Moses the Law Giver Is Dead; Long Live the Law

22 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 25, October 29, 2023
Deuteronomy 34: 1-12 Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46

Lectionary Link

How many law, rules, and regulations govern nearly every facet of our lives?   Seeming endless laws and unless we are legal experts or who have access to specialists, we might be breaking laws of which we are ignorant.  The church has laws, called canon laws and people can get into church trouble if they don't obey the canon laws.

We are familiar with the Big Ten, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments.  But the Torah lists a total of 613 commandments and these recommended behaviors and procedures were to be followed for the various areas of life for the members of tribes of Israel.  Certainly the judges, priests and scribes would continually have to be consulted in order to certify one's compliance with all these commandments.

We have read the account of the death of Moses, perhaps, the most famous Law Man of history.  Moses received the Law and one can imagine that the best case scenario is to have present both the law and the law giver.  When Moses was alive, he was like a living Torah, a living law and he was present to adjudicate and address any legal situation.

But what happens when the Law Giver dies?   Moses is gone; long live the Law.  The textual law is what is left after Moses is gone and there needed to be successive replacement figures for Moses.  There arose judges, priests, scribes, teachers, and prophets to be the living interpreters of the law.

The basic insight of the law is good order in all things.  There are too many bumper cars in life with the tendency of wanting to be in the same place at the same time.  So there needs to wise application for the avoidance of harm, chaos, and disorder in the world.

We can appreciate the basic insight of the law as the need for order and the recommended behaviors for good order and for the teaching of the good habits of order.

But the basic insight of the law can be lost; we can sully our relationship to the law.  We can turn the need for good order into legalism without humanity serving purposes.   We can accumulate thousands of law and in the proliferation of so many rules and law, we can lose the good purpose of law.  We can come to regard the performance of rules as being the certification of certain people's privilege in society.  "I am good because I publicly perform these laws.  Aren't I good, aren't those who don't keep the rules like I do, bad?"

When laws are made to highlight my goodness then the true motive of the law is lost.  In the quest for the best laws among the 613 commandments and among all the new rules and regulations that have come to human communities around the world, Jesus offers the secret to good legal thinking.  He offers the secret to how to discern good behaviors of speech and deed when one does not have access to the legal scholars or priestly casuists.  What is the secret?  Love.  St. Paul wrote that love fulfills the law.

Jesus harkened back to the spirit of the law which was present from the times of the story of Moses.  Love God.  That is how we grow our hearts.  God is too big for us to get our feelings around, but we keep stretching to increase our capacity to love by loving a much greater than us God.   And in this effort, we are asking for the experience of grace.  We seek to love God whom we don't see, to receive grace to love the ones whom we do see, namely our neighbors.  And we seek to love them even as we apply appreciative love for ourselves.

Jesus gives us the key to living lawfully, even when we may not know all of the rules and regulations.  In discerning how we should speak and act, we ask ourselves, "is my word and deed consistent with loving God and my neighbor as myself?"

The interlocutors of Jesus did not get the love message; they preferred to argue about the theological issue of the Messiah.

And isn't that what Christians often do with each other?  Why don't you believe and articulate the doctrine of your faith in the way that I do, the correct way?

We often would much rather look for theological reasons to disagree and to dislike each other, whereas, Jesus reminds us about the basics: Love God, and love your neighbors as yourself.  Amen.