The Genius of Jesus by Erwin Raphael McManus

Author:Erwin Raphael McManus [McManus, Erwin Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

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After telling his audience to turn the other cheek, Jesus says that if someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, you should give them your coat as well. The crowd’s reaction should be easier for us to imagine, living in a world in which everyone is constantly suing someone else. I live in Los Angeles, which may be the most litigious city in America, if not on the planet. Each year, over a million lawsuits are filed in California. We have buses with giant advertisements for law firms that do nothing but take on one lawsuit after another. The American Tort Reform Foundation listed California as the number one “judicial hellhole” for frivolous lawsuits.

While there are certainly those who need to be defended and who deserve to be compensated for the wrongs done to them, this isn’t the fuel of our litigious culture. Lawsuits have moved from a way of protecting the rights of the powerless to a means of making quick cash. Too often, lawsuits are our society’s legal version of stealing.

A curious thing about injustice is that it often creates the incubator for justification. The more we believe all corporations and institutions are corrupt, the more justified we feel stealing from them. We conclude that it’s all a scam, so we might as well get our own. It is no longer about achieving justice, it’s all about getting money. We become a culture of consumers. Enough is never enough. We always want just a little bit more, or maybe a lot more. For years I’ve taught that we steal because we do not believe we can create. A litigious culture is all about figuring out how to take someone else’s money. Greed breeds greed. Corruption breeds corruption.

The Hebrews lived without justice, but among themselves, their mutual oppression did not lead them to greater mutual respect. While the Romans imposed unbearable taxes on the Jews, the Jews, in response, turned on each other. This is why in the Gospels, you find the recurring theme of disdain for tax collectors. Tax collectors were the middlemen between the Roman Empire and the Hebrews. In a real sense, they had sold their souls to the enemy. They were responsible for making sure the Romans received the taxes they demanded from all their subjects, but there was a great deal of leeway in the process. Tax collectors often had unrestrained power, without anyone to monitor their ethics. This became a breeding ground for corruption. Tax collectors would demand far above what the empire required. A significant part of their income came from these amounts. As long as Caesar got what he demanded, they were free to take whatever they wanted. Tax collectors were institutional thieves backed by the power of Rome.

When you feel that what belongs to you has been taken from you, it can easily justify a belief that you might as well take whatever you can from whoever you can. Perhaps the only thing worse

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