Isaiah 58:1-9a, (9b-12) Psalm 112:1-9
1 Corinthians 2:1-11 Matt.5:13-20
Lectionary Link
What is the law? The law is an articulated social coding system which arises within community to state the best recommended behaviors. It has a suppressive function in that it includes policing activities to enforce best behaviors and to punish violations of recommended behaviors. Enforcements and punishments are the negative side of the law based upon probable human behaviors, namely, that people will do wrong and they will do good. The positive side of the law is to be a published, public, promulgated teacher of what is good and right and the goal is to teach impulse control. The law is based upon the wisdom of what a good society is and how a good citizen within a society behaves. The law as is articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures with divine legitimization as a way of indicating that humans cannot be authorities unto themselves, they need the "outside and the beyond" insights of a divine revelation.
The best recommended behaviors include the Big Ten as a way of indicating that all rules are not equal in importance. It is more important not to kill rather than to perhaps have some shell fish to eat at a "foreigner's house."
Along with the Big Ten, the body of law grew to be a compendium of rules for all sorts of behaviors, pertaining to priestly customs, dietary restrictions, with minutiae even for the mixture of threads for making cloth. It would seem that the expansion of the Big Ten to the 613 precepts pertained more to the keeping of the people of Israel as a very distinct and isolated person with a highly developed purity code to express how exclusive this ethnic club was.
The 613 precepts were a declaration to outsiders that it was very hard to be included within this purity society, but at the same time it was proof that the Israelites themselves were not very faithful to keeping all the precepts of the purity codes, and especially their leaders.
It is a great burden of presumption of any people to have, namely, who is and has the right of declaring themselves to have the final standards for access to the true worship of God.
The Hebrew prophets were very critical of the misbehaviors of their people. They criticized them for avoiding the big rules pertaining to compassion, kindness, mercy, justice, and care in favor of the performance of public religious rituals. They were essentially saying "how can you say that you love God, if you don't love your neighbor?"
By the time of Jesus and John the Baptist, one finds a different context for appraising how the law or laws functioned. In Palestine, the main law was the law enforced by the Roman authorities. Within Roman authority, the Jews were allowed to "play their religious rules for themselves" as long as they did not openly conflict with the Roman rule. For the Jews, one was more of less polluted, by the degree of contact and interaction that they had with the Romans. How does a community remain pure, separate, and exclusive when the main law is controlled by the Romans. A certain amount of interaction could not be avoided, but the degree of ritual purity by Jews would define their status within the communities led by the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Zealots, and the Essenes. John the Baptist and Jesus are presented as prophets who critiqued the leaders who were supposed to be authorities on the religious laws of the 613 precepts.
Jesus is presented as one who said that it is not enough for the law to be a holy written code of conduct. The law was to be embodied in the lives of people, it was to be a living law.
His words from the Gospel of Matthew indicate that he reused two metaphors for the Torah to be used for his followers. You are to be the light of the world and salt of the earth. Both light and salt were used as metaphors for the Torah.
In the words of Jesus, the law needed to be in-fleshed, embodied in the lives of people who claimed to love God. What happens when people embody the law of God in their behaviors? They functions as lights to help other people know how to live. They have a spicy and preserving function in this world to show people what is to be maintained over time and have the staying power of being tasty goodness.
The New Testament is a collection of writings which present differences in how followers of Christ came to regard the Torah with it 613 precepts. Not surprising is that the differences pertain to the acceptance of Gentiles into the community of faith which derived from Jesus of Nazareth. Any situation is expressive of heterogeneous or homogeneous features in the people of a particular community. St. Paul had to be bi-lingual in being a Jew who followed Jesus while being an apostle to the Gentiles. He proposed a two track program: Jews could continue in their ritual practice and follow Jesus and Gentiles could follow Jesus and not submit to the ritual practices of Judaism while at the same time honoring the two big commandments to love God and to love one's neighbor as oneself. Paul believed that both "tracks" of following Jesus should be honored.
The Gospel for us regarding the law of best practices means that we have to embody the wisdom of God's Spirit to be active interpreters with our words and life actions of what it means to love God and our neighbor successively in the continuous never ending new circumstances of our lives. We have to live ever re-fulfilling the law of love which is central to God's nature. God is love. To fulfill the law of God and the law of Christ is to love. Amen.
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