Our reading from Nehemiah presents a strange scene from the history of Israel. The Jewish people had been exiled from the land for many years. Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians. And then, under the Persians, the Jews were allowed to return and rebuild the Temple and the city. So the scene we heard from Nehemiah is that moment when the people come together and listen to the book of law read—at least in this general, public way, as a whole people—for the first time in centuries.
They react in two ways. First, they mourn and weep—in sadness and grief over what was lost, and what was left undone and unpracticed for so many years. Then they turn to feasting and celebration.
And it’s that second reaction that I want to think about, because it’s a little strange.
Who has a party to celebrate the law?
We live in a world with a lot of rules. Most people follow them, even. But can you imagine having an assembly where someone reads all ordinances of the local borough or township, or a section of state law, or even just the student handbook of a school or university, and then everyone just starts cheering and applauding because they are so excited about hearing the rules? No, I can’t imagine that, either.
People don’t like law. We tolerate it. Maybe even we understand that it’s necessary. But we don’t think of it as something worth celebrating except maybe on those rare occasions where it obtains for us something that we already wanted, or some victory over our enemies. We think of law in purely negative terms: as rules about things we shouldn’t do, or as rules about things that we have to do—or that other people have to do—that we may not otherwise want to do.
A lot of Christians look at the Old Testament like this. They think of the law books of the Old Testament in that light. And so you get this kind of caricature of the Old Testament, and Judaism, as a whole lot of rules that are oppressive and hard to follow, and the New Testament and Jesus as being against rules and all about freedom and love.
But here’s the thing: no one in the Old Testament ever complains about the Law. When you read the Old Testament, you never see anyone talking about how the law is unjust or unfair or oppressive. You have prophets getting upset when people don’t keep the law, and the reason they’re upset is that the law is viewed as such an undeniably positive, life-giving thing. The longest psalm, Psalm 119, famously goes on and on for 200 verses about how fantastic the law is! Can you imagine someone composing a love song in honor of the tax code?
I’m not saying we need to do that. And obviously there’s a difference between the law given by God to the Jewish people and the law given by Congress to the American people and the particular law given by a bishop to his diocese. But I think it’s important to understand this positive attitude toward the law if we’re to understand what Jesus is doing. Because that picture, which so many of us have learned, of Jesus showing up, getting rid of the law that no one liked, and everyone breathing a sigh of relief isn’t what happened.
What did happen?
Despite the positive attitude that Judaism had toward the law, despite the beauty of the law itself, human beings are pretty messed up. Maybe the reason that we have such a negative attitude to law these days is that we know more decisively just how bad we are at following the law—any law. However wonderful a law may be, there will always be someone to break it. Law just reminds us of our imperfection. It reminds us that we aren’t good at being good without something making us be good.
This is a message that we get through the Old Testament as well. At one famous part of Jeremiah, God tells people that one day he will make a new covenant. No longer will his people have law written on tablets of stone or scrolls or books—the law will be written on their hearts. In other words, they will be good not because some rule makes them be good, but because they want to be.
Wonderful as it may be, the law, as a set of rules to follow, isn’t enough. We need something more.
And so when Jesus, as in our Gospel today, starts talking about his own life as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, people listen. We should listen. Because what he offers is neither advice for perfectly following the law nor the permission to ignore it. He offers us something different. He offers us himself.
What he shows us is that real freedom isn’t freedom from the law—that would just leave us as slaves to our changing desires, which cannot ultimately make us happy. Nor is freedom found in the law itself. It’s found in the person who lived with all the perfect law of God in his heart. In a way, he is the law made flesh. And so from this point, following the law isn’t primarily a matter of following a list of rules, but a matter of following a person. And when we follow Jesus, he slowly changes our desires, he molds our abilities, so that we can be not just ourselves—and our own failed attempts to be the good—but him. We are members of his body, as St. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians.
That is an important image to remember. You can tell your hand all you want not to be bad. You can slap your hand when it steals, or when it reaches to click on something online that it shouldn’t click on, or when it starts to tap out something mean or insensitive on your phone—you can do that all you want, but it’s not going to stop your hand from doing those things. Because the hand doesn’t do things on its own.
Christ is our head. You’re not going to live in the power and the joy of Christ if you keep yourself separate from the head; that’s like a toe going off and trying to do its own thing. We need the head and the heart. We need the life of Jesus in us. And there’s no easy shortcut to keeping connected with that life. It happens only in regular prayer, in receiving the body and blood, in friendship with the other members of Christ’s body. And the more deeply we take in Christ’s life as our own, the more we can greet God’s law, God’s order, God’s rules—not as an obstacle to getting what we want, but as the only path to true love and happiness.