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Ransom

A person’s riches may ransom their life, but the poor cannot respond to threatening rebukes. (Proverbs 13:8)
          Sometimes, it’s tempting to think that what Scripture says is true is what Scripture says should be true. Today’s passage is rather cold. The rich are able to pay what is demanded from them to save their lives. The poor aren’t. The rich get away with crimes because they can afford to pay the legal fees or penalties. The poor can’t. It’s not a case of the way things should be, but a statement of the obvious. Now, I’ll make some other obvious statements. The rich can and do protect their riches, while the poor have none to protect. 
         But there’s another way to approach this passage. Those who take from the poor probably aren’t looking for money, or they’re not too bright. The rich are the usual victims when money is the goal. So while riches may aid the guilty, they also turn the innocent into targets. Poverty doesn’t help the poor guilty, but it protects the poor innocent from at least some crime. 
         There’s a third thing about this proverb, and it goes back to what I wrote about earlier, about beauty and wealth. There is trauma to anyone who is robbed, extorted, or found guilty and made to pay a fine. But the rich tend to have a security blanket around them, whether it is additional money or a security that they can become rich again. The loss of the money itself may not have a lasting impact. But when the poor are robbed, extorted, or fined, they often have to endure great hardship because what was taken was all they had or more than they had. The injury is deeper and therefore can do more harm … or good. The poor are likely to have faced such reversals before. They will likely have either allowed the “wound” to become infected and gangrenous, or they will have learned to accept the pain and use it to become stronger and more beautiful.  

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