Curate’s sermon. Gainford: Romans 4.13-end; Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it’.
Law is just a reality of our daily life – living in a society, we cannot escape it. Moreover, our lives, in different spheres, are governed by different kinds of law. By the virtue of being human, all of us, as well as all of our surroundings, are governed by the laws of nature. Seasons change according to these laws, gravity and movement exist according to these laws. Then there are state laws, which govern what we may or must not do as members of the same society. These are designed to protect us from harm – theft, injury, murder and other undesirable things. There are laws that define specific occupations and areas of life. There are health and safety laws, criminal disclosures and professional codes of conduct. In the church, there are Canon Laws. We don’t talk about them, but they rule every aspect of church life. Even this service I conduct today must be legal. If, for example, I exclude the Gospel reading from it, this would break Canon Law. Or if I try to conduct it using a liturgy other than that approved by the Church of England, this too would be illegal.
Laws are designed to enforce order and equality – equality of all before the law, which Roosevelt would certainly approve of. But laws can also mutate to acquire a symbolic and ideological meaning. In countries with oppressive regimes, arrests and harsh sentences are symptomatic of a system that mutated to serve the purposes of the state, to be a warning to those who may wish to disobey. The law, which was designed to protect the society and to create harmony, turns against the people.
Not in the same way and for the same reasons, but the Jewish law that gets Jesus and then Paul and others into a lot of trouble is also a mutation of something that was designed for order but ended up being turned against the people. The origins of that law are found in the Old Testament.
The Old Testament law, condensed in its briefest form into the Ten Commandments and laid out more broadly in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, is a logical and expected product of the ancient world, where similar sets of laws were common. For example, in the Mesopotamian civilization law codes were ubiquitous. From there, they also migrated to Greece. Perhaps the most well-known document from that era is Hammurabi’s laws from 18th century BC. This set of laws was established by the Babylonian king Hammurabi to govern every aspect of daily life and to create a sense of unity for the people. The slight problem with this or any other similar law codes from this period is that they were never actually used in court and a lot of them were prescriptive but not enforceable. Instead, the purpose of these laws was likely to demonstrate the good governance of the King.
In the same way, the Old Testament laws were not designed to be enforced. For example, they do not say what would happen to one who steals or one who desires their neighbour’s house or wife. The real consequences of these actions or even thoughts are not prescribed. The laws contain good moral values and define an image of the society God wants to see, regulating relationships between people in ways that make a society harmonious, as well as relationships between people and the Lord Himself, ensuring, again, harmony and obedience, but, in many ways, the laws are symbolic.
Over time, however, the symbolic nature of the laws gives way to their much more rigid interpretation, developing into a doctrinal, legalistic and punitive system that seeks to either correct or ostracise anyone who errs in any way. By the time of Jesus and Paul, ‘The Law’ develops into an ideology, a whip which is applied indiscriminately to anyone who does not fit in. The Law is defended and justified as a way of life that exists from the beginning of God’s covenant with Israel, ignoring the changes I have described.
This is where we finally come to our readings. Please forgive me for this long introduction, but I felt it was important to set the scene to understand the significance of what happens both in the book of Romans and in the passage from Matthew, because both of them speak of a conflict between following the law and being faithful to God. In fact, this conflict is ongoing throughout most of the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Speaking against the Pharisees who are sticklers for laws, both Jesus and Paul stand up to make a point that faith and love come first. Paul does this like a top-class diplomat! For the Pharisees, Abraham is an example of a religious personality, one of the patriarchal figures that embody the law (even though it was formally given to Moses after the times of Abraham). The Jewish legal system insists that the laws were there in Abraham’s understanding. Paul does not deny this but makes a move to say that Abraham’s righteousness before the Lord came primarily from his faith in the Lord’s promises. Not by keeping the law but by keeping the faith did Abraham live to see the time when Sarah bore a child and he indeed became the father of many nations. His faith transcended the laws of God, including the laws of nature that God himself laid down, since, as we know, Sarah was biologically too old to have children. Paul specifically says that her womb was ‘dead’ or ‘lifeless’ – ‘nekrosin’ in Greek – to emphasise that in giving her a child, God very much resurrected her womb just like He resurrected Jesus and just like Jesus will resurrect us.
The theme of resurrection is picked up by our lectionary in offering us the reading from Matthew. Jesus raises a dead girl, despite everyone laughing at him. The laws of nature, established by God, again, are reversed. Jesus’ words that the girl is not dead but asleep can also be interpreted on a symbolic level: to a Christian, death is no more than sleep, but Christ can awaken us from it. The passage about the raising of the girl is paired up with an earlier portion of text from the same chapter, where Jesus is speaking with the Pharisees. His words ‘I desire mercy not for sacrifice’ from Hosea 6 seek to explain to the Pharisees that what God wants from us is mercy, kindness, love and healing. The word ‘sacrifice’ is used as a collective term for everything prescribed by the law, which, despite its initial good intentions, gets in the way of good things happening. God puts the act of healing first even on a Sabbath. He puts an act of mercy first, even shown to those whom the law excludes from the society. In the Pharisaic world, the Law itself seems to have become a cardboard deity which must be obeyed at all costs, even at the expense of what the real God actually wants. The initial lack of definition in the Old Testament laws, which appealed to moral goodness of those who sought to obey them, has been used against the law itself, turning it into a weapon.
Under these circumstances, Jesus shows us that the superficial law does not have a value compared to the value of remaining human. Paul insists that anyone’s relationship with God, even Abraham’s, starts with faith, not the law. This is not to say there is no place for law in the Bible, in our relationship with God or indeed in our Church, but a good law is one that puts humanity first and allows us to exercise our power to help each other, to show mercy and kindness. A good law is one that allows for our faith to flourish, even at the expense of this same law being then broken by faith. Amen