Redemption: It Isn't About You

Well, it’s not mostly about you. That’s a hard thought in an aggressively individualistic society, but I want to hold it for as long as I can.

I want to look at the long slow historical development of the concept. And having followed the history of this notion, I want to see what happens when what we mean, today, by “redemption” is put into the context where it was developed.

It can be done. I have done it. And so have you—although not, perhaps, about the notion of redemption. Here’s what I mean. It is like watching/listening to a TV program when suddenly a magnificent sound system with good mid-range speakers, a world class woofer, and surround-sound, kicks in. It isn’t that you are now listening to a different program. It is, rather, you’re your experience of the program is now entirely different and you might think, about the experience you were having before all that world class acoustic boosting happened, “What was I even taking the trouble to listen to THAT?”

I want to come back to that experience at the end, but let’s spend some time with the texts that will provide all that boosting. We’ll start early. I will be looking at the Greek noun lytron, “a ransom, a redemption” and at the verb lytrousthai, “to ransom, to redeem.”[1] I want to get a sense of the earliest situations to which those words were applied. You will find that they are amazingly clear. The noun, lytron, is “the means or money for a ransom.” (C. Brown). The ransom has to be paid for those, like the first-born of man or animal, which by sacred law” belongs to God. One “buys back” the first-born son or first-born animal by means of a sacrifice or a money payment. It is the payment itself that is designated by lytron.[2]

The same word is used for the redemption of a relative. I will pause briefly here for you to clear your minds of all the relatives you may have who are, for one reason or another, in need of redemption or who are by common acclaim, beyond redemption. OK. Done with that? Let’s go on. The redeemer—the Hebrew word is gō’ēl—was originally the closest relative who, as Colin Brown says, “as the avenger of blood, had to redeem the blood of the murdered victim.” He would be, in this case, the clan’s designated executioner and he would be “redeeming” the blood of his relative by finding and killing his murderer. Follow me here: the dead relative’s blood (his death) would be redeemed by this action. You may look at Numbers 35:16—19 if you are feeling a little woozy.

The gō’ēl was also the designated man to redeem the family possession that had been sold and even the relative who, under economic duress, had sold himself into slavery. That’s a lot of redeeming. What is going on here?

This makes sense only against the background of the covenant. Under the terms of the covenant, Israel is God’s unique possession and the people among whom He dwelt. The land, Israel, belonged to God, which was why it was never to be sold in perpetuity, but rather, had to be redeemed. If you can picture “land” being purchased by a modern developer and thereby removing it from the natural conditions and interactions of nature—rain no longer falls there, the food chain is broken as swings back and forth in the breeze, or would if the breeze still blew there—you will get a sense of what a big deal this is. Israel is unalienable. One could no more remove the land from Israel (because being Israel, the land belongs still to the Giver) than the land from Nature.

This redemption was both social, by the way, and systemic. The nearest relative had the obligation to redeem a fellow Israelite from slavery, but if for any reason that didn’t happen, the year of jubilee, the mechanics of which are laid out with painstaking detail in Leviticus 25. But if all else fails, a slave will be set free during the jubilee year, because that honors God who set all Israel free in Egypt.

We move now to the verb lytrousthai and get ready for the next leg of the journey. As early as Deuteronomy 7, this verb is used to refer to the redeeming activity of God. We begin to edge toward metaphor here and as a result, lose some of the concreteness. So long as there is someone or something in hock and someone obligated to pay for his or its return and some concrete means of exchange, everything was pretty clear. But early (see Deuteronomy 7:8 for an example), the verb refers to no material price at all, but rather to the redeeming activity of God in “buying Israel back” from slavery in Egypt. Isaiah uses the same metaphor (Isaiah 41:14) for God’s redemption of Israel from Babylon and return to Judah.

These early uses are difficult because not all the pieces of the simple model are there and because some of the pieces that are “there” are there metaphorically. Ideally, we would a condition before (e.g. slavery) a redeemer (likely a kinsman) a ransom (for slavery, however much money the market demanded for that particular slave) and a condition after (e.g., freedom from slavery). So Samuel was enslaved and Jonathan, his kinsman, paid $100 to his owner, after which Samuel was a free man. Concrete, clear, and simple.

In the redemptions above (Egypt, Babylon) there is a condition before( slavery) and a condition after (freedom), but no concrete actor and no payment of a ransom. It is notoriously hard to say what God is doing at the time He is doing it. Every religious community which conceives of one God who acts, does so mostly in retrospect. An easy way to see this is to compare the very dark prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah with the relatively mild prophesies of President Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The prophets of the Captivity are much more horrifying, but Pastor Wright’s was seeing God’s hand in his own time and so provoked a firestorm of protest.

Things get a good deal more complicated in the New Testament and I think I ought to take a fresh run at that one. There, the abstract notion of “what we are to be redeemed of” is taken for granted. It is sin. And the means of redemption are clear. It takes a sacrificial death. And the conditions before and after are conceptually clear, but practically contentious, as Paul discovered when he used them. In short, they require a fresh start.

We have looked at this closely enough, however, to come to a conclusion I want to share with you. All my life as a Christian, I have heard words of the ransom/redeem/redeemer group.[3] They have been abstract; often they have been used casually. And even when they weren’t casual, they were worn down by much use; they were trite.

Now I see that there is nothing casual about the relationship between God and Israel, nor between the people we call Israel and the land we call Israel. They are seen, all through the Old Testament, as fundamental relationships. I mean by “fundamental” what Thomas Jefferson meant by “inalienable.” You can like them or hate them, but they are there and nothing you can do can make them not there.

Similarly, I got a real jolt from realizing that it would be someone’s responsibility to redeem me, even from a slavery into which I had sold myself, because IT IS NOT RIGHT that I should not be free—being one of God’s people. It is not, in other words, about me. Nothing here speaks of market transactions. Nothing has to do with economic causes or effects. God and the people and the land are, being held together within God’s intention, a single entity and land and persons must be bought back to maintain the integrity of that entity.

Frankly, I find it overwhelming. You can see, now, why I used a metaphor as powerful as a new sound system in the introduction. I’m reading along, reading about “redemption,” and all of a sudden, the term falls into its full context and MEANS SOMETHING! The bass and the midrange speakers and the surround sound all kick on and I wonder why I thought I was listening to music before.

It isn’t an entirely comfortable feeling, but as I close out 2010, I wish it for you and I claim it for myself.


[1] It would be wholly misleading to so much as imply that I know any of the information I am about to retail to you. I am completely in debt to Colin Brown, of Fuller Theological Seminary, who wrote the article “Redemption” for the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and who serves as general editor of the English version of this masterpiece.
[2] I first stumbled on this when I noticed that Jesus’ parents had to “redeem” him because otherwise, he would have “belonged to God.” I had a very good time with that.

[3] In fact, like many others raised by Christian parents in Christian settings, I was puzzled when I first saw the word used in a secular context. I probably heard “ransom” in a story about kidnappers. I probably heard “redeem” in a story about pawnshops. This is considerably complicated by the expression about doing something “to redeem yourself,” which is also common. So I projected the religious meanings I already had on these new uses and was puzzled for a time.