It's the Law

The scriptures referred to are Exodus 10:1-4, 7-9,12-20 and Matthew 21:33-46.

In the Hippocratic oath that doctors take, there is the statement, “First, do no harm.” The oath nurses take, named in honor of Florence Nightingale, has a similar but lengthier statement that we will abstain from “whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.” It's kind of obvious that we in the healing arts should not do anything that causes harm. It's a good basic rule for morality and ethics as well. For instance, while the Golden Rule is pretty much universal, it is most often stated negatively; that is, don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to yourself. That is the low bar that we expect everyone to understand and live by. If you can't help someone, at least don't make things worse for them.

It may sound odd, but the Ten Commandments we have read in today's passage from Exodus could be seen as the least you can do morally. Just don't do these things that either harm other people or that harm your relationship with God. All but 2 of them are negative: don't worship other gods, don't make idols, don't misuse God's name, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't lie about your neighbor, don't crave what belongs to your neighbor. The commandment about the Sabbath is both positive and negative: keep the Sabbath holy which means don't work on that day. The commandment about parents is purely positive and the only one that comes with a promise: honor your father and mother so that you will live a long time in the land God is giving you.

Though they are mostly negative, there are positive principles behind them. William Barclay said, “The whole of the Ten Commandments are based on two great principles. They are based on reverence, reverence for God, for God's name, for God's day, for the parents God has given us. They are based on respect, respect for a man's life, for his possessions, for his personality, for his good name, for oneself.” This last one is because if you do right by God and by other people you can respect yourself as a good person.

Another way to look at them is that there are 5 principles underlying the ten. They are about recognizing and respecting the existence of others, ie, God and humans. They are about being faithful in your relationships with God and other people. They are about preserving your personal integrity. They are about preserving the integrity of society and its institutions. And they are about acknowledging and honoring the rights of others.

And you may diagram the commandments as a cross. The vertical axis is about our relationships with our creators, God and our parents, and the horizontal axis is about our relationships with our peers, the other humans we live and interact with. And we can see this in how Jesus summarized the commandments. When asked which of the 613 commandments found in the Torah, the 5 books of Moses, was the greatest, Jesus answered with not one but two. “'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40) The first commandment he quotes comes from Deuteronomy 6:5 and is part of the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith which is recited by observant Jews daily and in the synagogue service every Sabbath. The second commandment is from Leviticus 19:18, a chapter that restates most of the Ten Commandments and also expands what they mean in practical ways.

C.S. Lewis compared the 3 parts of morality to an orchestra. He said personal morality is like the need to take care of your own instrument. That's why before a performance you hear the musicians making sure their instruments are working properly and are in tune. Social morality is like the way you need to harmonize with the other musicians and their instruments, keeping the right beat, coming in at the right time and not playing when it's not your part. Religious morality is like how everyone should be following the conductor and playing the same piece of music he is conducting. If he's conducting Beethoven's Ninth, you don't want to be playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” So too as Christians we want to make sure that we are in good shape morally, that we are doing our part in our community and that we are all on the same page in doing the right thing.

And you can't get away with skipping any one of the 3 parts of morality. Self-discipline is important but by itself it's not enough. After all, Hitler didn't drink or smoke or eat meat. That didn't make him a good moral example. For that matter, the Nazis put a high value on working together harmoniously and having respect for authority. But the authority they obeyed and the goal for which they were working were evil. They did not see all human beings as equal and created in the image of God. Some people were vermin, they said. So they not only persecuted and killed Jews but also Slavic people, black people, the Roma (who used to be called Gypsies), mentally and physically disabled men, women and children, gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, political opponents, prisoners of war, and Christian clergy who spoke out against what they were doing. And since all of that obviously went against what the Bible says, they edited God's word in order to maintain the fiction that Nazism and Christianity could somehow go together. Sadly, a lot of churchgoers were fine with that.

The reason we need to have moral laws spelled out is because you can find a lot of people who will go along with the Nazis and other groups that say that some people are inherently inferior to others and do not deserve the same rights. But laws cannot make people do what is right, anymore than the food pyramid can make people eat right or road signs can make people observe the speed limit. Teaching people what is right and wrong may be necessary for society but it is not sufficient to make people good. One of the recurrent themes of the Old Testament is that while God gave his people his law, they kept ignoring it and doing whatever they wanted. They worshiped other gods and denied the poor, the needy, the widows, orphans and resident aliens their rights. (Malachi 3:5) And because they turned away from God and his just laws, he turned away from them.

But he never gave up on them. That's the part of Jesus' parable in today's Gospel that we often overlook. The owner of the vineyard keeps sending his slaves to the tenants to collect what is owed him, even after previous slaves were beaten and killed. Still he remains patient with the tenants, offering them many opportunities to do what is right. And despite the fact that they don't, the landowner nevertheless decides to send his son, hoping they will respect him. When their fate befalls them, they cannot say that he was unfair.

This is that rare parable that is a complete allegory where everything stands for someone. The landowner is God, the tenants are the religious leaders, the son is Jesus and the vineyard is Israel. Jesus was probably thinking of chapter 5 of Isaiah. Isaiah says, “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard.” He tells how the owner of the vineyard prepared it with loving care and yet it yields bad grapes. So he stops taking care of it and lets it become “overgrown with briers and thorns.” This passage ends by saying, “For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” (Isaiah 5:1-7) Trying to reproduce the wordplay of the original Hebrew, the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh translation renders this last part “And He hoped for justice, but behold, injustice; for equity, but behold, iniquity!”

Jesus' parable reminds us of his lament over the city where God's temple stood. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” (Luke 13:34-35)

A society that tolerates and even condones bloodshed and injustice cannot be surprised when bloodshed and injustice increase. As Paul says, a person will reap what he sows. (Galatians 6:7) If we plant the seeds of disdain for others and indifference to their suffering, we will see those things spread like weeds and choke off the good things we wish to enjoy for ourselves. If we sow the seeds of reverence for a just and loving God and respect for all people and their rights, we will see the fruits of a good and fair society.

As we said, however, just having these laws and commandments will not automatically make people good and fair. After all, we have seen so-called Christians turn a blind eye to the principles underlying God's laws and a deaf ear to Christ's commandments to love God and other people, just as we have seen our own countrymen routinely ignore the principles of equality and justice enshrined in our constitution.

We've all heard of how superficial observance of the letter of the law can violate the spirit of the law. In Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite who pass by the man beaten and left for dead could justify their inaction by appealing to the Jewish version of the Golden Rule, that is, to not treat people the way you would not like to be treated. They didn't beat him further or rob him. The Samaritan, however, acts according to Jesus' positive version. He treated the man the way he as a fellow human being would want to be treated. The man needed first aid and help, which the Samaritan goes out of this way to provide. Similarly religious leaders felt Jesus was violating the letter of the Sabbath prohibition on working when he healed people on that day. Jesus pointed out that his critics would not hesitate to rescue one of their animals if they fell in a hole, even on the Sabbath, (Matthew 12:11-12) Jesus also pointed out that he was doing good, which God's law was never meant to prohibit. (Mark 3:4) “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” Jesus said. (Mark 2:27) Laws are meant to make life better for people; when a strict observance of the law is harming people or letting them be harmed, that goes against the spirit of the law.

And we cannot fulfill God's law without the proper spirit; in this case, the literal Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit filled and enabled Jesus to do his mission. (Luke 4:14, 18-19) In the same way, Jesus promised the Spirit to his followers. On the night before he was arrested and executed, he said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another Helper to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him or knows him. But you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:15-17)

The Spirit enables us to keep God's laws. As God says to his people in the book of Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you; I will take the initiative and you will obey my statutes and carefully observe my regulations.” (Ezekiel 36:26-27)

After my accident and my surgeries, I needed to learn to walk again. It's harder than you think because you normally do it without thinking. I needed physical therapists to help me learn how to walk, how to transfer from my wheelchair to my bed or to the toilet. Their goal was to train me to the point where I would no longer need to think about these techniques because they would become a part of me. And they were there for me as I learned to stand and to walk. One had a gait belt around my waist, to make sure I didn't fall. Another pushed my wheelchair behind me in case I suddenly lost strength and needed to sit down. They were my support as I learned and did what was required for me to get better.

Think of the Spirit as our physical therapist, teaching and helping us walk with God. The Spirit teaches us, reminding us what Jesus, the living Word of God, has taught us. The Spirit leads us to the truth. (John 16:13-15) The Spirit also gives us encouragement and support. In fact the Greek word Jesus uses in John's Gospel, parakletos, means helper, counselor, advocate and encourager. That's why different translations use different words for the Spirit in this passage. No one English word encompasses all the Spirit does for us.

Good rules and good laws are good for us. Like all good things, they can be misused. And bad laws can allow or even call for people to be harmed, such as the laws the Nazis passed or the Runaway Slave Act passed before our Civil War that required people to turn in runaway slaves, contrary to what the Bible says. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) That is why we need to be sensitive to the Spirit of God, the Spirit who filled and enabled Jesus. As Paul said, “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, 'You must love your neighbor as yourself.'” (Galatians 5:14) In the same chapter he says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23) If we live the law of love, and produce the fruit of the Spirit, we know that we are truly following Jesus.