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Early in The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s fine novel, a
number of cowhands and shopkeepers are enjoying their afternoon whisky in Canby’s Saloon in Bridger’s
Wells, Nevada Territory, when a young man pushes his horse hard into town. The kid ties up at the rail
and rushes into the saloon. He’d heard that some rustlers had made off with some of Kinkaid’s cattle and
had shot Kinkaid dead. In the head, he said.
Since the trail was already getting cold and the sheriff, the only one who could form a legal
posse, was out of town, some of the men decide they need to take the law into their own hands. It’s time
to put an end to rustling, they contend, time to give the rustlers quick justice and long necks.
But Davies, the owner of the general store, points out that the only evidence they have is
hearsay, and he argues for sending for the sheriff even if it takes a little more time. If they don’t
wait for the sheriff, he says, an angry bunch of cowhands could become an unlawful mob and thwart the ends
of justice.
Bill Winder disagrees. Not even a legal posse always achieves justice, he reminds Davies, since
the law sometimes lets the guilty off Scot free. So Davies asks him, “What would you say real justice
was, Bill?” And the discussion that follows around Canby’s bar that afternoon could well be mistaken for
one straight out of one of Plato’s dialogues, except that it’s set in Nevada Territory.
“Whadya mean?” asked Winder. “I mean, if you had to say what justice was,” said Davies, “how
would you put it?”
That question wouldn’t have been easy for anyone. It made Winder wild. He couldn’t stand getting
reigned down logical.
“It sure as hell ain’t lettin’ things go till any sneakin’ cattle thief can shoot a man down and
only get a laugh out of it,” Winder said. “It ain’t that, anyway.”
“No, it certainly isn’t that,” Davies agreed.
“It’s seeing that everybody gets what’s comin’ to him,” said Winder. “That’s what justice
is.”
Davies thought that over. “Yes,” he said, “that’s about it.”
“You’re damn shootin’ it is,” Winder said.
“But according to whom?” Davies asked him.
“Whadya mean, ‘according to whom?’ Winder wanted to know, saying ‘whom’ like it tasted bad.
“I mean, who decides what everybody’s got coming to him?”
Winder looked at [the rest of] us, daring us to grin. “We do,” he said belligerently.
“Who are we?” ask Davies.
“Who the hell would we be? The rest of us. The straight ones.”
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“Yes, I guess you’re right,” said Davies. “ It’s the rest of us who decide.”
“It couldn’t be any other way,” Winder boasted.
“No, no, it couldn’t. Though men have tried.”
“They wouldn’t get away with it.”
“Not in the long run,” Davies agreed. “Not if you make the ‘we’ big enough, so it takes in
everybody.”
“Sure it does,” said Winder.
“But how do we decide?” Davies asked, as if it were troubling him.
“Decide what?”
“Who’s got what coming to him?”
“How does anybody?” asked Winder. “You just know, don’t you? You know murder’s not right, and
you know rustlin’s not right, don’t you?”
“Yes, but what makes us feel so sure they aren’t?” Davies asked.
“God, what a fool question,” Winder said. “They’re against the law. Anybody.........” Then he
saw where he was, and his neck began to get red. [And] Davies let his clincher go and made his point --
that it took a bigger ‘we’ than [just those of us hanging around Canby’s Saloon, or even all of us in
Bridger’s Wells] to justify a hanging, and that the only way to get it was to let the law decide. “If we
go out and hang two or three men,” he finished, “without doing what the law says, forming a [legal] posse
and bringing the men in for trial, then by the same law, we’re not officers of justice, but due to be
hanged ourselves.”
“And who’ll hang us?” Winder wanted to know.
“Maybe nobody,” Davies admitted. “Then our crime’s worse than a murderer’s. His act put him
outside the law, but keeps the law intact. Ours would weaken the law.”
“That’s cuttin’ it pretty thin,” said Gil, [who was standing down at the end of the bar].
“It sounds like it at first,” Davies said earnestly, “but think it over and it isn’t.” And he
went on to prove how the greater ‘we,’ as he called it, could absorb a few unpunished criminals, but not
unpunished extra-legal justice.... “It spreads like a disease,” he said. “And it’s infinitely more
deadly when the law is disregarded by men pretending to act for justice than when it’s simply inefficient,
or even than when its elected administrators are crooked.”
“But what if it doesn’t work?” Gil asked. And Winder grinned.
“Then we have to make it work.”
“God,” Winder said patiently. “That’s what we’re tryin’ to do.” And when Davies repeated they
would be if they [got the sheriff and] formed a legal posse and brought the men in for trial, [Winder]
said, “Yeah, and then if your law lets them go?”
“[Then] they probably ought to be let go rather than that a lynch gang decide whether they ought
to hang,” said Davies.
Davies’ issue with Winder is a Nevada-Territory version of Jesus’ point with the pharisees this
morning -- that the ends never justify the means, that the means by which we do something are part of
the ends we seek, that the means by which justice is obtained are themselves a substantive part of
justice, and that without the proper means for obtaining justice, justice itself is denied and thwarted.
Or, to put it in the context of Jesus’ discussion with the pharisees -- that the means by which God’s
ends and purposes are sought are part of God’s purpose itself, that if we want to do what is right but do
it in a wrong way, then we become more wrong than those who do what is wrong in the first place.
“Why do your disciples eat with defiled hands?” the pharisees asked Jesus. “Why do they eat
without washing first, in accordance with our ancient traditions?”
And Jesus tells them that Isaiah was right when he prophesied about hypocrites who pay lip-service
to God, but whose heart is far from God. He tells them that Isaiah was right when he spoke about those
who worship God in vain by teaching as doctrines the commandments of men, when he spoke about those who
neglect both the means and the ends of God in order to maintain the means and traditions of men.
John Ortberg (Christianity Today, May 19, 1997) says that the pharisees were part of the culture
wars of the first century, a group of activists who came down on the right side of all the values
questions. “They rejected relativism and secularism. They were unwavering adherents of ethical
absolutism. They were committed to the values of monogamy in marriage and chastity outside it. They
promoted monotheism against polytheistic Roman paganism. Clearly,” Ortberg says, “the Pharisees were the
Religious Right of Israel.” And they were right.
“But it is interesting,” he adds, “that the people who held the ‘right’ values were the ones least
responsive to Jesus’ message and most likely to receive his reprimands. His message was received with the
greatest eagerness by those who came down on the wrong side of all the values issues -- the prostitutes,
the tax-collectors, the religious half-breeds.”
A few of the pharisees embraced Jesus, but most of them read their Bible a different way than
Jesus read his. They argued that they were keeping the Law of God by washing their hands and by declaring
their money Corban and giving it to the Temple. But Jesus read the same Bible and told them that they
were neglecting the greater law of God, neglecting the very ends and purposes of God, in order to maintain
human traditions that had grown up around the Bible. He told them that they were cleverly putting their
money in a religious trust so they wouldn’t have to take care of their mothers and fathers, which was a
more basic thing God had told them to do, and that they were so wrapped up in the liturgy of hand washing
that they couldn’t see the need of the people sitting beside them.
“The ironic result of [the pharisees’] ‘rightness’ in belief and practice,” says Ortberg, ”was
that they became unable to love -- [they] did not want the sick healed on the Sabbath, did not want an
adulterous woman to be forgiven, did not want sinners to share the fellowship of the righteous. [In
keeping their traditions], they came to see the people they were called to love as ‘the enemy.’
“This is a common temptation for all of us who take faith seriously,” adds Ortberg. He says that
he often gets fund raising letters from Christian organizations “that paint society in conspiratorial ‘us’
versus ‘them’ colors,” and that while he usually agrees with their moral positions, he rarely senses from
them a caveat, let alone a consistent tone, “acknowledging that love must be the ultimate aim even in
disagreement.”
That’s what Davies was getting at with Winder -- that justice must be the ultimate aim even when
someone has been shot and his cattle rustled. And it’s what Jesus was getting at with the pharisees --
that while it is important to be right on the traditions, and on moral questions, there is something more
dangerous than being wrong on them, and that is being right and knowing it, being so caught up in the
“righteousness” of being right, being so caught up in the thrilling sense of being morally superior to
those who are ‘not right,’ that you become more wrong than your most misguided opponent. “This,”
concludes Ortberg, “is why certain pharisees who were so careful not to commit adultery or steal or
murder, [and so careful to wash up before eating], were so deeply offended when Jesus said they were
further from the kingdom of God than, say, Hugh Hefner or Madonna,” or than those politicians who send
their money to the laundry or those convention deputies who voted the wrong way.
One of the basic principles of moral theology is that the ends never justify the means, that the
means by which a tradition is observed are themselves a substantive part of the tradition, that without
the appropriate means to an end, the end itself is denied. And Jesus is saying that all the commandments
of God and all the tradition is summed up in two more basic commandments -- to love the Lord your God
with all your heart and soul and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.
It is, in other words, as important to act lovingly toward the one who is wrong as it is to be
right. No, even more so. It is more important to do good on the Sabbath and heal someone than to let him
continue to suffer unnecessarily. It is more important to welcome the prostitute and tax collector and
sinner at the table of the righteous than to make sure she knows she’s wrong, which she probably already
knows anyway. The trick, as Abraham Lincoln knew, is to destroy our enemies by making them our friends.
And this is what St. Paul means when he says that even if he has all knowledge, even if he gets everything
right, if he doesn’t have love he is nothing.
Jesus does not disagree with the pharisees about the importance of the law and the tradition.
Jesus agrees that the law and the tradition are important, but he is insistent that when you worry about
washing your hands at the right times, and even about the traditions of the Church, but forget that the
purpose and end of a life lived for God is to love your neighbor as yourself, you find yourself straining
at a gnat in order to swallow a camel. The law and traditions are good, but love is the end and
perfection of both. It’s possible, in other words, to keep even the traditions of the Church but ignore
the most basic commandment of God. The means are part of the ends; how one is right is a substantive part
of being right.
Sadly, many of our disputes in the Church, in the present as well as in the past, sometimes
degenerate into ecclesiastical forms of lynchings. We throw our rhetorical ropes over a limb and say,
“Agree with us, or else!” which has a way of negating the very end and purpose of Church itself.
The primary task of the Church, as Ortberg reminds us, is not to push our own agendas at all cost.
It’s not even to make a powerful apologetic for what are called Christian values in society. The primary
task of the Church “is to participate in, and witness to, the Gospel, to witness to life lived in the
presence and under the reign of God which Jesus proclaimed,” to participate in and witness to life where
both God and neighbor are loved and where it is always remembered that the means toward the ends are
always themselves part of the ends.
To see our faith as an ideology of some kind, to see it as a matter of signing up for the right
party, is to allow us to evade the responsibility of discipleship. To see our faith as a matter of
signing up for the right party allows us to avoid the much harder road of following Jesus, whose path was
to witness to God’s love for all. The values Jesus calls us to are not the values of any “side,” or of
any human party or cultural or ecclesiastical tradition. The values Jesus calls us to are the eternal
values taught and lived by him, which stand over and above every party platform and political agenda.
Does this mean silence or neutrality on the controversial issues of the day? No, it doesn’t, not
anymore than it did in Jesus’ day.
What it does mean is that as the culture wars rage on, both in the world at large and within the
Church, Jesus calls us to remember that his invitation to the Gospel, and to the fellowship of God’s Table
today, is not an invitation to be on the right side. It is an invitation to become the right person. And
the right community.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |