Some thoughts on law and light

Today’s Gospel reading requires us to think about Law. I have some friends who are well versed in the law, so much so that one of them’s just been made a judge. We expect our judges to be wise and learned people, and so she is, and she’ll need to be, because the law of the land is a complex business. But we’re thinking today not about the law of the land but the Law of God. So I suppose we’ll surely also to be thinking about sin, for sin is the word we use for when we break the Law of God.

Now for Jews the Law of God and the law of the land had been one and the same thing ever since they entered the Promised Land. The Law Moses brought down from the mountain top governed every aspect of their lives. But by the time of Jesus that had ceased to be the case, for now the people had to live their daily lives subject to the laws of Rome. There’ll have been many legal areas in which Rome and Moses were bound to agree - that murdering people is essentially wrong, for example - but even so, the very fact that a law made by an earthly emperor should take precedence over the law given by Moses would have rankled deeply with the faithful.

Most of us aim to be law-abiding, but all of us have times when we skate on some legal thin ice. The speed at which we choose to drive our car, for example, or if we ignore a “No trespassers” sign to take a short cut. Some laws we take more seriously than others. Or we may choose to break the law by, say, sitting down in the street as part of a demonstration against some action we don’t agree with, or by some form of non-violent direct action. And God’s law? How readily do we break that? Too readily, I guess. Maybe out of thoughtlessness, maybe out of self-interest or greed, maybe just because we’re in a hurry: times when perhaps we take more than we should, or don’t notice when someone’s been hurt, or rush past when we could have stopped and helped. It’s sort of hard not to break God’s law. Sometimes we have to choose the lesser of two evils: and whichever alternative we go for, we end up hurting someone or doing something we’re not happy to have done.

And then there are the times when we act with all good intent, and only realise afterwards that what we said or did was wrong. Hindsight can be a marvellous thing! And times when we’ve been wronged, but then what we then do or say makes things worse. And we could even find ourselves using the law itself as a means of wounding, limiting or excluding others.

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus tells his hearers that not a single letter of the law will be taken away by his teaching. Some folk, hearing the freshness of his teaching, had thought he was challenging the Law, rather like a 1960’s hippy in Haight-Ashbury saying, “Hey man, you don’t need all that law stuff any more, let’s all just love one another.” But Jesus tells them he’s come not to do away with the law but to complete it.

Rules are of course essential for the proper ordering of things. The Law is there for a good and necessary purpose. My freedom to do what I want has to be limited, so that I’m not damaging your freedom more than I have to. Rules keep a balance. But they also have their limits. You can be really good at keeping to the letter of the law, while still acting in a way that’s immoral or damaging - and you might even use the law itself as a means to do down others and make sure things go your way.

So laws don’t always do the job they’re meant to. To test whether a rule is working properly, we need to look at the effect it has on the person at its receiving end. Maybe a law is fair but the punishment is excessive. Or maybe it’s being applied without compassion or humanity. Bad law and badly applied law causes harm instead of limiting harm. Here’s where those who administer the law, including new judges like my friend, need more than just book wisdom and a detailed knowledge of the mechanism of justice. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, claims to be speaking with a greater and higher wisdom than the wisdom of the world - for by the Holy Spirit he’s brought into a knowledge of God’s own nature, and that’s what guides his speech and his action.

As Christians, we should allow the Spirit to lead us into a Christ-like way of living. And when it comes to law and sin we do well to be critical of ourselves, and how rules and laws are applied and used. And our clue to what’s expected of us is there at the start of our Gospel. Before he talks about the Law standing unchanged, unaltered, with not one jot taken away, Jesus tells his hearers about what their role should be as his people.

They, and we, are to be salt and light to the world. In other words, making a positive difference, making things better, and affirming people, showing them the way. This is the higher and wiser application of the Law, whose true aim is never to beat people down but always to raise them up. The demanding question Christians need always to ask, especially if we’re tempted into any form of self-righteousness, is this: Am I standing up for righteousness and truth, or am I doing this to make myself feel good and maybe to leave someone else feeling bad?

Throughout what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encourages those who heard him there to show compassion to those around them, to care for others. His teaching takes nothing from the list of rules and laws that governed people’s lives, but it does turn that law on its head, and change the way it applies to us. All law, religious and secular, aims to order society and keep us safe – if you don’t have rules then you end up with chaos and anarchy. So the law merits our honour and respect.

But when law is used to exclude or to oppress, when law lowers one person’s status so that another’s may be enhanced, or when law boosts one person’s sense of righteousness and labels another person as useless or incapable, or for that matter when law is applied letter by letter but without compassion, then law isn’t doing what God intends it to do. We sin not when we don’t keep the law letter by letter: we sin when we’re not being salt, when we’re hiding our light, when we let God’s love go begging.

And we do these things more often than we recognise; but sin, praise God, has a remedy. When we face up to our failings, and confess our sins and mean it, God promises to forgive us. It’s like we get given instead of our tatty old workbook a brand new diary with no ink blots and no crossings out - a chance to start afresh, to have another go. That amazing forgiveness should itself challenge and change any self-righteous attitude to what law is there to do. How can I not have compassion on my neighbour who makes a mistake, when God has been so compassionate to me? At the heart of all that Jesus says about law and judgement - and he says a lot - is this plain truth: we are all loved, completely and without any question by the one who is the source of all law, and whose nature is all love.