The Old Testament: Tolerance is Bad
Do the Ten Commandments frighten you? Perhaps not, since they are just rules. Earlier in our service, we read an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20. What is left out of the version we read are the consequences, but they are hinted at in the complete version. The commandment to honor your mother and father, for example, is followed with the phrase “so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you,” implying that you won’t live as long if you don’t honor them. The commandment about not taking the Lord’s name in vain is followed by “the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses His name.” The commandment against graven images sounds even more ominous, making a reference to the Lord “punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
But if Exodus chapter 20 doesn’t frighten you, Exodus chapter 21 probably will. That’s where it goes into more detail about what is forbidden, and then follows it up with the consequences of breaking those commandments. Instead of just saying that people who honor their father and mother will live long, in Exodus 21:15 it says “anyone who attacks their father or mother is to be put to death.” What if you curse your father or mother? Put to death. If you kill someone? Put to death. Don’t honor the sabbath day? Put to death. What does not honoring the sabbath look like? Look at Exodus 31:5: “Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day is to be put to death.” Committing adultery? Both parties put to death. This carries over into Leviticus and Numbers: blasphemers? Put to death. Anyone who approaches the sanctuary of the tabernacle? Put to death.
Even if they didn’t break these commandments, many Old Testament characters were put to death for seemingly slight offenses. Two of Aaron’s sons were burning incense, and didn’t do it exactly right: they “offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to His command” and were instantly burned alive for it. In 2 Samuel, there is the story of the ark of the covenant being transported on an ox cart, and when the ox stumbles, a man named Uzzah reaches out to stabilize it, and God kills him on the spot.
The Old Testament world, in other words, was not a very tolerant place. No opportunity to apologize, no one saying “I’ll let you off with a warning since it’s your first offense.” One false move, and you’re dead. If you try to live according to the Bible, there are many ‘false moves’ to be afraid of, and while they may not all merit the death penalty, any one of them may hurt your chances of getting into heaven. Reading the Old Testament may lead you to think that you have no hope of avoiding damnation.
Over the next few thousand years, the world became a much more tolerant place. At least, most of the world - but there are places where people are still put to death for doing the wrong thing. All societies have laws and punishments, and while the punishments may be less severe, you still can’t “get away with murder.” What about minor rule violations? Even in permissive societies, you see people on the lookout, eager to pounce on sinners. Someone who parks in a handicap parking spot and walks out of the car without a visible handicap might come back to a nasty note on their windshield, “You can’t do that!” If you use the wrong term to refer to a race or category of people, someone will tell you not to say that anymore. Try cutting into a line at a theater or blocking a grocery store aisle to see how tolerant people are.
A phrase that has become popular in recent years is “Zero tolerance policy.” This is one of the few concepts that appeals to people all across the political spectrum, although what they won’t tolerate may be different. Some places have a zero tolerance policy for abortion or drug use, others have a zero tolerance policy for bullying or hate speech. Those policies always sound like a good idea: when a society identifies a problem it would like to wipe out, the obvious solution is to say “We cannot allow that!” Then make sure to be vigilant, stopping any instances you observe. Why can’t you let the small infractions go? Because they will lead to bigger infractions, which is a phenomenon known as Broken Window Theory. If you own a building that isn’t currently being used, watch out for the first window being broken. If you don’t fix it, people will start to think it’s okay to throw rocks until all the windows are smashed. Nip it in the bud! But those zero tolerance policies always seem to run into trouble, harshly punishing people for something minor, such as stories of students being suspended from school for bringing a knife to cut an apple.
You may have heard the expression “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That implies that tolerating evil is in itself a form of evil, and we all need to do something to stop it. Don’t just leave it to certain authority figures: it is the responsibility of everyone to make sure that the rules of civilized society are obeyed, and turning a blind eye to wrongdoing is not okay. But this is also what leads to vigilantes and nasty notes on windshields written by people who don’t understand the whole picture.
It also opens the door to hypocrisy. The person so keen to punish you for your mistakes––the “speck in your eye,” to quote Matthew 7––may be concealing a huge plank in their eye. History is full of people who were intolerant of others, but when they were caught in wrongdoing, suddenly they plead for forgiveness and mercy. This is why I am suspicious of politicians who talk too loudly about being a “law and order candidate.” In Phoenix, they had a sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who proudly proclaimed himself America’s Toughest Sheriff, protecting the good people of Arizona against criminals - until he himself was convicted of crimes. You may remember Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York who put himself out as the knight in shining armor fighting evil. That was enough to get him elected Democratic governor of New York, until it came out that he paid thousands of dollars to prostitutes, and he resigned. The intolerance of the Old Testament, in other words, creates a harsh world in which no one survives unscathed. He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
The New Testament: Tolerance is Good?
Thank goodness for the New Testament. When the woman caught in adultery was brought before Jesus (John 8), the religious leaders wanted to stone her - which was exactly what Leviticus 20 says should happen - but Jesus instead forgave her. And he famously added, “Let those without sin cast the first stone,” recognizing the hypocrisy problem with intolerance. Jesus was criticized for hanging around with sinners, but he had no interest in condemning them for the mistakes of their past. He was morally pure himself, but that didn’t get in the way of him loving others who were not. The disciples even criticized some parents for bringing their children to him, but Jesus brushed their criticisms away: “Let them come!” The message of his whole life on earth was, “All are welcome!”
How much nicer it is to be around tolerant people. If you are extremely intolerant of messes, I’d be nervous about inviting you over to my house - and would be afraid to visit your house for fear that I’d spill something. I’m actually more comfortable if there’s a little mess in your house. If I am stopped by the police, I am grateful if they “let me off with a warning.” As a college teacher, I often see students who missed a deadline or failed a test, and I’d rather give them a helping hand to get back on their feet than to say “No! Rules are rules, and there’s no recovering from failure.”
So tolerance is a better way to live? Well, perhaps… but problems arise with that approach as well. Philosopher Karl Popper described something he called the Paradox of Tolerance. It goes like this: if you create a society (such as a church congregation) that is tolerant of all people and all views, you will get a mix of people who feel welcome. Many of those people will be nice and kind and open-minded, but others won’t, and they may express views that are problematic, harsh and intolerant. I will call them “ugly” people. They will make life uncomfortable for the nice people, to the point where the nice people leave. Meanwhile, the message “anything goes here” gets out, and without a mechanism to say “That sort of thing is not okay here,” more and more ugly people will be attracted to that society, and the ugly people will feel free to behave in increasingly ugly ways. The result is a society that started out tolerant turning into an intolerant society.
In other words, a society that locks everyone up for the slightest offense doesn’t work because everyone ends up in prison, but an “anything goes” society that never punishes anyone for anything will just disintegrate into Sodom and Gomorrah. Is the solution just a middle ground between the two? Let people get away with things sometimes but not all the time? That doesn’t seem ideal because it opens the door to inconsistency and favoritism. If a police officer lets one person get away with breaking the law but arrests another person for the same behavior, that’s discrimination. Imagine if the Ten Commandments said, “Thou shalt not kill … sometimes.”
I have been thinking about this for a long time, and all I can say is: I can’t solve this conundrum. Is tolerance a good thing? Yes. And no. Does a middle ground level of tolerance solve the puzzle? I don’t think so.
But that’s because I am only thinking in worldly terms. I am stuck on the literal level, or what Emanuel Swedenborg calls “outer truth.” On the earthly level, many conundrums cannot be solved. For example, the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus by asking him about whether they ought to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus knew right away that there was no good answer to that question, and more importantly, that it doesn’t matter. So he replied: “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” What happens on earth is just prelude for our eternal life, and getting tied up in the details doesn’t help.
We must all try to shun evils. But what if our goal is to eradicate evil from the planet? We will not succeed. Putting people to death for adultery will not eliminate adultery. Calling people out for expressing racist thoughts will not stop racism once and for all. We’re all on a spiritual journey, and you can’t force people to just jump to the finish line. Including yourself.
What role does tolerance play in your spiritual journey? Is it a paradox you cannot solve? Do you struggle with figuring out what to tolerate and what not to? I do. Will any of us ever get it perfectly right? I doubt it. The goal is not to “solve” it. The goal is to grow from it. To seek out the inner truth.
If someone in your life – a loved one or a stranger – does something unacceptable, how should you respond? For the sake of worldly order, you may be called on to say “That’s not okay” or “You can’t do that here.” But it is also an opportunity to look within yourself, and perhaps see truths you didn’t see before. Do you take delight in punishing or condemning others? If so, this is an opportunity to work on that personal shortcoming. When you are acting ‘correctly’ and someone else isn’t, do you revel in that feeling of self-righteousness and superiority? If so, that’s what you need to overcome. Or, if you are afraid to speak up against wrongdoing, and respond with “I’ll just let that go; it’s someone else’s problem,” is that driven by cowardice? Apathy? Then this is the time to work on those flaws. There are good reasons to be tolerant, and there are bad reasons: which one applies to you?
To answer that, there are two questions you should be asking before you make the choice to tolerate or not. The first is: are you acting out of love? Even a parent who punishes a child or a judge who throws a criminal in prison may do so out of love and the desire to help them. Discipline can be an act of love. Other times, tolerance and forgiveness are the loving way to respond.
But even loving people with good intentions can make things worse. Addiction programs talk about enablers, who further the addiction by tolerating it. How do you help without enabling? That requires a deeper understanding. But acting intolerantly can leave emotional scars or drive the sinner into worse behavior. So the second question to ask is: What is the wise thing to do? Love must be tempered by wisdom, and wisdom is not easy to achieve. Sometimes all we can do is pray for wisdom, pray for a glimpse of that inner truth.
A New Commandment
The Ten Commandments were given to us as a guide to life, but as we have seen, even those commandments can lead to intolerance and cruelty and a society that does not function ideally. Sometimes we need to hear something even more plainly. So when Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is, he did state even more plainly what is important:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
When he said “all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments,” he was saying “how you interpret the Ten Commandments should be driven by: does this express love to God, and love to your neighbor?” That’s what matters.
In John 13:33, he made it even more plain: “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
I began by talking about the consequences of breaking the Ten Commandments. Let’s end by asking, What are the consequences of following the New Commandment? What happens if you act out of love, guided by wisdom, in everything you do? What happens if everyone around you also acts out of love, guided by wisdom?
The answer is: you will live in a society where tolerance is not even an issue. A society that does not run the risk of deteriorating into disorder, that does not have a need for prisons, a society where people follow the rules not out of fear, but out of recognition that this is how you achieve deep happiness. And we have a name for such a society, a name you already know: heaven.
Amen.
READINGS
Old Testament reading: Deuteronomy 4:5-8
See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?
New Testament reading: John 8:3-11
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Reading from Emanuel Swedenborg: Secrets of Heaven #1807(4)
People who think divine thoughts never restrict themselves to the objects of outward sight but are always seeing inner depths in those objects and from those objects. The very innermost depths have to do with the Lord’s kingdom, so these people concern themselves with the very ultimate goal. It is the same with the Lord’s Word. People who care about divine concerns never view the Lord’s Word in terms of the letter but view the letter and the literal meaning as representing and symbolizing the heavenly and spiritual attributes of the church and the Lord’s kingdom. In their eyes, the literal sense merely serves as a vehicle for thinking about those subjects.