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This is the only time in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus reflects upon the meaning of his death. He says he had to give his life as a ransom for many. Ransom does not mean what we today typically think of as a ransom: money paid to a kidnapper to set someone free. In Old Testament Law one paid a ransom, or rather a life price, to redeem or restore worth and dignity, for a life that has been wasted to death by the criminal acts or neglect of another and it was paid to the family of the victim by the perpetrator; not the other way around.
This idea of life price is not foreign to us. You may or may not know that many governments have a policy of financially compensating the families of civilian casualties in war. The US government during the Iraq war gave $2,000US per death or approximately 2,500,000 Iraqi dinars per death. If you are wondering how much that really is, it’s about 282 of your favourite McDonald’s value meals. In Afghanistan, NATO countries paid $50,000US per death per Afghani civilian death. In the currency of Afghanistan, that is 2,500,000 Afghani per death. That sounds like a lot, but if you lived in Kabul, how long could your family live on the 10,000 value meals that that money, that ransom or life price, could buy. I must apologize for valuing human lives in accordance with McDonald's Value Meals, but I am just trying to point out the absurdity of war.
In Ontario, we have the Compensation for Victims of Crime Act which was enacted to help victims of violent crimes or their families pay for expenses that resulted from the violent crime. Its preamble recognizes that a value cannot be placed on a human life, so it makes clear that victims are compensated only for expenses related to the crime. The compensation can be in the form of a lump sum of $150,000 or by periodic payments that would in the end add up to $365,000. If these dollar amounts were for a life, the family of a murder victim in Ontario would get a dump truck load of roughly 20,000 values meals, or periodic dumps of up to a total of 48,667 meals.
For comparison’s sake, if a life’s worth came down to the price of McDonald’s Value Meals, then the life of your average Canadian victim of violent crime is worth between two and five times that of an Iraqi or an Afghani. Should nationality or ethnicity make a difference? Unfortunately, it seems it does So, we’re working with a couple of questions here: what is the value of a person’s life and if it is wasted by crime or whatever is it redeemable? Can its worth and dignity be restored?
Well, this idea of compensating for life wasted by the criminal or negligent acts of another as means of restoring worth or dignity to a life that has been unfortunately wasted is actually a biblical idea. A ransom or life price was a price paid that gave value to a life that was accidentally wasted and by paying it one could buy back or redeem one’s own life from being itself wasted if the consequence of death incurred from the accident - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. For example, the Book of Leviticus chapter 21 states that if a man’s ox gored and killed somebody, a life price had to be paid by the owner of the ox and the ox stoned to death and not eaten and thus its life was also wasted. If the ox had a history of goring, then both the ox and the owner were to be put to death. But, a ransom or life price could be imposed for the owner to pay and in doing so he could redeem his own life from his required death.
In other matters, a life price could also be paid to buy a slave from another owner such as ransoming a slave girl in order to marry her. One could also pay a life price by means of a sacrifice to redeem one’s firstborn child from the LORD. The LORD required this life price to make the Israelites remember that the lives of the firstborn of Egypt was the price of their own redemption from slavery in Egypt. The LORD himself could also redeem a person or his people from calamity with the ransom of a mighty act of his hand. Yet, when it came to intentional murder, there was no life price. One could only flee to a city of refuge and live there until the current high priest died and then be free to return home.
Ransom and redeem are two words that are familiar to us as words that we Christians use to talk about salvation or rather more specifically to explain Jesus' death. Unfortunately, their English meanings are no longer what the biblical words they translate meant. We think of a ransom as being a sum of money paid to a kidnapper in exchange for the safe return of the victim. When we think of redeeming it is in terms of redeeming a coupon. If a coupon has a value of twenty cents towards the purchase of a particular product, we can redeem it and save ourselves twenty cents. In the Bible, a ransom is an amount paid to a victim’s family to give worth and dignity back to a life that has been wasted to death. To redeem was to rescue oneself or another from the waste of life that death is by paying a ransom, a life price. We’ve heard of people being deemed worthy. To redeem is to give worth back to a life that has been forfeited for whatever reason. It is to make a person’s life not worthless even though it has been wasted.
So, what does this mean with respect to Jesus saying, "For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to be serve and to give his life as a ransom for many"? As I said earlier, this is Jesus’ only attempt to interpret the meaning of his death to his disciples. In light of what I have just explained, his life is the ransom, the life price that gives worth back to our lives for we have forfeited our worth, our value, our dignity due to sin and are thus lost to death. He has given his life to us and for us to restore utterly restore, the worth and dignity of human life that we have wasted.
Since we are talking about a ransom paid, it would be prudent to ask to whom or to what did Jesus pay his life as a ransom? Well, according to the biblical definition, ransoms, or life prices, are paid to the victim’s family as a symbolic gesture of saying your loved one’s life had worth. A life price was never aid to a perpetrator. Here’s where things get confusing. In this world of sin, we all are both perpetrators and victims. We are perpetrators needing to pay a life price we can in no way ever pay because of our demeaning and wasting of life, our own lives and the lives of others. When life is demeaned and wasted, death is the unfortunate consequence for the perpetrator. We are also victims who have had our lives demeaned and wasted by our own actions and by the actions of others and death is the result. For life to be really restored to its worth and dignity it must be brought back from death.
In one sense, Jesus gives his life, the life of God the Son incarnate, as the life price to bring us back from death and restore our worth and dignity. He gives life to us as we are the victims of sin and death by the gift of the Holy Spirit to us each and to us as communities of those who follow him. This infusion of divine life restores the worth and dignity of our lives which we as humans forfeit by trying to be our own gods and by our idolatry of “stuff” like money and power. Not only does he give us back our worth and dignity, with the life price of his life he buys us back from our slavery to sin by making us to know ourselves as beloved children of God and enabling us to live accordingly.
To pay this life price, this ransom, he himself became the victim of our wasting ourselves. He was a victim to us from the very beginning, the very beginning when he, God the Son, condescended to become as we are in our sinful humanity. He demeaned his life to become one of us and we, in turn, wasted him to death, death by crucifixion. Yet, the result of this is not utter, utter death, but new life, new Creation, resurrection. Paul says, “He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God.” This phrase, the righteousness of God, means that we are the proof that God is faithful. God has not utterly abandoned those whom he loves to death but has moved his mighty hand to ransom us from death, by putting his own life into us by the gift of the Holy Spirit by whose power we will be raised from death on the day of resurrection.
Jesus has paid the life price and redeemed us from death. His giving of his life, the incarnate life of God the Son, over to be wasted in death resulted in his passing through death to be raised to new life. He gives this resurrected life to us in, with, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit. He has given us his own value, his worth, his dignity. We are beloved children of God and no longer utter waste cases. Therefore, whatever we do, let us not waste this redeemed life we now have. Rather, let us take up his life and serve in life giving ways in this sinful, evil world. Let us take up our crosses and follow him for when we give our lives for the service of others in Jesus’s ministry of bringing in the Kingdom of God, his ransom is not in vain. Amen.
