In the context of the Gospel, the cross means Christ's sacrificial love. The passage from Deuteronomy explains how this love can be embodied in our relationships with our neighbors. Forgiveness is an action in which we are ready to give something up for another person's sake, in order to preserve the love between us. Sometimes we must give up demanding repayment of a debt—recall the Sermon on the Mount—and sometimes our ambitions, wounded pride, or emotional comfort. The greater what we give up and the more we forgive, the greater the love binding us to our neighbor, who may sometimes be someone we barely know. When we understand that another person is more important to us than our other values, whether material or spiritual, we begin to understand what love is...

When reading the Torah attentively, it often turns out that some of its provisions flatly refute both widely spread concepts and no less widely spread hopes. The statement about the poor, who among the people of God, just as among any other people, "will always be there," in an age of "fighting poverty," a fight that, alas, is more often declared than real, sounds discouraging.

Of course, in the Bible it is not hard to find an explanation for such a pessimistic view of the possibility of universal well-being: the fall distorted humanity's relationships not only with God, but also with the world He created, and now a person has to eat from the ground that formerly fed him willingly, "by the sweat of his face," obtaining food with difficulty and often balancing on the edge of survival. And attempts at intensified exploitation of nature in order to obtain more turn into ecological problems for fallen humanity.

The Torah gives no universal recommendations in this respect, neither economic, nor political, nor any others. It only calls for mutual support, which allows the consequences of the fall for human society to be minimized. To a modern person such a recipe may appear somewhat archaic. But if one thinks about it, hardly anything more modern and timely can be invented.

For the matter concerns that same love of neighbor which today is just as relevant as it was in the days of Moses and in the days of the Savior's earthly life. Love without which, alas, no schemes work and the most grandiose projects of universal well-being, which seemed so thought-out and flawless on paper, collapse. That same love which at the end of the path opens to us the Kingdom, where there certainly will be no poor.

In Deuteronomy the laws about slaves that we also see in Exodus are repeated. They certainly have a definite meaning in the context of the clan-tribal society in which they arose. The point is that debt slavery could easily lead to very serious property stratification, and then social stratification, which, under conditions of predominantly communal landholding, would inevitably have produced social instability. Slaves who, in the end, would have had nothing left to lose, and in large numbers besides, could have posed a serious public danger.

Contrary to ideas that are fairly widespread today, slave labor in antiquity, when it was effective at all, was effective only in certain cases and under very definite conditions, which did not exist in Hebrew society. That is why mass slaveholding was a relatively uncommon and rather local phenomenon in antiquity. The Hebrews never had it. In Hebrew society, slavery always remained domestic and patriarchal, when a slave was regarded as a member of the household, though not an equal one. His status resembled that of an underage member of the family or of a large patriarchal clan.

It is no accident that in Hebrew "slave" and "adolescent" are called by the same word. If slavery had become mass slavery, the consequences would have been completely unpredictable. The laws about slaves made it possible to avoid this.

There was, however, something else as well: the understanding that a person is not simply an element of society, which completely defines him and his existence. A person cannot and must not be a slave of the socioeconomic order in which he has to live. Not even because that order is bad, although in the fallen world it cannot be good in any case; here the only possible choice is between bad and very bad.

A person is first of all the image of God, and only afterward a subject of any impersonal relations whatever. Debts, of course, must be repaid, but a person must not lose himself as the image of God, nor his freedom before God and people, because of debts that for some objective reason he cannot repay. Objective because a normal, healthy person is able in seven years to work off any debt that bears at least some relation to his abilities. If he has not managed to do this in seven years, then he will not manage to do it later either. To leave a person a slave until the end of his life means to ignore the image of God in him, and this the Torah naturally cannot allow. Hence the compromise it proposes between the demands of society and the freedom a person needs for a full life before God.