It’s been a while since the Crusades. As a general rule, when our president goes abroad, he does not get waylaid and find himself in the hands of brigands who send back to the vice president wax-sealed notes saying, “Give us forty thousand ducats and we will release your dread sovereign, that he may return to his people amid much rejoicing.”
That’s not to say kidnappings and ransoms are unheard of in the modern world. They are, alas, all too common. But one of the differences between the modern and premodern world is that we don’t tend to think of ransoming the captive as a work of mercy. We tend to think of it as a sign of weakness. These days our standard reply to those who demand ransoms is, “We do not negotiate with terrorists!”
The idea of ransoming somebody as a virtue is an almost completely premodern notion. It depends on two conditions: (1) a society built on slavery (and therefore the taking of slaves), and (2) a not very centralized state that is spotty in its ability to keep people from being enslaved. Under those conditions of frontier semi-justice, the guy who will buy your brother out of captivity after a bandit raid or a skirmish with Saracens when the king and the nobles have no power to do it is a guy you are going to lionize. But since slavery is (thank God) dead in the Western world (due, in the end, to the influence of Christianity) and cops are now the ones who deal with hostage situations, we no longer have a living experience of how ransoming might be virtuous.
Our principal encounters with ransoming the captive as a virtuous work of mercy tend to come via historical dramas like Les Miserables. The kindly bishop, on finding Jean Valjean in custody for stealing the clergyman’s silver, insists to the gendarmes that the silver was a gift rather than stolen—and that Valjean must take the candlesticks as well. Having thus set him free, the bishop tells him, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”1
Beautiful and moving. But how do we live this precept out in this day and age?
One way is to support agencies like Anti-Slavery International, which exist to remind us that just because slavery has been largely banished in Christian lands doesn’t mean it’s banished everywhere. In fact, at this hour, slavery is a thriving concern in many parts of the world. It is also, in all but name, supported by global corporations that outsource to countries where they can turn a fatter profit by paying sweatshop drudges bare subsistence pennies instead of dollars. Child slaves, sex slaves, slaves of all ages and of a multiplicity of nationalities toil across the globe at this hour.
Of course, there is always a spiritual application to these things as well. Thus Jesus announced his own ministry by proclaiming the words of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4:18–19, emphasis mine)
And yet, in the political sense, Jesus set no captives free, liberated no oppressed people. He led no storming of the Bastille, no Underground Railroad, no ransom of King Richard Lionheart. So how did our Lord fulfill this prophecy?
Jesus gave us several hints. For instance, he exorcised and healed the demoniac who, “kept under guard, and bound with chains and fetters,… broke the bonds and was driven by the demon into the desert” (Luke 8:26–39). The man had been “liberated” in the merely physical sense when Jesus found him. And yet the iron chains he broke are nothing compared to the spiritual chains Jesus broke for him. Likewise, the woman with the infirmity (Luke 13:10–17) was described by Jesus as “bound” (v. 16), and her healing foreshadows the complete healing of body, soul, and spirit he means for us.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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2 Responses
Yes, and…
While it may be true that we no longer buy and sell people – and I’m not prepared to say that this is factually no longer the case in so-called Christian lands (lots of human trafficking still happening – Super Bowl, anyone?) – I will venture to say that the more salient meaning of this particular teaching for us today is that we “rent” people all the time. From the more benign manifestations of a gig economy that does not provide stability or a foundation from which to build a future to the more obviously corrupt sectors of modern American life – agriculture, construction, hospitality – that depend heavily upon the labor of the undocumented, we are all of us involved in renting our fellow human beings. These relationships do not permit these laborers to be engaged with as fully dignified neighbors. Their employers often know of their legal status and nod and wink to this as they pay them under the table or with fake social security numbers (at least the rest of us get the benefit of those payroll taxes into the system, even if the workers themselves can’t access those benefits, we might say). I know, it’s a stretch to go from ransoming Lord Farquaad’s freedom to the woman who’s cleaning our hotel rooms, especially since the former is a noble who can call upon the tribute of his vassals, and the latter is a non-person in our legal and economic systems. But I’m also not prepared to concede that there’s no connection.
Another resource for modern-day antislavery work is FreedomUnited.org