Good Laws Can Be Used Wrongly

2 Pentecost, B proper 4  June 3, 2018
Deuteronomy 5:12-15  Psalm 81:1-10
2 Corinthians 4:5-12  Mark 2:23-3:6

Lectionary Link

We pride ourselves for being a nation of laws and the mother of our laws is the U.S. Constitution.  Laws recommend the behaviors for just and fair living together as people; because when individual people live in proximity with each other, competing egos can be a recipe for continuous conflict.  So, we have laws that recommends the personal boundaries that must be honored between people and parties.

The people of Israel were a people who maintained their identity because of their famous Law, the laws that were written in the Torah.

The Jews and Christians had quite a big problem in the first century.  The Torah was revealed as both a religious law and a law for general society.  In that way, the Torah was a law like the Islamic Sharia, since it assumed a theocratic society where religious law and social laws were united in one body of law.

In the time of Jesus, a theocratic state of Israel governed by the Torah was not the situation.  Why?  The Roman Emperor controlled the world and so Roman law was the official and telling law of Israel, even though the Jewish religious authorities could exercise a certain autonomy for the practice of religious laws within their Jewish community.

 St. Paul and Jesus both knew that the Torah was not the law that governed in the Roman World of their time.

The Jewish religious authorities were under great pressure.  They had to become rigid about the practice of their religious rules within their community.  They feared assimilation of their community to the foreign values of the Roman invaders.  Many Jews compromised their religious observance to interact with Romans.

How do the people of an occupied country maintain their separation and their community identity?  The leaders promoted with great deliberation not just the big Laws of the Torah, the Ten Commandments but also the 603 other laws of the Torah.  Under Roman control, it was very difficult for people not to be compromised by quite different lifestyle of the Roman citizens.

If we understand the situation in Palestine, we can appreciate why Jews, followers of Jesus and St. Paul were apocalyptic people.  They were realistic about Roman control; the only way Roman control would be defeated would be by a direct act of God to bring deliverance.  God delivered Israel from Egypt, but God did not deliver the Jews or the Christians from the Roman political control of their world.

What did Paul and Jesus do when they knew that the Torah would not be the law of the Roman Empire?  They taught a different kind of legal thinking which could be adapted to the situations of peoples' lives.

For St. Paul, one could say he shortened the meaning of the law to the word "love."  He wrote that if one loved, then one fulfilled the law.  How was the law of love expressed in the words of Jesus?  He returned to the summary of the law.  Jesus said, the law is all about love.  "Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself."

A big issue was this:  Could the law of God be adapted to a society and a world that was not under the control of Torah law?

For Paul and for Jesus, law was all about love.

If the law is all about love, can the enforcement of laws be used for unloving purposes?  Laws can be applied in ways that contradict the greater law of love.

If it is against the law to heal someone on the Sabbath, then the law is a contradiction to the law of love.

Jesus cited his opponents for their petty application of the law.  He showed them that they were not consistent in their applications of their laws.  If they would retrieve their animal from the ditch on the Sabbath, why would they oppose the healing of a person on the Sabbath?  Even David ate the holy and restricted bread when he and his soldiers were hungry.  The religious leaders were presented by the Gospel writers as  using the laws in a petty way for the purposes of opposing Jesus and his charismatic authority among the people who were following him.

Today, we live a similar situation.  The U.S. Constitution is not Christian law; it is not Torah law.  It derived mainly from Common Law traditions in Europe and from Roman Law.

The early Christians lived in the Roman Empire; they practiced the law of love, the law of Jesus.  And the practice of this love proved to be very persuasive.  And you know what happened?  It turned out that Christians did not need an apocalyptic end of the world to take over the Roman Empire.  The power of the love of Jesus won the day.

There are Christians today who want Christian laws to dominate our society.  They decry our "non" Christian society.  But we need to remember the words and lives of both Jesus and St. Paul.  Christian evangelism is not about being able to force people to be Christians by legislation: it is about living lives of love in persuasive ways.  God's way cannot be forced on anyone because then people would not free to choose; but God's love can persuade people especially when people witness the love in the words and lives of people who have been won over to the love of Christ.

Let us have wisdom about the laws of society and the laws of church; and let us never forget to 

practice the law of love as revealed in the life of Jesus Christ.  Amen