What are laws for? I have always thought, perhaps naively, that laws exist to ensure justice can be done. This is why punishments for different kinds of crime are proportionate to the crimes themselves. You are unlikely to get 10 years in prison for stealing a chicken. In the same way, you are unlikely to get a fine for murdering someone. This is why I get really worked up when I hear stories of injustice, especially about crimes people got away with. At some point, I discovered something called statutory time limit on crimes – a period of time following the crime when the perpetrator can be prosecuted. In the UK, serious crimes, including murder, rape or drug trafficking, have no statutory time limit, which means you can get caught even 60 years later. To me, this sounds like a good thing from the perspective of justice. Apparently there are also special Cold Case Review Teams that look into old crimes, still trying to find – and punish – the perpetrators. However, I have discovered that in Russia, the statutory time limit applies to the most serious of crimes. After 15 years, no one will be investigating anymore. One of my best friends is a barrister there, so I asked her whether it is true and why this is the case – clearly people are getting away with very serious things if they manage to hide long enough, and the victims or their relatives never get justice. What sort of a legal system is that? And she said to me that the legal system is not about justice – it is about regulation of society and being a sufficient deterrent to those who may be tempted to do an unlawful thing. I couldn’t believe I was so wrong about what laws are for. It felt as if she’d told me the Earth was flat.
I am not saying that the Jews must have felt the same when Paul and others were telling them that the law is not going to save them, but it clearly must have been a big challenge to their perception of what the law is and what it is for. Since Moses, people had lived by the law, believing that it was sufficient both for their social and spiritual needs. And indeed it must have been, for this is what the Lord gave them with an explicit instruction to follow it. However, over time, the law seems to have become a value in itself, its own end goal, as we see frequently from Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees, so when a new invitation to turn to God came though Christ and his ministry, those who struggled to see beyond the law just did not notice the invitation. And yet, the invitation pretty much said: the law is not what you think it is.
Paul speaks about the Old Testament law a lot, and in the letter to the Romans, in chapters 9-11, he develops the idea that salvation comes through faith and staying faithful to God, not through lineage and affiliation with the law, as many believed at the time. In chapter 10, Paul makes a distinction between righteousness that is attained by law and righteousness that is achieved through faith. Righteousness through faith boils down to one simple thing: to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and to believe in it in your heart. Faith is what opens the door into salvation. As we have heard before, salvation is not guaranteed, because granting it or not is ultimately God’s decision, but faith is the bit that depends on us and we cannot do any more than that.
In the Gospels, when the rich young man comes to Jesus and asks what he should do to inherit eternal life, Jesus reminds him of the law – the Commandments. The man replies that he has kept them all, but Jesus tells him this is not enough. What this means is that the law may be a good guide in this life, but something else is needed to secure a place in the next.
In fact, Martin Luther argued that the law is an essential, God-given part of the earthly realm, including both the Mosaic law and any civil laws. He argued that the law has two uses: to deter people from misconduct and to make people conscious of their obligations in the society. Interestingly, this sounds almost exactly like what my friend said about the purposes of the legal system! The laws certainly do have a place, and an important one, in our lives, but they do not ensure continuity of our life beyond death. Faith in God does.
I think our Gospel reading today, perhaps unexpectedly, is also an illustration of such a relationship between law and faith, except the focus here is on the laws of nature. In the presence of Christ, the laws of nature stop working. This is what happens each time he performs a miracle. This time, he walks on water, and Peter, led by him, does too. However, unable to rely on the laws of physics, Peter is invited to rely on his faith. The second this fails, the laws return and he starts drowning. It is his faith that is meant to lead him to Christ and to keep him alive, not law.
Does this mean the law must be rejected? Is this what Paul is suggesting in our first reading? Not at all. It looks like there is place for both faith and law in the life of any Christian. According to rabbinical tradition, God said at the point of creation, ‘If I create the world by mercy alone, sin will abound. If I create it by justice alone, how can the world endure? Therefore I will create it by both’. The mark of a world created by mercy is faith, which leads to repentance and forgiveness and ultimately brings one closer to God. The mark of a world created by justice and order is law, which means our free will cannot go wild and act purely out of selfish impulses. The two must coexist by God’s design, which, as Paul says, is the same for the Jews, who live under the law, and the Gentiles, who do not.
But while both law and faith have a place in God’s creation and our common life, what concerns Paul is the law dominating, making faith irrelevant or unnecessary, or situations where people have never even heard about faith and how much it matters.
For Paul, the bottom line is to share the Gospel. In the final verses of today’s reading he asks, ‘How are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?’. The answer is: someone has to do the proclamation. Those who know who Christ is and those who do have faith in him must share it with others. Of course it will look different for all of us. Very few have rhetorical gifts even remotely comparable to those of Apostle Paul, but sharing the message – the Good News – however simply, in whatever way we can, means that those who have not heard about Christ and know nothing about Christian faith can at least have the option of exploring it further and, who knows, maybe following him one day. Amen.