Living in a World Beset by Sin.

Read: Genesis 34

The Bible contains many narratives where there are no “the moral of the story is…”, leaving the end rather open. Today’s passage is one of them. The temptation is to try to try and finish the story, to figure out what the moral of the story is. But sometimes, we need to just let open endings be left open. After all, we trust that the Holy Spirit has a reason for leaving the endings of the story open.

Today’s passage is a very difficult passage with many interpretations. One of them, of course, is that this passage has to do with purity, and how it’s important to defend it. The view comes from the fact that in those days what Shechem did was essentially to sully the purity of not just Dinah, but all of Jacob’s family as well. Thus, Jacob’s sons responded by destroying the city as a response to it. But the problem with such an interpretation was that they only destroyed one Canaanite city – out of many more. Furthermore, if they were so concerned about purity, why let Dinah walk around so freely in the first place? And is it just to respond to Shechem with lies and then inflict genocide upon his city? This is a passage that seems to elude a final “this guy is wrong”, “this guy is right”. The temptation, then, is to try to twist the passage so that, in the end, some guy is right and some guy is wrong, and from there we have applications to draw on.

What seems to have stood out to me at least was not so much who’s at fault – we can keep discussing this endlessly – but that human issues do not always have an easy answer. That’s because humans are sinful creatures. Oftentimes, when we deal with big issues such as poverty, creation care, etc., it’s tempting to boil them down into easy packages where there is an easy solution, where one side is right and the other wrong. But in this passage, it seems to me that everyone has made some sort of mistake. Dinah was walking to visit the women of the land alone and without company, at a time when women walking alone day or night are easy targets for rape. Shechem… well, he raped Dinah. Jacob was concerned only for survival and to avoid trouble with nearby Canaanites, despite the fact his own daughter was raped. Jacob’s son’s used deception upon Shechem’s people and then wiped them out by the sword.

When we live in a world beset by sin, these are things that should not surprise us. We live in a world filled with rape and violence. People seem to want to look out for their own interests all the time. There’s always deception on every corner of every city. Sin is everywhere. But the question is whether we want to play with such a system. As Christians, we should stand fast against rape, violence, self-centeredness, deception, etc. But how? The answer is never quite so easy. But this should drive us to our knees in prayer, because even though these issues are beyond us, they’re not beyond God.

Another application is that one person’s mistake can lead to many more. If only Dinah weren’t walking around without someone watching over her, maybe all these conflicts would not have happened! Many divisions in the church began because one person just got the ball rolling. All the more reason, therefore, that we keep each other accountable; not because we don’t trust others, but so that we can trust them even more as we partner together to do God’s work.