Laying Down the Law

Scripture: Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus really lays down the Law.

That’s a loaded term, isn’t it—the law? Law tells us what we can and cannot do. It protects human freedom by limiting human freedom. Too much law is totalitarian, yet far worse is the anarchy of lawlessness. Even so, laws cannot be arbitrary, can they? An unjust law is no law at all.

And that raises an interesting question right there, doesn’t it? If we judge a particular law, a human law, to be unjust, against what standard are we judging it? Behind human law lies a greater law, a greater justice, without which our laws would be unjust and thus meaningless. We call this greater law the natural law, and its basic precepts are universal: it is wrong to murder; it is wrong to steal; piety is good; adultery is bad; and so on.

Every human civilization has understood this, has acknowledged natural law as self-evident. We often disagree on the origin of these principles, and we certainly don’t agree on their application. Convince yourself that someone isn’t fully human, for example, and you can get away with pretty much anything. It’s not murder if they’re not people. But however we try to get around it, try to exempt ourselves from it, we simply cannot ignore morality’s natural law. There’s no such thing as a society that embraces lying, murder, adultery or impiety as virtues. Such would be literally unimaginable, an anti-society.

These two sorts of law—the human and the natural—represent two different levels of morality. The first level is basic self-preservation: I won’t hit you so that you won’t hit me; I won’t steal your stuff so that you won’t steal mine. This is the level upon which most legality operates. We agree, as a society, to stop at red lights, so that we won’t crash into each other every morning. Such laws operate as curbs, as bare minimums, to keep our communities functioning. Such laws do not mandate courtesy, or that we care about one another, or that we try to understand one another’s points of view. They simply make sure that we don’t kill each other.

Natural law corresponds to a second level of morality: obeying the law because it is the right thing to do. I won’t hit you because unprovoked aggression is wrong; I won’t steal your stuff because you have property rights and to violate them is wrong. This level of morality has to do with justice, with self-evident, universal concepts of right and wrong upon which all people of goodwill can agree. Remember that human laws must stem from natural laws; otherwise we will judge them unjust. And again, an unjust law is no law at all.

But there is a third level of morality corresponding to a third level of law. And this highest law is divine Law.

Divine Law was handed down by God to one specific group of people. God gave this Law to the Israelites, to the family of Abraham, for a very clear purpose. It wasn’t because the Israelites were the strongest of men. In fact, they were slaves. It wasn’t because the Israelites were the best and most moral of men. In fact, they were sinners like the rest of us. God gave His divine Law to the Israelites so that they would become an example, a shining beacon, a priestly people, through whom God promised to bless all the nations of the earth. God took the lowest of the low—the slaves of Egypt—and gave them the perfect Law of God, the Law behind natural law.

The first five books of the Bible are known as Torah, a Hebrew term that translates to “instruction” or “Law”. Within it there are no less than 613 commandments, 613 laws, governing God’s people Israel. At the core of all these lie the 10 Commandments, carved by God atop Mt. Sinai and brought down to the Israelites by Moses. The 10 Commandments are the beating heart of divine Law, and all those other commandments, the other 603, are basically case law applying the Big 10 to specific instances. When we read in the Old Testament all these obscure little laws regarding the rescue of donkeys and the treatment of skin diseases, these are all the ways in which God’s people Israel attempted to live out the 10 Commandments in the world they knew.

But it all boils down to those original 10. And what was the core message of the 10 Commandments? Simply this: love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. This, Jesus says, is the sum of the Law and the Prophets. Love is the core of divine Law. Love is the basis for the third and highest level of morality, the sort of selfless and self-giving love taught only by the world’s major religious faiths. I won’t hit you because I love you; I won’t steal from you because I love you. This sort of love is not merely emotional. This sort of love is the conscious choice to put another’s needs on the same level as your own. It is the conscious choice to put God first, and to care for all humanity as we would care for ourselves.

That’s what Jesus is trying to get across in our Gospel reading this morning. That’s why He sounds so harsh when rebuking the way in which the society around Him talks about God’s Law. See, by the time of Jesus it’s been some 1500 years or so since Israel first received the 10 Commandments atop Mt. Sinai. And the family of Abraham has been meticulous in preserving this Law. Students memorize every jot and tittle of the Torah. A whole new body of Oral Law has been compiled in order to form a hedge around the written Law, in order to guard and defend it.

For example: one of those written case laws that I mentioned, one of the 603 that apply the 10 Commandments to ancient life, has to do with not boiling a young goat in its own mother’s milk. I know that seems strangely specific, but apparently that’s something that the pagans around Israel used to do as a religious right. And the Israelites knew that if they sought to live out the 10 Commandments in daily life, as a people set apart, then they were not going to imitate the pagan rites of the neighboring Canaanites. In order to make sure that God’s people never broke this commandment, the Oral Law forbade any sort of mixing of meat and dairy whatsoever. And to this day, the segregation of meat products and dairy products is a central pillar of kosher law.

Jesus preaches that in doing these sorts of things, God’s people have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They know that the Law is important, which is good; they know that the Law must be protected and upheld and lived out, which is great. But in falling into this sort of legalism, they’ve neglected the heart of divine Law. They’ve been consumed by details and forgotten that selfless love is both the origin and the end of God’s Law. Notice that what Jesus criticizes is not the keeping of the Law but the keeping of it selfishly.

When people read “Thou shalt not murder,” they selfishly think that they’ve kept this commandment so long as they haven’t bashed someone over the head with a rock. But Jesus proclaims that public slander and private cruelty and even internal rage are violations of love and so are violations of God’s Law. When people read “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” they selfishly look for any loophole to cast off their current wife for a new one. Jesus insists that marriage vows are not for the husband’s advantage or abuse but to love his wife as God loves His people. This isn’t about condemning divorcees but condemning lovelessness. As for the bit about lust, well, lust treats people like meat—the very antithesis of love.

“Do you honestly think that because you keep the Law on a human level, on the bare minimum, that you’ve fulfilled the Law of God?” Jesus asks us. “The Law of God is more than legalism! It’s more than a checklist! It’s more even than right or wrong. The Law of God is to love God above all and to love your neighbor as yourself. It calls not for a new mindset to keep new rules, but for a new heartset, to put the needs of others before your own—and thus to find true and abundant life, the deep happiness of selfless love.”

Jesus is not speaking to people who know that we are sinners, who know that we aren’t fulfilling God’s Law. Jesus is speaking to people who think that they are fulfilling God’s Law, that they are holier-than-thou, because they check off commandments and use the Torah as a bludgeon to knock others down and to puff themselves up. Plenty of people do that in churches all across the world. In fact, if we pay attention, we’ll probably catch ourselves doing it more often than we’d feared.

The highest Law is that of love. Everything else is details. Let us ever strive to love God above all and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And when we fail—which we will do, oh, so very often—let us trust in God’s love to forgive and raise us anew.

Thanks be to Christ, our Law and our Gospel. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.