Doing a Hank Snow

Before going on to become a federal Member of Parliament, Randy White was the secretary/treasurer of the Abbotsford (BC) school district, where I am a school trustee, in the 1980s and early 1990s. He was a wonderfully funny man who was a treat to spend time with in relaxed situations.

In the year before he went to Ottawa, Randy and I attended the Canadian School Boards Association annual conference in St. John, New Brunswick. I don't think I ever laughed so much in my life as during those four or five days we were together. Randy had lived in St. John during his high school years, and he took me around to see all his old haunts. He also explained to me some of the local vernacular.

"When you wanted to turn back in the direction you came from", Randy explained with his Maritime accent, "you would do a Hank Snow." Randy had no explanation for this odd reference to that old Canadian crooner (Snow was born in Nova Scotia). But to prove to me that he was right, he later told a taxi driver to do a Hank Snow. The man immediately made a U-turn, laughing while he did it.

Today, of course, we would more likely say something like, "Do a 180", referring to a change in the opposite direction. 

What I will briefly explore in this post is whether the Levitical laws and other legal material in the Old Testament (including the rejection of homosexuality) carried through to the New, or whether the biblical writers of Jesus' period did a Hank Snow. Or was something else at work?

The Israelites of the period depicted in Leviticus and its companion books (the latter part of Genesis, along with Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) were not a people with a particular culture. A collection of small families related by blood when they departed Canaan for Egypt in Gen. 46 and following, they returned to the Promised Land one or a few centuries later (depending on whose dating you accept) a much larger group, in most ways indistinguishable from the surrounding ancient near eastern peoples. It is not likely that all (or even most) of them were monotheistic, and few would have had much idea of how being followers of Yahweh (or Jehovah) would make them in any way unique.

What we see in the latter four books of the Pentateuch (the Books of Moses, the opening five books of the Old Testament), is God carving out of the prevailing culture a people for himself. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt, he now proceeded to take Egypt out of the Israelites.

God accomplished this through the towering presence of Moses, along with brother Aaron and sister Miriam; the promulgation of the Ten Commandments as that which would distinguish their worldview from that of other peoples; the establishment of a system of worship and the rituals that would be associated with its practice; and a series of laws and institutions to regulate everyday life. In most cases, these laws focused on the external--appearance, appropriate relationships, even allowable foods and textiles. We considered many of these in earlier posts.

While in many cases mystifying to us now, beneath these seemingly strange and even arbitrary directions and restrictions one can discern a principled foundation, even though this moral logic was not spelled out in so many words. In no particular order, such principles included:

• The sanctity of the family unit as the building block of society.
• A culture characterized by justice (distributive, restorative, and retributive) and the rule of law.
• Letting punishment fit the crime.
• Life balance.
• Personal integrity.
• An organic relationship among the Israelite people.
• Wholesome relationships; i.e. a fellow Israelite was never to be exploited in any fashion as a means of achieving self-gratification--whether sexually, economically, or politically.
• Loving others as one would oneself.
• Worship that was sincere, not ritualistic or perfunctory.

These principles were applied in somewhat embryonic fashion in those early days; for instance, the equality of men and women, or of masters and slaves, was only distantly reflected in those ancient laws. Some of the restrictions were shaped by practices in the surrounding culture that were to be discarded for reasons we can't necessarily understand now (e.g., not cooking a goat in its mother's milk for consumption purposes in Deut. 14:21). Slavery was still condoned, although in a humanitarian way that surrounding peoples would find ridiculous.

But what the Israelites received, by and large, were not the principles but only the applications of those principles, often quite limited in the extent of their application, and typically contrasting with surrounding peoples and their own practices that were inimical to the new culture that God wanted to establish and then develop. God was blasting through the enculturation that characterized his people in a pretty hard-hitting way.

Some later biblical writers recognized that it was these underlying principles, and a commitment to them, rather than merely legalistic adherence to ritualistic practice, that endured over time; e.g.,

Isaiah 1:13-18 Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations-- I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. "Come now, let us settle the matter," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. 

This same misunderstanding that approved practice was all that was required shows up in Jesus' condemnation of Pharisaical practice in Luke 11:39-42 Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the platter; but inside of you, you are full of robbery and wickedness. You foolish ones, did not He who made the outside make the inside also? But give that which is within as charity, and then all things are clean for you. But woe to you Pharisees! For you pay tithe of mint and rue and every kind of garden herb, and yet disregard justice and the love of God; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.

But such insight--that a legalistic following of external practices was supposed to be consistent with internal commitment to the underlying values--was a long time coming, and endured even among the Jewish converts to Christianity, as we saw in an earlier post dealing with circumcision.

The great turnaround--the Hank Snow--of the New Testament was that while the principles lying deep beneath the Old Testament laws continued to be honoured, the focus turned from an emphasis on external practices to an internalized value system with the application of the principles left to the person of faith to decide for herself or himself. From the point of view of the legalistic 1st century A.D. Jews, this was revolutionary. 

In my next post, I'll explore this Hank Snow in greater detail. And then we'll look at that abomination in Leviticus re homosexuality in light of this new approach to living one's faith.