Jesus was a
spirit of the law kind of guy – one of the most important lessons we can carry
away from the Gospel story about the healing of a paralyzed man at
Bethesda. “The
man went and told the Jews that Jesus was the one who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus
because he did this on a sabbath.” (John 5:1-16)
Sure,
healing someone on the Sabbath violated the letter of the law but the poor man
had been suffering for 38 years. Should
Jesus just have cited the rules, apologized and walked away? What if one of us were that man? What would we want Jesus to do?
Letter of
the law vs. spirit of the law.
It’s been a
vexing issue for more than 2,000 years; as someone who instinctively goes
overboard on the side of spirit of the law to help people, passages like this
delight me. It’s great knowing that
Jesus is on my side!
It’s easier
to be a letter of the law person because you can go strictly by the book. You don’t risk suffering any consequences as
Jesus did for violating regulations in order to obey the Great Commandments to
love God and other people. Saints
throughout the ages including our own era have suffered for breaking rules in
the name of obeying those greater commandments.
Heroes like
Dorothy Day and the late Rep. John Lewis were beaten and jailed for refusing to
practice a bland form of Christianity that followed legal rules but never
challenged injustice. They spent their
lives making “good trouble” at great personal cost, as Jesus did.
Happily, we
don’t have to face down armed attack at the Edmund Pettus bridge to live within
the spirit of the law. I think, for
example, of my daughter Sarah, an attorney who helps immigrants regardless of
their legal status; she speaks out loudly and often about the injustices of our
nation’s current immigration policies. I’m
sure that Jesus blesses her work.
We can all find opportunities to respond to the spirit of the law even if it occasionally means fudging on some technical rules if we’re willing to risk paying even a small price to claim the label of “Christian.”
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