Law as Covenant Transforming Love

6 Epiphany       February 16, 2014          

Deuteronomy 30:15-20  Psalm 119:1-8

1 Corinthians 3:1-9  Matt.5:21-24,27-30,33-37

Lectionary Link

  What is the purpose for the speeding laws of the State of California?  Are they to encourage all of us to transform lives towards health and public safety or are these laws given for me to proclaim my moral superiority over my wife who has received many more speeding tickets than I have? If we understand this distinction, we perhaps can appreciate the issue in the Gospel riddles of the ironic words of Jesus.
  When law is reduced to legalism, then the law is used to build a moral resume for one’s own self-promotion and as a standard to compare oneself with others who do not attain the same moral resume.

  In the ministry of Jesus, he is often portrayed as confronting those who would reduce the great law to legalism.

  The great law was given to humanity as something like a marriage vow with humanity.  It was given to express a covenant relationship between God and humanity.

  The first commandment expresses the primary commandment; love God with all our hearts, soul and mind and strength.  And by the way, if are achieving this, it will affect your entire life.  You will have to spend some time with God so it will show in Sabbath time, prayer time.  And it will help and show in your family relationships with your parents and your spouse.  And it will help in your community relationships as in being truthful, respecting life and respecting the property of others.  And it will help you be contented with your life and not have to live in envy of other or wanting what others have.  If you work on your relationship with God these issues in your community life will improve.

  But  this great love and covenantal relationship with God can be reduced to some rules that the clergy and some of their groupies are able to keep and build their specialized moral resumes to prove to everyone how much better they are than the rest of those who are not a part of the legalistic cabal.

  Jesus came to countryside people who were being told that they were excluded because they did not have the same moral resumes as did the clergy and their groupies.  Jesus came to oppose the clergy who reduced the great covenant of a love relationship with God to very exclusive moral resumes for the religious legal experts.  So these clergy who were promoted as the official representatives of God could in fact misrepresent God and as a result they could make lots of people feel as though God did not care for them or that God was in no way relevant to their lives.  If God does not care for us and is not relevant to our lives, then what’s the use?

  Jesus came to oppose this misrepresentation of God.  If the ancient covenant of God was about a love relationship, then what was the purpose of the love relationship or covenant with God?  The purpose of this ancient love relationship or covenant with God was for the transformation of the lesser being to become more like the greater Being.

  If humanity was in covenant with God then the purpose of the covenant was to make us more God-like.  And what would it be like to be more God-like in the human situation?  The excitement of this ancient covenant with God is discovering what it is like in the human situation to be more like the God with whom we have this covenant of love?

  The specific rules and laws in the context of the people of the Hebrew Scriptures were simply the effort to try to chronicle what it means in specific situations to become more God-like.  But sometimes we can begin to assume righteousness by association rather than as a matter of practice.  There were those in  Israel who came to believe in their own automatic exceptionalism because they had discovered this great covenant relationship with God and because they had become specific in their rules and laws in how this covenant could make them exceptional and different within the world in which they lived.  We, Amercians, can and have done the same thing with our Declaration of Independence and Constitution; we often are very proud of our exceptionalism because of our association with these great documents but we often have not lived up to the great principles and spirit of these amazing documents.

  Jesus was confronting people who were reducing God to a legal resume.  I feel pretty good about myself.  I’ve never killed anyone.  Good job; I can put that on my resume.  I’ve never committed adultery; so I can put that on my moral resume.  I’ve had a divorce but when I divorced I followed the specific Moses instructions in how I carried it out.  Good job, ole boy, I’ve got that on my moral resume.  I’m a pretty jolly good fellow and look that all of those moral reprobates in the countryside; they’re a bunch of moral barbarians.  I’m certainly glad that I am not them.

  And this is when Jesus came at them with full blazing exaggerated rhetoric to blast them off of their pedestals of moral superiority.   Jesus was saying to them, “Instead of using the great covenant with God for the continuous transformation of your life to be more like God, you have used your definitions of moral attainment as justification for self-congratulation and for reasons to separate yourselves from people whom you will never welcome into your company.  And these are people that you exclude in the name of God.”

  If you are in a covenant love relationship with God, you know that God is so perfect that you will always be called to better living.  Long before Sigmund Freud told us that the unconscious interior life is polymorphously perverse, it was well known by the prophets that the human heart could entertain all sorts of perversity. 

  Jesus was saying to the religious people who were certain of their righteousness, “Yes you may think that with social pressure you can clean up your external behaviors, but what about your insides.  You may not kill anyone, but how many times have you wanted you?  You may not have acted out in adulterous acts, but how many times have you wanted to?  You may not have stolen anything, but how many times have you coveted?”

  Jesus was saying to everyone, “Do not reduce the law to a legalistic moral resume.  The law is to encourage the continuous transformation of one’s life towards being more like God.  And this is a continuous and great task.  And each person is in a different phase of this transformation.  And if we give exemplar behaviors, it is only for us to encourage a moral direction.  We are not to use exemplar behaviors as the final goal of this covenantal relationship with God.”

  Jesus reminded us that yes we can sometimes look like we clean up well for public presentation.  But then there is that interior cauldron that can have more counter tendencies flying around than the heevie jeevies of Pandora’s box.

  If we reduce the great covenantal law of transformation to the appearance of good public performance we make goodness into human work and the fortune of good social upbringing.  The greater work of God involves the engagement of our interior lives, our hearts and this is where we need to experience the work of God’s grace.

  Jesus was inviting everyone to this covenantal and transformational relationship with God.  This transformational relationship was the entire purpose of the Covenant expressed in the Mosaic Law.  It was not meant to be used as the basis to be a moral resume for people to use to establish their moral superiority.

  If you and I are about legalism and about establishing how much better we than others, then Jesus offers us the same convicting words.  “Okay, you can look good on the outside, but what are you going to do about cleaning up the inside, the part that is secret and hidden?”

  So what is the point about the exaggerated words of Jesus?  The point of Jesus is that the Law can only show us what we are like inside in spite of everything that we do on the outside to clean up our behavior for proper presentation to the public for whom we care.

  And if we know the division between the interior thoughts, motivations and desire and the way in which we actually behave, we will understand our need for grace to be tolerated by God and by our honest selves.  And knowing this we will not ever over-estimate our moral resumes to criticize how badly others are failing.

  Jesus was simply telling people to be honest and know their own insides and then to find themselves in the same place as everyone, namely, in desperate need of God’s tolerating and saving grace and in need for a touch with the higher power of God to do things that we know we cannot do if we are left to ourselves alone.

  We often find ourselves in a continuous battle not to act out on interior tendencies and this common battle for each of us is what makes us always equal in the need for God’s grace.  We can receive the Law not as condemnation but as an invitation to a covenantal love relationship with God in a path of transformation.

  This is how Jesus promised that his way would fulfill the entirety of the Law.   How, in honesty about our interior lives, we can be desperate always to know God’s grace and the power of God’s Spirit for transformation of our lives.   Those who are in the path of transformation are too busy looking at the next goal to worry about the goals which others may or may not be achieving.

  Yes, there is juridical law for the governing of society and we need to follow those laws; but the covenantal law of God in Jesus Christ is given to us for the transformation of our lives through the continual awareness of the need for grace.  I’m here today, because I need God’s grace; will you join me in this need today?  Amen.