The law of Love

Sunday 9th February – 3^rd before Lent

Isaiah 58: 1-9. The people wonder why God does not answer them in their distress. God tells Isaiah to tell the people exactly why this is so with a voice like a trumpet (verse 1). Isaiah’s voice needs to be loud and clear to pierce their armour-plated complacency surrounding their religious devotion. Their religion is debased because it is self-serving and hypocritical and used to cloak their failure to live as God would have them live. A life filled with Justice and charity is what God requires as well as worthy religious devotion.

1 Corinthians 2: 1-12. This is not a piece of writing that is against human intellect and reasoning as such but only as it sets itself up in opposition to God’s wisdom as revealed in Christ crucified. Paul infers that conversion is a gift of God rather than a product of clever human persuasion or rhetoric. That doesn’t stop us being involved intellectually of course – Paul is actually the greatest example of this – but faith is a gift of God and so just as other gifts of the Spirit, if we want at have or bestow faith we should pray for it.

Matthew 5: 13-20. Was Jesus a legalist? He warns people that if ignore the law or teach others to do likewise are doomed. This has cause philosophical problems from the beginning. Jesus says he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it. In the sermon on the mount he explains that the law of love is much more rigorous than the written law (Do not murder becomes do not even get angry for example) and our righteousness must exceed the scribes and Pharisees. The Spirit of the law, the law of love, is the highest form of service to God and its demands are limitless and referring back to the Isaiah reading today is what God always expected from us. We find these demands quite impossible of course which is why we need a saviour like Jesus to save us from our sins.

Jesus says “You must obey the law”

That is problematic for many Christians who understand Jesus as having come to abolish the law.

But what Jesus means by the law is that the laws, like the ten commandments, or even the myriad little laws in the Old Testament, are expressions of God’s law which are centred in Love and all written laws are subservient to the law of Love. 

On one level Jesus makes it very easy for us because all the essential laws in the Old Testament have been gathered into two laws which are entirely complimentary.

“Love God and Love thy neighbour as yourself”

Deceptively simple as I said. How that law of love works out in daily living is so rigorous it makes the eyes water.

The headline law is distilled to its very root, its very essence, so for example,

Do not murder, becomes do not even get angry because anger is the root of murder.

Do not commit adultery, becomes don’t even look at another woman with any kind of lust in your heart.

Using these two headline examples, Jesus demonstrates that rather than coming to abolish the law, he has actually come to fulfil it, which makes it much stricter in reality.

What we are aiming for, humanly speaking is beyond us no matter how hard we try. Jesus says we must demonstrate a righteousness that exceeds the scribes and the pharisees, who were the most scrupulous law keepers of all.

For example Jesus also bids us not to retaliate when slapped, and to love our enemies. This is hard stuff.

We can pray for and aspire to these things obviously, but humanly speaking they lie mostly beyond us.

It is a classic Christian understanding that those who think they have no sin, meaning that they keep all the law all the time, deceive themselves. We all need a saviour because keeping the law of love in every respect all the time is beyond us and in breaking one part of the law we break all of it.

Acknowledging our need of a saviour implies a lot of self-knowledge and self-understanding. It requires humility and knowing that we cannot earn our own salvation. We are dependent on God to save us and in his love for us he sent us a saviour.

We want to please God and aspire to the law of love, and may make excellent progress towards doing that, but the knowledge that we all fall down in some respect keeps us from a too tight judgementalism and leads us to a proper personal humility towards God.

A church’s self-understanding should be as a community of forgiven sinners. That is what we are and the measure of how much we realise that we are forgiven will naturally dictate how forgiving we are of others. That beautiful line in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” makes plain the connection between the two.

Knowing our status as a forgiven sinner leads to appreciate with deep joy the enormity of the sacrifice made by Jesus on the cross. Through his suffering we are healed.

We didn’t deserve to be saved. We are saved through the wonderful gift of the Grace of God.

So, the next time you read the sermon on the mount, know what the law of love requires of us all. Aspire to it and pray for the gift of God’s spirit to try and attain it. But also be mindful that our innate nature pre-disposes us to fail to fully attain it.

But we can rejoice that when we do fail, Jesus has won forgiveness of our sins, and our salvation is secure.

The standard of behaviour required by the law of love has only ever been fulfilled by one man – the only man worthy enough to represent and intercede for us before God. Jesus was that man. Human like us and yet without sin.

Jesus was God’s son and died to set us free to live a life free from fear if we put our faith in Him.