Bad Theology

Text for today: Numbers 15 xxxii-xli

During their time in the wilderness, the Israelites discover a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Uncertain of the appropriate penalty, they imprison him and then bring him before Moses and Aaron, whereupon God informs Moses that the man should be stoned by the entire congregation. After the man's execution, God tells Moses to order the people to put tassels with blue cords on the corners of their garments, as a reminder to do as God tells them.

Like most tyrants, God cannot tolerate the smallest infraction or show the slightest mercy. Even His chosen people, a gang of itinerant barbarians who thought nothing of stoning adulterers and were later to commit multiple genocide while emitting loud hosannas, are briefly given pause by the triviality of the offence. Once the miscreant has been disposed of, God's response is to impose an elaborate piece of make-work as a mnemonic device against believing their own eyes or obeying their own conscience.

God's proclamation that man was made for the Sabbath and not the Sabbath for man was eventually overruled by His Son, who declared Himself lord of the Sabbath because it annoyed His enemies, and presumably also because God was by that time obsessed with His eventual destruction of the world and therefore less concerned about commemorating His day of rest after its creation. Later, in his letter to the Romans (14 v), St Paul declared the Sabbath a matter of individual conscience, thereby creditably clearing the low but still significant moral bar of being less murderous than God and less egomaniacal than Jesus.