The Beauty of Law

Propers: The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

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

The Law is given for the flourishing of life. We must never forget that.

In the Bible, the classic formulation of the Law is found in the Ten Commandments, given to God’s people at Mt Sinai:

I am the Lord your God; you are to have no gods before Me.

You are not to use the Name of the Lord your God in vain.

You are to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

You are to honor your father and your mother.

You are not to murder,

nor to commit adultery,

nor to steal,

nor to bear false witness,

nor to covet.

Do this, God says, and you will prosper and flourish and be righteous in My sight. Do this, God says, and you will finally be what you were always meant to be: truly human.

Now, there are 613 Commandments in the Old Testament, but 603 of those are really just case law, specific attempts to apply the Ten Commandments to everyday life in ancient Israel. It all boils down to those original ten. And Jesus boils it down even further. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment,” He says. “And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

St Paul points out that even the Gentiles know this. Even the pagan nations, to whom God has not revealed Himself in the ways that He revealed Himself to Israel, understand that we are to love God and love our neighbor. “When Gentiles, who do not possess the Law, do instinctively what the Law requires,” Paul writes to the Romans, “these, though not having the Law, are a Law unto themselves.” Love of God and love of neighbor are written on every human heart, available for discovery to every person of reason and goodwill.

A lot of this is common sense. Anyone should be able to discern that a society based on idolatry, murder, adultery, jealousy, and lies will not outlast a single generation; whereas a community founded upon piety, lovingkindness, faithfulness, respect, and truth will endure. The Law is given for the flourishing of life.

But on a deeper level, we must confess that the Law convicts us. If we love God perfectly, and love our neighbor perfectly, then we ourselves shall be perfect, shall be righteous in the eyes of God! So—how are we doing? Show of hands, who here loves God perfectly, with all their heart and soul and mind? Who here truly and perfectly loves their neighbors as themselves?

Oh, man. We are in trouble, aren’t we? We had one job, people! One job!

The Law reveals to us God’s original vision for human life, the beauty of the world as it ought to be. But in doing so, it also reveals to us how very far we’ve fallen. At first glance, the Commandments seem simple enough: don’t murder, for example. I mean, I’ve largely managed not to murder anyone for some time now. But on a deeper level, the Commandments are all about loving God and loving neighbor, and we can’t do that. Not perfectly. Not in any deep and abiding sense. We’re too fallen, too broken, too emaciated for that. We’ve been away from the Light for too long.

“If you choose, you can keep the Commandments,” Sirach says. Well, we do choose. Every day we choose. And we choose, oh, so very poorly. “You have commanded Your precepts be kept,” sings the Psalmist, and we want to, truly we do. But in the words of St Paul, the good that we would do, we do not do; and the evil we would not do is precisely what we end up doing. And so the Psalmist must fling himself upon God’s mercy: “Do not utterly forsake me!” he cries.

We need God’s grace. We need God’s mercy. We need God to forgive us when we are unforgiveable, to cure us when we are incurable, and to raise us up when we are unraisable. And that is precisely what Jesus has come to do. Where we have failed, God in Christ succeeds. And He does so freely, generously, purely from His love for us. The Law reveals that we cannot earn forgiveness, we cannot claw our way back into Heaven. But the Gospel tells us that we don’t have to. And so the Law, intended for life, kind of kills us, convicts us of our sin. And the Gospel of the One who died because of us raises us up to new life in Him.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus is preaching to a crowd who doesn’t understand this. They don’t understand what the Law is for, and so they cannot comprehend what the Gospel is offering them. They have had the Law for a thousand years and more, and they honestly seem to think that they can keep it! They honestly seem to believe that they can perfectly love God and perfectly love their neighbor all on their own, thank you very much.

“I don’t keep any false idols,” they proclaim. “I keep the sabbath holy. I haven’t murdered anyone or committed adultery or lied about anything for years! Well, months, anyway. And cross my heart, I don’t even covet. Nope! A veritable saint am I! Now—what’s wrong with all you other losers who can’t keep up?”

See, if you think that you can keep the Law, not only does this cause self-righteousness to fester like gangrene, it also leads to you judging everybody else. You did it, so why can’t they? Well, clearly, it’s because you’re special. You’re holy. You’re God’s gift to humankind and they don’t even realize what it is they’re missing.

We still do this today, mind you. Oh, we may not strut around boasting about how we keep every jot and tittle of the Old Testament’s 613 Commandments. But we try to prove our righteousness in other ways: through our political opinions, say, or our embrace of fashionable causes. We try to prove our righteousness, our innate superiority, in our diets, our exercise regimens, our checkbooks, our houses, our idyllic vacations, our shiny happy children, and so on, and so forth—anything that makes us feel like we’re better than others, anything that lets us judge other people as inferior to ourselves.

And Jesus is having none of it. There are no loopholes in the Law. “You say that you don’t murder,” He says. “But have you been angry with a neighbor? Have you denounced someone as a fool? Then you already have murder in your heart! You say that you are faithful in your relationships. But have you looked upon another in lust? Have you treated a person as though she were a thing, a commodity for your consumption and disposal? Then you’ve already committed adultery at heart!”

And then there’s that line about divorce and remarriage, sure to convict many of us here. Keep in mind that in Jesus’ day, a woman was fully dependent upon her husband for survival. And a man had the power, simply by dint of being a man, to cast his wife out in the street, where she would be reduced to penury and shame. “Just because you write it out on paper,” Jesus says, “doesn’t absolve you of your betrayal.”

The Law convicts us. Every single one of us. Not because the Law is harsh or wicked but precisely because the Law is good and true and beautiful and we are not. We do terrible things to one another. We say and think and post on social media terrible things about each other. We do not love God with all that we’ve got. We do not love our neighbor as ourselves. Lord, have mercy! Do not utterly forsake us.

And so the Law humbles us with the truth. It breaks us in our pride. But it does so in the same way that the plow breaks rough and hardened earth: that we might receive the seed of new life and be fertile ground for the Gospel! No, we cannot earn God’s love, but He loves us all the more! No, we cannot claw our way back up into Heaven, but Heaven now comes down to us! And this perfect love, so freely given, fulfills all the Law, in us and for us and through us, and so we flourish—we flourish as we were meant to flourish all along!

And we will continue to flourish, rejoicing in the beauty of the Law and the mercies of the Gospel, throughout our pilgrimage here on earth, and far beyond into the eternal life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.