ThinkBlog

Tying in with the previous post, isn’t it interesting how much misery arises when we instinctually entertain vengeance? A wrong done to us might turn into anger, and then to grief; but if we don’t then “get over it,” so to speak, that is, to forgive, it becomes a grudge. It’s perfectly natural not to forgive. You have people that will tell you that a civilized individual knows well enough to forgive and that it’s only an impulse of the abased to hold a grudge; but in reality what civilization will tell you to do is merely to sublimate your pain, not to genuinely move past it in forgiveness, which is a uniquely Christian concept based on the forgiveness we have in and through Christ Himself.

Whence this kind of thing springs, too, is interesting; rage and retaliation are driven at base by honor, a sense of one’s own reputation and value in and of oneself over and above another person, or above their (negative) actions done to you. What makes Christ so radical is that He tells us to submit to His power and (only thereby) lay down that sense of selfish pride, the honor in oneself that makes us hold grudges and seek vengeance and nurse ill will and make the ones who did us wrong come groveling back to kiss our feet before they’re in our good graces once again. This is a huge part of the reason that to the Gentiles (Greeks especially), Jesus and His whole message were “foolishness,” that is to say, a laughingstock—because the thymos by which the Greeks governed themselves and their sense of self-seeking pride was the very foundation of personal dignity and warlike sensibilities. The Greeks were appalled to hear anyone known as “wise” to be telling them that they had to lay down their pride and vengeance voluntarily—since the only ones who did that were the ones who were too weak to fight in the first place.

Exodus 21:22-25

“If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

What you don’t get from just that passage alone is that this is prescribed as a limit to vengeance, not a starting point. It was a pre-existing social practice in Israel and all across the world (cf. especially Homeric society in ancient Greece) that if someone hurt you, you hurt them back. If someone takes your eye intentionally and literally, aren’t you inclined to do more than just remove one of theirs? I humbly submit to you that, even today, when we are wounded—emotionally, physically, whatever—we are very tempted to take from the other person more than they took from us. Watch kids on the playground for an unabashed example: all things being equal, if Billy punches Tommy, Tommy will probably knock Billy to the ground, not just punch him in return. Same thing we struggle with today: if someone cheats you out of a few grand, are you tempted to settle out of court (or even in court!) about it “fairly,” or are you tempted to ruin that person professionally? If you are backstabbed, &c.

But taken as a limit, this seems almost as radical to their day and age as “turn the other cheek [when you’re insulted]” does to ours.

It occurred to me over the summer while I was taking a required low-level history course on Latin American civilization that what happened to the Aztecs is a picture of what is prophesied to happen to many—even some believers— in the “last days.”

The Aztecs built their capitol city, Tenotchitlan, on top of the previous civilization’s capitol city, out in the middle of a giant lake where now stands the region of Mexico City. Incidentally, the Aztecs also adopted the mythology of the older civilization as well, which included the ideas that, among other things, the following. They were living in the Fifth Sun, that is, the fifth epoch since the foundation of the world, and a time in which the world was said to end; to stave off the end of the world, they liberally sacrificed humans in the temple at Tenochtitlan.

Quetzalcoatl was the benevolent, bearded messiah-king who was to return with his men from across the eastern seas to save and rule his people, and he would be known by the sign of nothing less than the cross (+ or †)! When the handsomely bearded Cortes arrived in 1519 at Tenochtitlan with the Spanish army in tow, brandishing swords, shields, and breastplates marked with bright scarlet crosses and riding these foreign things the Aztecs had never seen (horses, as it turns out), they were allowed into the city gates with a timid Aztecan leader giving them the guided tour. It seems Moctezuma’s realization that Cortes was not the savior of the[ir] known world came only when he was captured by the gold-hungry Spanish.

Interesting what parallels can be drawn to us, who think of ourselves as so much better informed and more sophisticated….