PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Leviticus 24:15-22                                                                           An Eye for an Eye

Sermon June 22, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

          The fancy Latin term for it is "lex talionis":  "the law of retaliation," "an eye for an eye."  It's a primitive form of justice—I myself avenge a wrong done to me or to a member of my family:  and it's brutal.  No objectivity, no limitation, no court, no system—just thrash him who thrashed me.  So it's hard to understand why such a brutish form of justice would be included in the Bible; but it is, as our First Lesson shows.  And  it's not limited to the Old Testament:  in the Book of Revelation the souls of the martyrs cry out, "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our deaths?"[1]  So let's ask a question today and try to find an answer:  Am I right in seeking vengeance? 

 

          There are so many situations in modern times when "lex talionis" has been the only justice available to people.  If you've watched the movie "The Godfather" ten or twelve times—it has certainly been on television enough!—you learned how the Mafia inherited "an eye for an eye."  Sicily has always been a rough country, a battleground among many invaders, and the people have been left to establish their own justice.  The associations of family and clan are more important than we can imagine, and so when a wrong is committed against a woman in one clan, the men are required by "lex talionis" to punish somebody—anybody from the offending clan.  The Italian word for this is "vendetta." 

          Closer to home, we've all heard about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  Up on the Ohio River side of West Virginia in 1882 Floyd Hatfield borrowed $1.75 from Randolph McCoy, and he didn't pay it back.  McCoy took two of Hatfield's hogs and penned them up to hold as collateral.  For two years the Hatfields stewed about those hogs, and then some Hatfield boys ambushed one of the McCoys and killed him.  Now who was responsible for making all this right?  Who could give them justice?  The county sheriff was no match for either family:  so it was up to the families to work it out.  But they saw it as standing up for their rights; and it became a blood-feud:  the two families tried to wipe each other out. 

It reached its lowest point in 1887.  Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace dragged two McCoy women from their beds at night and beat them so badly the mother suffered two broken ribs and was maimed for life.  On New Year Day 1888 the Hatfields surrounded Randolph McCoy's house, killed his daughter, broke her mother's ribs, and killed his son Calvin.  This is "an eye for an eye."  The family says, "We take care of our own."  And they do, either because there is no law-enforcement, or because what law enforcement there is  is weak.  The problem is:  each act of revenge is worse than the wrong it was supposed to avenge. 

 

          For the first two or three hundred years after the ancient Hebrew peoples invaded Palestine there were no kings, no courts, no constitution, no law:  just tribes, clans and families.  But the culture recognized "the avenger of blood"—that was the official title—a man related in a particular way to an injured relative, whose responsibility it was under old tribal law to "take care of it."  He didn't do this in a fit of anger:  he did it as a clan responsibility.  If a relative was killed, the next of kin was responsible for killing the murderer.  If somebody stole something, the next of kin had to get it back along with additional stuff.  Now when the clans began to build towns, the tribal elders would gather at the town gates and deal with questions of justice, but the "avenger of blood" was still responsible.  When Israel chose a king, the king set up a court, and the country began to be ruled by what we would call today an unwritten constitution—like Great Britain has:  then "the avenger of blood" no longer carried the burden of justice.

But in that earlier, more primitive time, how could the elders at the gate put limits on revenge?  How could they save lives?  Where might there be any opening for grace?  This text we read from Leviticus actually provides the grace:  it sets limits—it limits punishments:  the "avenger of blood" was forbidden from killing someone who had only stolen a sheep.  To us that might not sound much like progress, but if you had lived back then, it was a major leap forward in legal thinking:  limits.  "An eye for an eye" meant only an eye, only a tooth.  And not only that, the Law of Moses established specific towns around the territory to be "cities of refuge":  if you killed somebody, you could get to a city of refuge as quickly as possible, and there was actually a court there where the "avenger of blood" could be stopped, or limited.  The guilty were still punished, but the innocent had sanctuary there—for the rest of their lives if necessary.  

          The Hebrews weren't the only nation who established "an eye for an eye" as a limiting rule.  It appeared in Iraq about 1750 BC in the Code of Hammurabi, that Abraham knew.[2]  It appears in Rome about 450 BC as part of The Twelve Tables.  As soon as primitive societies reached a certain point where mere revenge was getting out of hand, it became necessary to set reasonable limits, in the hope of preventing a vendetta, a blood-feud from annihilating whole families.  So "an eye for and eye," in its time, was a gift of grace for a primitive culture. 

 

          The question is whether "an eye for an eye" is justice today.  Am I right in seeking vengeance?  Today we have laws, police, courts that make decisions about justice.  They don't always get it right, but they usually do.  If you're in a traffic accident there are laws, and also the insurance companies have standard procedures for settling claims.  If you sign a contract, that's covered by the law and can be judged in a court.  If there's a burglary at your house, the police collect evidence and it becomes a criminal case that goes to court without your having to avenge anything.  If there's a murder, the crime procedures in our time are clear.  This is how we establish justice in our time; and it's appropriate for the Christian to support the justice system, and if a crime is committed against you  to use the justice system.

          Of course there are areas where things are fuzzy.  The application of existing law to new acts—like the responsibility of the accounting firm that supported Enron.  Over the past twenty years both business and law have worked untiringly to define sexual harassment, but there are still incidents that nobody knows whether the law covers them.  And then there are those hardest of all fuzzy issues, like whether your neighbor is parking her boat over the line of a shared driveway. 

 

          He was a respected leader in the church, as well as a high-powered business man in the community, but he didn't know what to do when one particular young man kept climbing over his back fence and swimming in his pool.  He called me and asked if it would be wrong for him to call the police.  I told him that in this case the young man could be stopped from trespassing on other people's property, so yes, he should call the police:  it wasn't personal, it was justice. 

          But he had a point:  he stopped and thought about his moral response as a Christian, and I respect him for that.  All world religions had a primitive time when "and eye for an eye" was a gracious limitation on vengeance, but as they deepened, another standard took its place.  Jesus expressed this deeper idea in these words:  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  And then he amplified and refined it in the Sermon on the Mount:[3]

 

 

 

With these ideals we're in a whole different territory from "justice" now:  we're in the territory of transformation, looking forward to the coming reign of God.  He didn't mean that we're supposed to let people run over us:  he's giving us a rule of thumb for interaction with our neighbors to fulfill the law of love.

          So if it's a matter of law, justice, public duty, the Christian is responsible to support the public good, to seek legal justice through the proper channels.  If it's a matter of personal offense, and especially if the offense comes because of your faith, Jesus says "forgive."  In a nation that has come to thrive on lawsuits you are called as a follower of Jesus to a higher standard:  to the way of love. 

 

          Am I right in seeking vengeance?  We don't live in a western movie where everybody's a gun-slinger.  We are called to participate in the redemption of the world from its violence, its cruelty, its injustice and alienation.  There was a primitive time when "an eye for an eye" was a grace-filled limit on violence, but that time is long past.  We are living in a time when we need to be moving our culture toward reconciliation and redemption.  Are there people I'd like to "get back at"?  Of course—we all meet people who bug us.  But Christ has called us up higher.

AMEN