Day in the kulla, part 2

[Richard]: To pick up on the thread I had going in an earlier post (dated November 4th), I had asked the workshop facilitator about whether a traditional Albanian highlands clan might ever decide to absolve a blood debt without receiving a balancing blood payment from the offending clan. The analogy that had come to mind in thinking this through came from the Christian tradition: the widely received notion that there is a ground-breaking difference between Old Testament justice and New Testament justice.

Whereas the Old Testament chronicles a mostly Hebraic tradition, where an eye-for-an-eye code of law and honor held sway*, the books of the New Testament (particularly the Gospels) describe how Jesus' life and example supposedly released mankind from these rigid, robotic responses to offenses against one's honor, one's person, and one's family or clan. And the method of this release took the form of forgiveness and mercy, as documented in The Lord's Prayer: " ... and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Several days after attending the aforementioned workshop, I had the insight (while watching Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus on TV, of all things) how the image of Jesus dying on the cross to absolve all blood debts ("sins" in Christian parlance) is related to the logic behind Albanian blood feuds. Since the notion of paying for an eye with someone else's eye or a life with someone else's life is so ingrained and inviolable in Old Testament culture (as it likewise is in the Albanian highlands tradition), it made perfect sense that the Jesus myth-makers would've used the concept of the savior dying a death that symbolically supersedes all other human deaths and subsequent debt payments, thereby releasing humanity from the rigid requirements of honor and face-saving compensation demanded by Old Testament law.

To elaborate, many of us have heard the old mantra "Jesus died for your sins" and scratched our heads. What does it mean, exactly, to say that someone else died for your sins? For me, it's never been a matter of accepting or rejecting that premise; it's always been about wanting to understand the logic (if any) behind it. I see now that the reason this statement has never made sense is because it's invariably spouted in a cultural and historical vacuum. Most Christians, at least those of the American evangelical variety, are so intellectually vapid and incurious that it apparently never crosses their minds to examine a statement like "Jesus died for your sins" within the historical framework that it emerged from.

Coming out of an Old Testament tradition, where (officially, anyway) all debts had to be repaid in kind, an emerging consciousness of mercy and forgiveness had to be grounded by its promoters in a logic that the people of that time and place would understand. Hence, after Jesus, you no longer had to blindly pursue justice by attempting to redress every offense and trespass and act of disrespect committed against you and yours ... nor did you need to fear the judgment of an obsessive, record-keeping, authoritarian god for every offense and trespass you had committed against others. Why? Because if you accepted the Jesus story, then you recognized that Jesus had already paid all those debts for mankind by giving his life, thus releasing humanity from less-evolved Old Testament ideas about such things. (According to the widely accepted Old Testament logic of that era, someone had to pay ... so let it be Jesus, responded the Gospels.)

In this light, mercy and forgiveness can be seen as a quantum leap forward in consciousness ... in sort of the same way that Einstein's theories completely transformed and revolutionized Newtonian physics. This psychological leap forward purports to offer humanity a way out of robotic notions of causality and reactionary responses and into a heart-level concept of freedom and greater humanness. And whether Jesus was a real historical figure or not is arguably irrelevant in this light. Again, the idea that Jesus paid the sinner's debt by giving his life is more important symbolically -- as a rhetorical device that would've resonated with the audience of that time -- than it is literally. The thing of real importance was the humanity-changing idea of "Hey folks, good news: there's actually a better way! We don't have to be controlled by oppressive dogmas and ideologies." (And like I mentioned in the earlier related post, the Kanunin and the law of Moses actually represented great leaps forward in consciousness in their own times ... it's just that everything evolves and eventually runs its course.)

To finish (for now) this rumination on the nature of this leap forward, the revolution in consciousness that Jesus represents is somewhat of a two-edged sword. In a way that's similar to how relativity theory complicates the neat, simplistic truisms of Newtonian physics (consider, for example, the paradox of Einstein's discovery that light is simultaneously both wave and particle), the consciousness represented by the Jesus narrative undermines much that was comfortably settled by Old Testament dogma. By this earlier logic, if your son were killed by someone affiliated with another clan, the grief experienced by the human heart in such a situation never even came into play. The whole sorry incident was played out and resolved as if on an accountant's balance sheet. A son in the other clan must be sacrificed to pay the debt, and assuming this took place, everything was settled. But the Jesus logic recognizes that it's absurd to assume that the loss of a loved one could ever be resolved in one's heart, or in the world at large, by a "balancing" death. After someone's death, your world is forever changed; and after a revenge killing, the real world is arguably tipped even further toward imbalance rather than back into balance. The grief and the loss have been doubled, not atoned for. This is something that most of us today, whether religious or secular, probably have little trouble understanding on some level. It just makes intuitive sense to us. But the logic associated with this consciousness is not necessarily a given. Loss, grief, remorse, mercy, forgiveness, grace -- all are agents in the on-going evolution of our conception of justice.


* Old Testament notions of justice are essentially grounded in the law of Moses. For example, Deuteronomy 19:17-21 describes this law as requiring "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." This code later became known as "retributive justice," which maintains that proportionate punishment is a morally acceptable response to crime, regardless of whether the punishment causes any tangible benefits.