Bible 101, Part 4: “TROUBLE WITH THE LAW?”
Isaiah 1:10-17; Matthew 22:34-40; Romans 7:7-25
June 28, 2009 – Rev. Jerry Duggins
I
knew a Lutheran pastor in the community I last served whose secret desire was
to attend law school. I was a little jealous when I heard that upon retirement
he did enroll in law school. I’ve always held a little fascination for the
legal world. I love watching courtroom dramas and am one of those rare people
who wouldn’t mind being selected as a juror. I even took a course on the philosophy
of law in college. The law strikes me as more art than science, not the kind of
art that manipulates lines and colors in creating a beautiful picture, but an
art that discovers clarity amidst the chaos of circumstance and frames words to
form persuasive arguments; an art of the mind if you will, which if you’ve seen
me draw may be the only kind of art I’m capable of.
Despite
this fascination, I quickly decided that lawyers worked too hard, so I became a
minister instead. But… one of the things that excited me about this series on
Bible basics was the opportunity to talk about the legal material found in the
Bible. There are the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, with a slightly different version
in Deuteronomy 6. That’s about the limit of what most people know. There are
references to the law scattered throughout the Bible. It’s actually quite an
important theme, but what I’d call genuine legal code is limited to about a
third of Exodus, most of Deuteronomy and all of Leviticus.
Initially
I thought I would pick a section of Leviticus for our reading today, but then I
started reading it myself… and I kept reading and reading. And then it struck
me that it would be a little like reading something out of real estate law or
from the internal revenue code. I found it to be monotonous, repetitive,
technical and worst of all, irrelevant. And then I picked up a commentary on it
only to discover that the commentator didn’t seem that enthusiastic about it
either, labeling it as “the most neglected of the neglected biblical books.”
Even “in the depressed market for biblical commentaries” his was doomed to
never even make the bookshelf in the bookstore, let alone the pastor’s shelf.
Well,
it did make my bookshelf and he has some really helpful things to say about Leviticus,
not the least of which is that even though it appears to be a technical manual
intended for priests, its inclusion as part of the Torah indicates that there’s
wisdom for the average lay person as well. My colleague, Rev. Abbot must agree
with him since he is currently preaching his way through the book. But the more
I thought about it, the more I thought that this was not the place to begin
with “the law.” The details of Leviticus seem to me to belong to a second
course on understanding the Bible. Instead I’ve chosen three passages that
aren’t strictly speaking “legal material” but contain important observations
about the law. Simply stated, I want to identify some things to remember when
reading the law.
So,
taking up Isaiah, the first thing to observe is: “Not all parts of the law are
equally authoritative.” Here, God is telling the people that the sacrifices and
burnt offerings commanded by the law as outlined in Leviticus have now become
offensive to God. They are no longer a sweet aroma because the people have
failed in a more important aspect of the law, specifically in relation to their
conduct toward each other. As long as they fail in their responsibilities to
widows, orphans and the oppressed, their faithfulness in observing the proper
ritual before God is worthless. There is no worship of God without a healthy
relationship to one’s neighbor.
Now
there are some things to ponder there for us today. We have in this community
of faith a variety of preferences for worship style, but none of that matters,
if we fail to exercise compassion toward those in need.
A
related issue here is the relationship between faith and politics. Certainly if
you accept that there are some needs that cannot be addressed outside the
political arena, then a neat division between faith and politics is impossible.
The legal sections of the Bible assume the exercise of faith in the public
arena. I understand that there are a lot of nuances to this question, but I
think the biblical law invites us to ask it.
Different
aspects of the law operate differently. Some of you will remember this in our
own legal system during the O.J. Simpson murder trials. Even though the
prosecutor was unable to prove the criminal case, the civil trial brought a
different verdict. The criminal code and the civil code operate by different
standards. Even within the criminal code we distinguish between felonies and
misdemeanors. Add to these the statutory and regulatory laws operating on
federal, state and local levels and you begin to see why we need lawyers.
Begin
reading Leviticus and you might feel that we need lawyers to understand
biblical law. In fact, the Gospels mention lawyers and scribes whose job was to
do precisely this. There is a great deal of complexity to biblical law. The
fact that God can move from requiring a certain kind of religious practice to abhorring
the very same practice suggests that things are not as simple as we’d like to
believe. I mentioned one reason for God’s attitude change - that the people
have forgotten the more important part of the law outlining one’s responsibilities
to the neighbor - but another reason comes to mind. The people seem to have
forgotten that the ritual wasn’t really for God’s benefit. It was for their own. They had begun treating
the sacrifices as a way for God to come to terms with the sins of the people,
but the four or five kinds of offerings were always about people coming to
terms with their own sin.
Jesus
translates the ritual of sacrifice into the language of repentance, and the
same thing applies. God doesn’t need our repentance to offer forgiveness. We
need repentance to receive it. So when reading biblical law, remember it’s
about us and our need, not God’s.
But
this is a little too simplistic, because we should first say that it’s about them.
I think somehow, we’d like the Bible to be a simple and straightforward book.
We simply have to do what it says. When people say “biblical” they often mean
universal and immutable, but the Bible is not like that. Every sentence has a
context, is embedded in a story and it isn’t a story that belongs to us. It
belongs to several different times and places and we may have connections, but
we have to work to find them. As I said last week, many of the stories are
timeless, meaning the connection to us and our time lies right on the surface,
but there is very little in the law beyond the Ten Commandments that bears
anything like a universal mark. The more detailed the instruction, the less
relevant it seems. Half of Leviticus concerns itself with the system of
sacrifice that is barely understood let alone practiced today, even by Jews.
It
may be that this tendency to read law “literally” is what lands the people of
Isaiah’s time in so much trouble, and it certainly is Jesus’ chief complaint of
the Pharisees, that in their emphasis on the letter of the law they have missed
its “spirit”. Paul made the same complaint to the “backsliding” Galatians, and
we continue to have ceaseless debates in the church today because of the
insistence of some that biblical law is universal and timeless. Nothing could
be further from the truth. Ask any good lawyer. Statutes and regulations
require constant updating and attention. I heard this past week that the
landmark voting rights act of 1965 is in serious danger of being declared
unconstitutional in the not too distant future largely due to Congress’ failure
or reluctance to pass a more up to date version.
Our
tendency to be literal about the Bible and to apply legal references
universally has sent the church today into a 40 year debate on homosexuality. I
don’t want to repeat the arguments that have been put forward. In my mind, we
have missed the real connection between our story and the Bible’s story because
we have wrangled over the meanings of words. The holiness code of Leviticus
which contains the two references to homosexuality is about a people trying to
define themselves against a hostile culture. The code is about presenting an
alternative witness to a world clouded by the ugly machinations of nations.
It’s an attempt to show the world a different way of doing religion. This
countercultural emphasis is another of the stories that run through the Bible
(and incidentally behind the Pauline references to homosexuality as well). In
the cultures all around
Jesus
picks up on this theme in the gospel text for today and offers a key to reading
the legal parts of the Bible. He offers a summary of the law, incidentally not
unique or original to himself. I won’t say a lot about it because it is
familiar to us. When reading law in the Bible, remember it’s ultimately about
love of God and love of neighbor. On a side note here let me mention that this
sums up not only the law, but the prophets as well. More often than not, we use
law to beat someone over the head, to criticize or find fault; but if we take
Jesus seriously, the first thing we ought to look for in a law is the love.
Finally
the law came to have a special use as defined by Paul in the book of Romans. Martin
Luther is most noted for making much of this. Let me read from Romans 7. (see Romans 7:7-25)
Here
law plays the role of exposing human pretention. The truth is that we are not
up to the task of fulfilling all that the law envisions. That’s what the whole
system of sacrifice is about, a way to deal with our failure to live up to the
law’s expectations. The New Testament replaces that system of sacrifice with an
understanding of grace that helps us connect to God in spite of our failures
and shortcomings. Grace invites us to live into the spirit of the law being
guided less by the burdens of the letter.
Paul
asks, “Does this make law a bad thing?” Essentially he says that the law is
good because without it we wouldn’t understand our sin. The law convicts us and
in so doing, thrusts us back on the mercy of God. “Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ, our Lord,” he writes. Romans is a very difficult book to
understand, but the important point to get is that God’s love is not contingent
on our ability to obey. We don’t have to be good first. In fact, we can’t be.
Paul’s convoluted words here evoke a common question, “Why can’t I be better?”
Paul isn’t trying to discourage us from trying, but he insists we will never
succeed unless we forget about the code and go back to the love. The law
without love can do no better than condemn. We need grace, and again, not for
God’s benefit but for our own. Grace is for us and it flows from the love of
God.
I
don’t expect that everyone will be rushing to read Leviticus this afternoon;
but if you should, remember these things:
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Not all parts of the law are equally authoritative. The law covers many aspects
of life including religious ritual, personal ethic, moral conduct and
especially life in community.
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You will discover that much of law applies to a culture and a time that is very
different from our own. Very few individual laws have a universal application
to all times and place.
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In those texts that seem most irrelevant, you will want to uncover the story
behind the text. Sometimes you will find connections in the story that suggest
a way to reframe a law for our time and place.
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As Paul points out, most of the time the law just serves to show how bad we
are. This is a good thing to know, but just knowing doesn’t automatically make
us better people.
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For that we need the love, the love we have seen demonstrated in the life,
death and resurrection of Jesus. The bottom line of the law is the call to love
and that we are enabled to do only by the grace of God.
There
is much to learn in a study of the law, these few things are important to
remember if we are to keep the law in its proper perspective, as a tool to
teach us how to love rather than a tome to beat others over the head. The law
can be a mighty fine work of art. May God grant us eyes to discover its beauty.
Amen.