GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 5:11
Moral Courage or Complicity
Two choices: exercising moral courage by rejecting immoral job duties, or choosing profit or fame over moral courage.
A driver worked for a beer distributorship when he became a follower of Christ. He came to believe that his devotion to the Father conflicted with his job of distributing beer. Consequently, he resigned his job as a beer-truck driver and became a janitor.
There is a recent story about a lawyer on her way to a partnership in her firm who was asked by the senior partner to sign an affidavit that she knew was not true. She resigned from the firm.
Recently, the head of the Internal Revenue Service resigned. This marked the third person to do so since the start of the year, following a deal struck on behalf of the agency that will require the sharing of tax data on undocumented immigrants—a deal that violates the agency’s privacy laws.
There is a brief glance at a seemingly conflict between moral courage and profitability in St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ meeting a man with an unclean spirit on the seashore in the region of the Gerasenes. “Now a great herd of pigs grazing was there on the hillside.” (Mark 5:11) Jews were forbidden to eat pigs because they have a cloven hoof. (Lev. 11:7-8; Deut. 14:8) According to later Jewish dietary laws, a land animal is kosher (edible) if it both has split hooves and chews its cud. Pigs have split hooves but don’t chew their cud; therefore, they are non-kosher. A legitimate question, then, is: Why were Jewish herdsmen and merchants raising pigs? Well, a likely answer is that Palestine was under Roman occupation. There were Roman soldiers in most Jewish communities. So, while Jews could not eat pigs, Romans had no such prohibition. Jewish farmers could sell pigs to the Romans.
These Jewish farmers apparently chose economic profitability over ethics. If eating pigs violated a divine ethic for Jews, it likewise violated that ethic for Gentiles, but somehow these farmers wiggled their way around their ethical principles to facilitate the Romans’ violation of a divine ethic as long as they did not violate it. This appears to be an example of economic profitability over morality.
Sometimes, choices are inevitable—moral courage or complicity.
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