sarah

Some critics aren't satisfied that Jesus never owned a slave; they want to know why He never condemned the institution by name. The answer is that He aimed at the exact thing that built every slave ship, camp, and occupation in history. Years ago, a friend told me he was disappointed Jesus answered the tax question with "give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar." He thought Jesus missed the cleanest opportunity in the Gospels to condemn the occupation. That disappointment is ancient. Most who rejected Jesus did so expecting David's son to arrive as a mighty man of valor, a Spartacus to break Rome by force. When He declined the role, they concluded He failed. Every era has its own horror; the Atlantic slave trade, the Holocaust, the occupations of old, and every era wants God incarnate to speak to the one it finds most unbearable. That standard has no stopping point. If Jesus owed us an express word on slavery, He also owed one on the porn industry, pharmaceutical profiteering, and the networks of men like Epstein. A God who answers each age's grievances by name only ever speaks to one age at a time. The method is on full display in the Sermon on the Mount. He takes "You shall not murder" and moves the verdict from the hand to the anger that armed it, takes "You shall not commit adultery" and moves it from the bed to the eye, and answers "an eye for an eye" with the cheek turned and the second mile walked, spoken to a people whose occupiers could compel them to carry a soldier's pack one mile whenever it pleased them. He starts with the external rule and ends with the interior, so the crowd that came to hear Rome indicted finds itself in the dock beside it. A Messiah fixing the crowd's gaze on a common enemy feeds the oldest appetite we own. People love to demonize: the slave demonizes his master, the master the occupation, the occupier the barbarian. Each leaves the room cleaner than he entered, like the Pharisee thanking God he is not like other men. Jesus cuts that cycle, commanding love for the enemy and prayer for the persecutor. Slavery is an atrocity and nothing I say lightens it, yet the diagnosis reaches everyone. The man in chains is a sinner in chains, and the man holding the whip is a sinner holding power. What separates their capacity for malice is frequently opportunity rather than character. A gospel that cured only one side of the chain would be a mere political program. So Christ went for the root, the absolute rot of the human heart, because atrocities are just localized symptoms of a universal, terminal disease. It is the same wickedness that sent Cain at his brother before there was a Rome, a Congo, or a Reich. Humanity remains infected, capable of unspeakable depravity the absolute second cultural restraints are removed, and I enter myself first in that indictment. A Messiah who crushed the occupation would have cured one century of one symptom and left the rot running in every heart cheering Him on. Take away Rome and the heart that built it is still standing, and that heart is what He came to kill.