Nature and Culture 2: The End

“You can try to push back against the troubles of this world, but trouble is like the tide, and it always returns.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S3 E7, ‘The End’ (2019)

How to generically characterise Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events? Well, I suppose you might call it something like Victorian-gothic-esque absurdist metafiction with strong elements of social satire. Or on the other hand, you might decide that, at its core, it’s really a coming-of-age story. I’m going to work from the Netflix adaptation rather than the books, simply for ease-of-access reasons.¹ Spoilers ahead.

 

Many thanks to Paperguest at newgrounds.com for this very smart depiction of Count Olaf by one of his less-than-subtle aliases.

One day at the beach, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are informed by family friend Mr. Poe that their parents have perished in a terrible fire. Thenceforth they are passed like so many hot potatoes from one (invariably incompetent if not downright villanous) guardian to another, their footsteps always dogged by misery in the form of the most villanous villain of all, Count Olaf, who wants to kill them and steal their fortune before they are old enough to inherit it. Along the way, they discover that their parents, Count Olaf, and many more of the people they encounter belonged to a secret organisation called VFD: the Volunteer Fire Department. Once, VFD was driven by the noble goal of dousing fires both literal and figurative, but then there was a schism, in which one side decided it would rather be setting the fires than putting them out.²

Throughout the series, setting fires basically functions as a metaphor for doing evil things. The Baudelaires start out with very firm notions of good and evil: some people are noble and some are wicked and you have to figure out who sits in which box. But then things get a bit more complicated than that, as is very neatly demonstrated by a courtroom scene in the twelfth story. Count Olaf is on trial; the Baudelaires make their accusations against the defendant. He hit Klaus across the face; he tried to marry Violet; he poisoned Uncle Monty; he threw Aunt Josephine to the leeches; he conspired with Esmé Squalor and Carmelita Spats; he kidnapped the Quagmire triplets from Prufrock Prep; he murdered Jacques Snicket in the Village of Fowl Devotees; he tried to cut off Violet’s head at the Heimlich Hospital; he threw a brave and noble librarian to the lions. They identify him as the cause of all their suffering. They recall that nobody has ever listened to them before when they have tried to communicate who Count Olaf is and what he’s capable of.

They recall it, and, though their testimony is well received, they begin to worry. What if, once again, their word is not enough to get justice done? They decide to take a gamble; they call Count Olaf himself to the stand to attest to his crimes. And he, well, he turns the tables on them. He makes a series of accusations of his own, whose veracity the Baudelaires are unable to deny. They held Esmé Squalor hostage on Mount Fraught (because Count Olaf was holding Sunny hostage and they wanted to get her back, but still). They helped Count Olaf burn down Caligari Carnival (because they had to in order to get a ride to the Mortmain Mountains where VFD Headquarters was, but still). Klaus caused a series of terrible accidents at Lucky Smells Lumber Mill (because he was hypnotised, but still). Violet stole some keys from a blind man to break into the library at Heimlich Hospital (because that was the only way they would be able to check the records for mentions of VFD, but still). Sunny broke her siblings out of jail (because they were going to be burned at the stake for a murder they didn’t commit – so, ahem, yeah, less grey area on that one, I’ll grant you). And then the pièce de resistance of Count Olaf’s case: the Baudelaires technically killed a man – because Count Olaf thrust a harpoon gun into their hands and it fired when they dropped it in surprise, but still. Dewey Denouement is still dead.

The point isn’t that the Baudelaires are actually on a par with Count Olaf in terms of their criminal resume; the point is that they aren’t quite as innocent as they thought they were. The point is that they’ve done more wicked things than a noble person ought to. And indeed, at the end of The Penultimate Peril, there’s a bit of a culmination of that, because they burn down the Hotel Denouement – and this time it’s not on Count Olaf’s initiative, but their own. They have truly become those who set fires rather than those who douse them.

They burn down the hotel and they escape in a boat, with Count Olaf. Subsequently shipwrecked, they wash up on an island whose community of castaways is provided over by a man named Ishmael (“call me Ish”). Everyone on the island seems to be very happy. They hang out in comfy robes keeping coloured sheep and drinking coconut cordial, their motto is ‘forget your troubles’ and apparently, though the right tidal conditions for leaving the island swing round on an annual basis, nobody ever does. Plus, the islanders are the only people the Baudelaires have ever met in all their misadventures, apart from themselves, who are able to see through Count Olaf’s disguises. I’m sure there are lots of ways in which that fact might be construed, but it strikes me as ascribing to the islanders a kind of untaintedness by the conventions and expectations of the world at large – a simplicity of heart, if you will. If we’re talking about nature and culture, the islanders are about as far to the ‘nature’ end of the proceedings as you can get, and it certainly seems to be doing them some favours.

 

Coconut cordial. On which, keep reading...

But it seems to contain some disadvantages too. There’s nothing to eat on the island except unmarinated ceviche – which is literally just bits of raw seafood – and nothing to drink except the coconut cordial, which the Baudelaires find suspicious on account of both its taste and the slightly mind-numbing effect it seems to have on the islanders. Sunny suggests that the fish might be tastier if cooked, but Ishmael counters that fire is the most dangerous thing in the world, and the Baudelaires can hardly disagree with that. Later, Violet offers to try to assemble a water filtration system from the various bits of flotsam and jetsam that have washed up on the island (which is situated such that a heck lot of flotsam and jetsam washes up there, hence all the castaways), so that there would be water to drink and salt to season the food, but Ishmael, again, argues against the proposal: what if the islanders couldn’t tolerate fresh water after so many years on nothing but cordial, or what if they started fighting about what to drink? The island is good because it’s safe, and it’s Ishmael’s job to keep it that way. Violet replies apologetically that it was just an idea. “Yes,” says Ishmael, “but ideas lead to more ideas, which lead to arguments, which lead to schisms. You remember what got you stranded here to begin with – don’t rock the boat.”

As Ishmael’s comments betray, he knows rather more about the mysteries in which the Baudelaires are embroiled than he’s letting on. In fact, he knows rather more than they do. The Baudelaires find their way to the Other Side of the island, where all the ‘dangerous’ stuff that washes up get sent – which is to say, pretty much everything that washes up. There they find a house in a tree, which has a water filtration system, and food cooked with fire, and books – including a book with their mother’s handwriting in it. Ishmael shows up and tells them that their parents once lived there. He knew their parents, because he was the one who recruited them into VFD when they attended the school of which he was principal (Prufrock Prep again). The organisation was his idea, his project. “When a fire breaks out, the Official Fire Department is there to fight it,” he explains. “But figurative fires need fighting too, and my students were interested in so many things – literature, science, music, theatre, animal behaviour, the culinary arts – and I thought, what if a group of curious, capable young people came together to stand against the ignorance and injustice of this world? We could make it a quieter, safer place. And for a time we did, and then, well, it all went up in smoke.”

You see the nature of Ishmael’s project: these things his recruits were interested in, these were all culture things, all development things, technology things. They wanted to learn and build and create and progress – just like Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, who identify themselves respectively as an inventor, a researcher, and a chef. Ishmael had hoped that VFD might make the world a better place through such things, but the project failed, and he gave up on the dream. He compares the troubles of the world to the tide: you can try to resist them but they always come back. And hence the banning of any technological-cultural development on the island, the logic being that if you can’t confront ignorance and injustice with progress, then all you can do is try to stop it ever emerging in the first place. And that’s how he proposes to keep the Baudelaire orphans safe the way he couldn’t keep their parents safe.

But then everyone on the island gets infected with a deadly fungus called the Medusoid Mycelium, the only cure for which is horseradish or another culinary substitute. The Baudelaires run back to the tree-house to see if they can find any, and a scene ensues that really makes anyone who knows the book of Genesis sit up and take notice. The Incredibly Deadly Viper – who we were introduced to in the second instalment of the series, and whose name is a deliberate misnomer (it’s actually harmless) – gives the Baudelaires an apple from the house-tree, which has been specially hybridised to function as a cure for Medusoid Mycelium poisoning. And just to hammer home the illusion further, in the book, Sunny’s comment on the matter is “Gentreefive” – as in Genesis 3:5, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”³ What’s going on here? What’s Mr. Snicket using the Biblical story for? Well, as you’ll have guessed, that’s a question that I’m going to have a stab at answering.

 

This one’s a rattlesnake, apparently, so probably actually is an Incredibly Deadly Viper.

Let’s start with the obvious: it’s some kind of inverted Fall. In Genesis, the fruit brings death; in The End, it brings life. In Genesis, the serpent deceives the woman, pretending to be her friend when he’s actually her enemy; in The End, the serpent is likewise deceptive as far as its name is concerned, but the opposite way round: it’s pretending to be deadly when it’s actually harmless. And what about the moral effect – the you shall know good and evil bit? Well, Adam and Eve were just totally ignorant of good and evil before they ate the fruit. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, on the other hand, knew good and evil already. They knew noble from wicked perfectly well. It was for that reason that they found it so disturbing that they had ended up doing so many wicked things in pursuit of noble ends – that they weren’t quite as innocent as they’d thought they were.

But compare the islanders. They don’t have any moral choices to make, because Ishmael removes anything that might cause a disagreement such as might throw up a moral choice from the side of the island where everybody lives. For these guys, it’s just herding sheep, and ceviche for tea, and that’s what there is. So arguably, the islanders don’t know good and evil. They just don’t have to. And that was Ishmael’s whole idea, really, wasn’t it? He has, in a way, engineered a kind of reverse Fall. And he wants the Baudelaires to forget their troubles and join him in his little pseudo-Eden.

The prospect isn’t without its appeal. A safe place to be, with no Count Olaf, is exactly what the Baudelaires have been looking for all this time. But staying on the island would mean giving up, just like Ishmael did. It would mean giving up on inventing and researching and cooking – on any sort of technological-cultural activity that might rock the boat. It would mean ceasing to dream and learn and build things better, and instead settling down with some ceviche and coconut cordial and accepting that this static existence is just what there is. And it would mean giving up on the moral standards that the orphans have been fighting so hard – and failing so increasingly – to hold themselves to. I should mention here, Ishmael decides, early on in the story, to leave Count Olaf in a cage on the sea wall to drown. If the Baudelaires really want to forget their troubles and become part of the island community, they have to be OK with that.

So this is what their inverted Fall is: a reassertion of their determination to know good and evil. They won’t settle for leading quieter and safer lives without striving to make the world a quieter and safer place overall – even though trouble is like the tide and can’t be held back. Even though inventing and researching and cooking your way out of problems doesn’t actually stop the onslaught of problems. Even though that onslaught inevitably leads to you making at least some choices that seem more wicked than noble, and you realise that you’re not as innocent as you thought you were, and you find yourself setting fires instead of putting them out. At the end of The End, the Baudelaires don’t stay on the island, as happy as they might feasibly have been there. They get on a boat and they go back out into the world.

The world is fallen. And human technological-cultural activity and progress is going to cause as many problems as it solves. But I don’t think that excuses us from trying to solve the problems. If you want to reverse that development, if you want to take us back to the golden age before it all went wrong, well, how far do you take it? Which inventions and innovations do you allow or forbid? Hybridised medicinal apples? Water-filtration systems? Fire? Every coin has two sides, benefit and danger. Humans are naturally creative; I think that’s a little bit of what sets us apart from creatures that are merely flesh. We naturally dream and learn and build things better than they were before. We naturally seek to meet problems with new and creative solutions, and, you know, that’s how technological-cultural development happens. Which problems should we be forbidden to solve because it might cause a schism or something somewhere down the line?

The world is fallen. And one thing that that means is that our efforts to do good are never going to be perfect; sin will dog our footsteps for as long as we’re in the flesh. But another thing that that means is that we know good and evil, which our first ancestors didn’t before they ate the fruit. And that means that we can realise and recognise that sin is dogging our footsteps. That means we can realise that we’re not as innocent as we thought we were; that we are not by nature noble, that we are guilty of starting and feeding figurative fires. And that means we can come to Jesus, who swapped his innocence for our guilt and paid the price for it, for salvation. And once we’re born again of water and the Spirit, even though sin is still with us, our efforts to do good count. Just as God chooses to forget our sins, he chooses to remember the good we do. Or else how could he promise reward for good works?

So try. Even if it’s messy, and every solution or piece of progress seems to throw up other problems, and you’re never going to get it perfect – all the same, try. To humanity generally, I say let us dream and learn and build things better than they were before. And to my brothers and sisters in the Lord, I say let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.⁴

Footnotes

¹ Here it is if you fancy a watch: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80215880?trackId=200257859.

² I wrote about this element of the story in ‘Verifiably False Doctrinists’, under May 2018 in my blog archive.

³ You might want the chapter open: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ That’s from Galatians 6, if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+6&version=ESVUK.

Tithes

“If the Skeksis are all-powerful and they have everything, then why do they require tithes from even the poorest Gelfling?”

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance S1 E1, ‘End. Begin. All the Same’ (2019)

It’s not often that I feel able to recommend a television serial after having seen only the very first episode of it. After all, we’ve barely even properly clambered into the actual plot of the thing yet: it’s probably been mostly scene-setting and character introduction and laying of foundations whose true importance will only be revealed later. The premise might be a compelling one, but I can’t tell yet whether it’s been executed in such a fashion as to do it justice. So when I say I really think you might like to see The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, please be aware that I’m saying I really think you might like to see it. The thing is a visual marvel. It’s all done in puppetry, which I’d argue works as a kind of best-of-both-worlds option straddling the line between live action and animation. Like live action, it can incorporate a phenomenal degree of detail in costume and set that most animated media, reasonably enough, simply can’t be bothered with. And like animation, it can create breaktakingly fantastical worlds and inhabitants thereof, with no limit on what’s achievable but the human imagination. Add to that the total and utter charm of these real-yet-unreal entities – solid, graspable, yet hailing from beyond the realm of the factual and possible – and you have a recipe for absolute visual glee. If the plot turns out to be decent as well, well, that’ll be an added bonus.¹

 

This is Deet, one of the characters we met in Episode 1. Thanks to doublemaximus at newgrounds.com for the truly gorgeous fanart.

Probably my favourite set of the first episode is the library in the city of Ha’rar, which is the capital of the Gelfling, the main inhabitants of the planet of Thra, where the story is set. Every surface of the library glimmers with wood panelling, not that you can see much of it under all the stacks and stacks of books – proper, hardbound tomes the lot of them, some designed in exotic shapes so that the pages fold over onto one another at unexpected angles.² A magnificent spiral staircase lined with yet more books snakes up to the high ceiling. Just next to the bottom of this staircase is the reading-desk that seems to constitute the favourite haunt of Brea, the youngest daughter of the All-Maudra, who rules over Ha’rar and, by extension, all the Gelfling. But soon after we meet Brea, she’s torn from her studies by an invitation to attend Ha’rar’s annual tithing ceremony.

The All-Maudra might be top dog among the Gelfling, but she and all her subjects sit under a yet higher authority, namely, a small group of offworlders called Skeksis, who, if you couldn’t tell from the fact that they basically look like carrion birds in elaborate Tudor dress, are very definitely the Bad Guys of the story. From the off, it’s abundantly clear that they care nothing for the Gelfling or for the wellbeing of the world of Thra more broadly; on the contrary, they are intent on exploiting these things in any way possible so as to extend their own lifetimes. The Skeksis’ corruption is not well known, however, and most Gelfling do their best to be of loyal service to their foreign overlords. Part of that loyal service consists of offering a tithe, in kind, of one’s annual income. Whether this is a strict tithe, as in ten per cent, or more of a gift of whichever value the Skeksis deem appropriate, is not made clear. What is made clear is that the whole process is horrifically unjust.

At one point during the tithing ceremony, a farmer and his wife come forward and offer a bowl with a few sad-looking fruits in it. The All-Maudra is not impressed: “Your tithe is wanting.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” admits the farmer. “We beg the lords’ forgiveness. Our land has suffered a strange blight. Nothing grows.”

There is a pause. One of the two Skeksis attending the ceremony, skekOk, steps forward to get a closer look at the couple “Hmm. Lovely,” he remarks.

“What is, my lord?” asks the farmer’s wife.

“That piece – pretty! – about your neck,” replies skekOk.³

“My lord is too kind,” she says. “It was my mother’s. Her final wisdom has been dream-etched into the stone.” Sharing one another’s dreams and memories is a thing that Gelflings can apparently do by various means; it’s not been explained very much yet, but suffice it to say that this pendant takes sentimental value to a whole new level.

“Now this would make an honourable tithe!” declares skekOk.

Tension blooms. Brea is unsettled. “There’s plenty of food in our stores,” she says to her sisters standing with her. “We could pay the tithe.” They shoot her suggestion down without hesitation or concession.

Meanwhile, the farmer pleads with skekOk. “Please – anything but the pendant. Perhaps next harvest–”

“Why?” skekOk address the room in general in a hurt, whingeing tone. “Why do Gelfling hurt us so? Skeksis give so much and ask so, so little! It breaks our hearts.”

Uproar buds and blossoms among the crowd of Gelfling assembled to offer their tithes. They insist that the farmer pay just like the rest of them do.

The All-Maudra’s authoritative voice cuts through the commotion: “The lords are benevolent! Kind! They never take that which is not given.”

The farmer turns to his wife with eyes about as full of anguish as a puppet’s can be, whispers an apology, kisses her gently, and unclasps the pendant from around her neck in order to hand it over to the Skeksis.

“This is wrong!” objects Brea, though not loudly enough for anyone but her sisters to hear.

“This is the law,” snaps one of them.

“It’s the way of things,” says the other, more gently, but with no more willingness to move.

The tithe is proclaimed accepted, and the ceremony moves on to the next contributor.

Later, Brea is back at her favourite reading-desk. “I’ve been reading about the tithing,” she tells the librarian. “None of it makes sense … If the Skeksis are all-powerful, and they have everything, then why do they require tithes from even the poorest Gelfling?”

“Because all Gelfling benefit from Skeksis rule, so all Gelfling must contribute,” replies the librarian, clearly less than comfortable with where this conversation is going.”

“Or perhaps they want us fighting each other for the leftovers,” Brea suggests darkly by way of an alternative.

Of course, Brea’s question is a very good one, a very incisive one – one that threatens to expose the Skeksis’ corruption for what it is and challenge the rightness of their rule. That’s why the librarian proceeds to wrestle the book off her and forbid her from pursuing her line of thought any further: because she’s getting dangerously close to the truth. (Never trust anyone who tries to stop you reading, kids.)

If the Skeksis are all-powerful, and they have everything, then why do they require tithes? Well, the answer to that is, they don’t. They use the tithing system as a mechanism for exerting control – keeping the Gelfling poor, and perpetuating a narrative of their dependence on their Skeksis overlords. It might be the law, or the way of things, but Brea’s right: it’s wrong.

 

I think this properly brilliant fanart by BlackArro3 at newgrounds.com is based on the 1982 film which inspired the 2019 TV series, rather than the latter itself. Still, this is how Skeksis look.

So – and you knew where this was going – what about God, then? If he’s all-powerful, and he has everything, then why, under his covenant with Israel as laid out in the Torah, does he require tithes?

Well, a good place to start in terms of answering that one is, what are the tithes for? In the Skeksis’ case, they seem to just hoard the Gelfling’s contributions for themselves, with the occasional gift for a favourite along the way: the farmer’s wife’s pendant is subsequently given to the All-Maudra. By contrast, check out the following chunk of Numbers 18:

To the Levites I have given every tithe in Israel for an inheritance, in return for their service that they do, their service in the tent of meeting, so that the people of Israel do not come near the tent of meeting, lest they bear sin and die. But the Levites shall do the service of the tent of meeting, and they shall bear their iniquity. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations, and among the people of Israel they shall have no inheritance. For the tithe of the people of Israel, which they present as a contribution to the LORD, I have given to the Levites for the inheritance. Therefore I have said of them that they shall have no inheritance among the people of Israel.⁴

So tithes, under the covenant with Israel, are the property of the Levites, who weren’t assigned any land of their own and so had no other means of supporting themselves. The other tribes, who did have land, all gave ten per cent of the income it generated as the wages of the Levites for their service in the tabernacle (or later, the temple), which they carried out on behalf of the whole nation. Levites weren’t the only ones who benefited from tithes, either; take a look at the following couple of verses taken from Deuteronomy 26:

When you have finished paying all the tithe of your produce in the third year, which is the year of tithing. giving it to the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, so that they may eat within your towns and be filled, then you shall say before the LORD your God: I have removed the sacred portion out of my house, and moreover, I have given it to the Levite, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, according to all your commandment that you have commanded me.⁵

The categories of people to whom tithes were given were those groups vulnerable to poverty in the socioeconomic system of ancient Israel. Land was assigned to heads of households of native Israelites, so if you found yourself outside that framework – as an immigrant, widow, or fatherless child – you’d likely be landless, as the Levites were, and so without a reliable source of income. The tithes were there, in short, to provide for those who lacked the means to provide for themselves.

Tithing as outlined in the Law, then, is not about giving stuff to the one who already has everything. God doesn’t need anyone’s stuff. It all belongs to him first by default anyway, and he lacks nothing:

For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the hills and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.⁶

That’s a little bit of Psalm 50 for you there. Now consider the Skeksis again. They have everything, because the whole planet belongs to them, but they demand offerings from even the poorest Grifling. God likewise has everything, because the whole planet – the whole universe, indeed – belongs to him, but what he demands is that the poorest of his people be provided for by the offerings of the rest. If Thra were governed according to the rules laid out in the Torah, the poor farmer whose crops had suffered blight would have been receiving of the tithe, not giving one out of his own meagre harvest.

So what does this mean for us under the new covenant with Christ? Well, the first important fact to get settled in our minds is that we are not obliged to tithe. That’s not our covenant. We’re simply not part of the same system as tithing. There is no cause for you to work out ten per cent of your income and – well, do anything in particular with it. (In fact, you might want to set your subconscious working on the matter of what you would do with it if you were going to try to tithe, while you read the next few paragraphs; I’ll touch on that question in a bit.)

 

Calculate your ten per cent ... and then whisk these pound coins to the bank, sharpish, and get them exchanged for the new sort you can actually spend.

I’ve seen it argued that, based on the Torah, ten per cent is clearly God’s base requirement for charitable giving, and so we ought to use that as our starting point when making financial decisions. I think this argument is potentially missing the point a bit. Tithing was not really charitable giving as we’d understand it; that would have been something you did on top of your tithe. Tithing it was an economic safety net for those made vulnerable to poverty by the nature of how their society worked. Paying tithes was also compulsory. So if you’ll forgive me for straying into slightly politicised language, it was fairly akin to what we might call a social security tax. It was not, to borrow Paul’s wording from 2 Corinthians 9, each one giving as he had decided in his heart. Indeed, to impose any base requirement on charitable giving is surely to defeat the point of it being charitable. Insisting that the contribution is freely given, while colouring it as sinful not to give that specific contribution, smacks a little of what the Skeksis did to the farmer and his wife, don’t you think? Somehow “God loves a giver obliged by duty” doesn’t sound quite right. Obligation is not generosity. In fact, obligation removes the opportunity for real generosity to be demonstrated – but I’ve written about that before.⁷

There’s also the issue that imposing a ten-per-cent minimum that Christians imagine themselves to be sinning if they don’t meet, can do harm to exactly those people tithing was designed to help – the poor and vulnerable. I saw a heartbreaking post on the Subtle Christian Traits Facebook group some months ago, in which a member of the group was asking for advice about how to handle the following situation: her parents had started ‘tithing’ – which in context seemed to mean paying to their church – ten per cent of their before-tax, rather than after-tax, income, as an ‘act of faith’, and had ended up in debt because of it. I refrained from writing a reply because I was worried I was too furious to write a helpful one, but a glance at some of the other comments only made me more furious: a majority of them affirmed that the girl’s parents were right to be tithing, even if they disagreed about the niceties of exactly how. Meanwhile, the very idea that Christians were ending up in debt – quite possibly to a non-Christian creditor – because their church was telling them to contribute more than they could afford towards its expenses, seemed pretty sickening to me.

The principle to take from Old Testament tithing isn’t the figure of ten per cent: it’s the need to provide for those members of the covenant community who lack the means to provide for themselves. Our model for how to do this is indicated in Acts 4:

No one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.⁸

So if you thought I was letting you off the hook when I said we’re not meant to tithe under the new covenant, think again. This point is probably worth a post of its own, but when Jesus quotes something from the Law and follows it with a ‘but’, he has a rather irritating habit of then following that ‘but’ with a demand far more stringent than the one made in the Law.⁹ He moves the battleground from the outer person to the inner one: no longer, do such-and-such, but rather, be such-and-such. No longer, do not murder, but rather, don’t even be angry with anyone; no longer, give your stipulated ten per cent, but rather, consider everything you own to belong to your brothers and sisters as much as to yourself. Impossible demands they may seem, and indeed they are, for us in the flesh, but Jesus is able to make them of us, because he has granted us his Spirit dwelling in us to conform us to his righteousness. There is radical sanctification, and there is grace, by his blood, for every way in which we fall short. This is the law to which we are subject.

I repeat: the principle to take from tithing is the need to provide for those members of the covenant community who lack the means to provide for themselves. I’m afraid I can’t resist mentioning that this doesn’t involve paying for church-owned real estate or salaries for professional ministers. Some people draw an analogy in this respect between the role of the Levites and that of paid ministers, but this misses a crucial distinction between the two: the function of the Levites, the duty whose performance earned them their reward, was as mediators between God and the people. Scroll back up and have another scan of that slice of Numbers 18: getting service at the tabernacle or temple wrong was literally a matter of life and death, so there needed to be a special consecrated group who could carry it out properly on behalf of everyone else. Under our covenant, on the other hand, we have no mediator but Christ. No one but he stands between us and God to bridge the gap between his holiness and our sinfulness, and prevent that dissonance from spelling our destruction. The Levites are fulfilled in Christ alone, and again, he’s God; the cattle on a thousand hills are his; he doesn’t need us to pay him a salary. Likewise, we have no temple or tabernacle to maintain: our temple is, once again, Jesus, or else it’s the community of the Church. And only one of those fulfilments is going to benefit from us sharing our income with it.

I’m not saying, by the way, that there aren’t other categories of generosity that it’s right and good for us to exercise – that the poor and vulnerable of the Church are the only people we’re ever allowed to give any money to. But looking purely at the matter of tithing, this is how it translates in our covenant.

The Skeksis have everything, but require a tribute from even the poorest Gelfling. God has everything, and apportions it to human beings as he wills. We glorify him when we manifest his love for the poor and vulnerable among his people by making sure that everyone is provided for. Holding everything in common is, for most of us, substantially more difficult than calculating ten per cent of our income and sticking it on a direct debit to the church we attend. But Jesus died and rose so that we could not only inherit his righteousness in a technical, legal way, but also be confirmed to his image in an authentic and practical way. I’m not pretending I’m any better at this jazz than anyone else in our prosperous and individualistic western society, but, in this as in so many things, adelphoi, I really do believe we ought to try.

Footnotes

¹ You can get it on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80148603?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Cea26c99b-0b3e-4840-bdb1-1b0f05448307-67168608%2C%2C&ad=true.

² First plug of the day, in case you’re one of those heathens who still celebrates Christmas and are well organised enough to already be thinking about presents: I have a friend who’s a bookbinder and makes really lovely notebooks with nice fat paper that doesn’t mind markers or watercolour paints: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/LunaBloomsDesign?ref=ss_profile.

³ Second plug, to similar effect: I have another friend who makes really beautiful statement jewellery from polymer clay and other bits and pieces: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/HandcraftedByHatty?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=621624757.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=num+18&version=ESVUK. Just ESV today. Hey, it’s late, and translating takes time.

⁵ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=deut+26&version=ESVUK.

⁶ And, indeed, again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+50&version=ESVUK. More of my thoughts on this psalm are in ‘Rise of the Slightly Rubbish Guardians’, under April 2017 in my blog archive.

⁷ In ‘The Present Situation’, way back in December 2015, and also ‘Genuinely Generous’ in February 2017. Clearly I have run out of things to say and am simply repeating myself in different iterations. Hopefully it’s edifying all the same.

⁸ Penultimate Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+4&version=ESVUK. I wrote about that one in ‘Hunted and a Hundredfold Houses’ in March of this year too. Blimey, I really have run out of things to say.

⁹ Try Matthew 5 if you don’t believe me: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5&version=ESVUK.