rate it on your Apple podcast and other platforms. You can also support this series at buymeacoffee.com—which you can go to by clicking on the line, “Support the show” in the episode description.

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[1] There were of course, two sides to this. The Romantic movement, and its heirs, often questioned the good of Western progress, and it forms a counterpoint to how the West viewed what was going on. However, even this is far from the kind of profound pessimism and comprehensive skepticism that pervades our contemporary society in the aftermath of world wars, the Cold War, and the environmental catastrophes of our time. 

[2] And that includes Galileo, whose conflict with Church is the stereotypical example parroted by people that religion is opposed to science; but, Galileo was also a scholar of the Church, and his opponents were also our equivalent of “scientists,” no less than Galileo was, while Galileo was a churchman no less than they were.  

[3] Lincoln articulated these thoughts in his strikingly brief second inaugural address, delivered shortly before the end of the Civil War. And he voices these sobering words: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." A more recent article that discuss it here: https://time.com/5784810/lincoln-healed-divided-nation/