Jesus & the Law – on agriculture & “husbandry” … (11/12/18)
Though the Law proscribed a number of regulations pertaining to the sowing & reaping of crops (see Leviticus 19:19-24 & Deuteronomy 22:9-10 et al), Jesus rarely referenced the same – and then ever indirectly (see Matthew 8:37‘s “the harvest is plentiful, yet the laborers are few”, Luke 10:2‘s “ask the Lord to send out laborers into His harvest”, and John 4:35‘s “look around you and see how the fields are even now ripe for harvesting”). That having been said, the Law was just as concerned with what is still today called “animal agriculture” – that being: the confinement, the enslavement, and ultimately the murder of non-human animals (primarily as sources of food). Interestingly enough, even though the ancient Law allowed and even demanded that these beings be slaughtered, a number of Old Testament regulations were (hypocritically) concerned with said animals’ well-being (see Exodus 23:19, Leviticus 22:6-8, & Deuteronomy 12:20-23).
And yet fittingly, these proscriptions were not nearly enough for Jesus – a man who claimed to comprehend (and indeed be a champion of) perfect, selfless Love (see Matthew 5:39-48, Matthew 24:12-14, Luke 10:29-37, John 13:15-17, & John 15:8-17); a man who openly lauded “mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13); a man who – if he had truly mastered his heavenly Father’s all-Loving will (see Matthew 5:48, Matthew 7:21, & Luke 6:36) – would have staunchly refused to harm any innocent creatures at all (much less murder them for palate pleasure or needless nourishment)1; indeed a man who bravely championed the rights of all animals by standing up to many of the animal-abusive legal traditions of his day2 – summoning his first disciples away from their cold-hearted labors as fishermen (see Matthew 4:18-22, Mark 1:16-20, & Luke 5:10-11), freeing all soon-to-be-slaughtered animals from the Temple (and overturning the money-changing tables that enabled those brutal sacrifices to continue – see John 2:13-16)3, and brazenly refusing to slaughter a lamb and eat its corpse at his final Passover meal (see Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, & John 13).
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1 While it is true that Jesus appears to encourage others to eat fish during the “mass feedings” mentioned in Matthew 14 & Matthew 15 (see also Mark 6 & Mark 8), these passages actually show Jesus only offering the people bread and only collecting scraps of bread after they were finished. Indeed, more than a few scholars have noted that the earliest recorded manuscripts of these tales do not mention fish at all (Jesus also neglected to mention fish when later referencing those same feedings – see Matthew16:5-12, Mark 8:19-20, & John 6:26), which makes perfect sense, seeing as how fish would never be placed in baskets alongside bread, and seeing as how both events took place on a shoreline; a location where Jesus’ fishermen disciples could have caught as much fish as they wanted had they desired to do so.
2 While it is true that a handful of biblical passages seem to show Jesus supporting the killing & eating of fish (see Luke 5:4-6, Luke 24:41-43, & John 21:5-14), all of the same have readily explanatory “outs” that allow Christians & non-Christians alike to see Jesus as being a pseudo-enlightened “honey vegan” instead of a far more ignorant pescatarian.
3 Intriguingly, the word “thieves” Jesus uses in this passage to repudiate those in the Temple who are changing currencies & thereby enabling the selling of animals for sacrifice is actually the Greek word lestes in the ancient manuscripts (Strong’s #3027) – a word that did not indicate a mere “thief”, but rather described a brutally violent “marauder; one who exploits the vulnerable with violence”; a term that quite aptly describes every single slaughterhouse worker to this day … More support for this definition comes from two other instances in the Bible where the same Greek term is found – first, Jesus’ not-so-subtle criticism of the violent group of heavily armed “thieves” who came to haul him off to his crucifixion (see Luke 22:52 & Matthew 26:55) and second, to describe the two “thieves” who were later crucified with him on the hill of Golgotha (see Mark 15:27 & Matthew 27:44 – remembering that crucifixion was a particularly painful form of execution that the Romans reserved for political insurgents &/or other violent criminals).
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