O Lady Vengence, How I love Thee
The other day I went to see a new film starring Kevin Bacon called Death Sentence. The movie is about on an average guy working in risk management who is forced to face the meaningless death of his son. A local gang slashes his son’s throat as an initiation right for one of its recruits. He and his family start to cope when the criminal is caught, but he begins to spiral out of control when he hears that the criminal will get 1-3 years in a plea deal. He then purposefully disrupts the plans for a plea in order to pursue a more satisfying end to the story. He inadvertently starts a war between families that would put the Montagues and Capulets to shame . The situation reminded me of the concept of blood debt in the Ancient Near East. I’m no expert in the practice, but often in the Old Testament you find characters declaring very loudly “This man’s blood is not on my hands. I had nothing to do with it!” In the Old Testament, avenging the blood of a relative was excusable, and so, even if your relative was in the wrong or it was an accident, you might pursue a man for the satisfaction of your familial blood. Obviously, exacting blood vengeance was a good way to cause a scuffle between families. For this reason, in the Old Testament God created Cities of Refuge. In a City of Refuge, a man was safe from the relatives of anyone seeking blood debt. The problem with vengeance is that it contains a minute element of rightness to it. Most humans have a conscience that demands justice, and when it is absent, vengeance seems an apt substitute. The element of supposed justice within vengeance provides us with a sort of perverse satisfaction at it’s exercise, and that is why vengeance belongs to God. With humans, the satisfaction we feel becomes the justification for the thing itself. We delude ourselves into thinking that vengeance is the last resort of justice, but what are we then saying about God? If we take it upon ourselves to be the last resort of justice, then we are saying that God is incapable of being a just God, that we are in fact needed to take justice in our own hands because God is not competent. As I watched the main character of this movie take the price of his son’s life from the blood of his enemies, I felt joy at their destruction, but the greatest weapon we can wield against our enemies is forgiveness. When we forgive, we place justice in the hands of God, and if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that my wrath cannot compare to God’s! You want your enemies to come to justice? Forgive them! Place it in God’s hands, because after all “Vengeance is mine” says the LORD
