Jesus and the law

Luke 6: 29-31 “To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your cloak do not withhold your coat as well. Give to everyone who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods, do not ask them again.”

A few weeks back there was something of a stir when a survey was published showing that 37% of young British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia law. Immediately the public mind leapt to images of hand-lopping and beheading, which is all that most of us associate with Sharia. In some quarters it was implied that the law of England might soon come to be rather like the law of Saudi Arabia. Most of this was the media at their usual game of launching the panic for the day, whether terrorism or gun crime or bird flue or escaped criminals or global warming.

But there was a deeper anxiety, one that had its source in the tradition of law that we have in this country. On the whole, most of us are uncomfortable with the idea that the law of the land should be subject to religion. This is true even of people who would regard themselves as religious. For most of us, law is the common framework within which different religious beliefs find their place. To make law subject to religion is to get things the wrong way round.

None of that is surprising if you look back over Christian history. Though it is sometimes claimed that English law has its basis in the Ten Commandments, we don’t normally think of our law as having a religious base; and though we are familiar with the idea of Jewish law and more recently of Muslim law, the idea of “Christian law” doesn’t come so naturally to us. The reason is fairly clear. Whereas you can extract from the Quran and the Hebrew Bible a body of specific laws, covering most situations from the division of land in inheritance to the proper treatment of divorced wives, the same is not true of the Christian scriptures. It would not be possible to extract such a body of law from the New Testament. Only very occasionally does Jesus pronounce on a specific issue. Unlike Moses and Mohammed, he was not legislating for a community; he seems usually to be thinking in personal rather than in public terms.

This presents problems. It means that when as a society we are faced with a moral difficulty we cannot simply look to a set of published rules. Is war right or wrong? Jesus is unclear. At one point he says that those who live by the sword will die by the sword; at another, that his own coming will bring not peace but a sword. Is he for or against profit? He tells his followers that they must choose between Mammon and God, but at another point he says that, living in the world as they do, they must make to themselves friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness. On many of the issues of our day—sexual orientation, racial and social equality—he leaves us with no judgements at all.

Of course the Church, and Christian societies, have tried to fill this gap. Catholics have pronounced against abortion and Methodists against alcohol. The Free Presbyterians in Scotland see Sunday ferry-boats as an offence to the Gospel. But all that is us, not Jesus. As Christians, we have nothing like Sharia law, nothing like the law of Moses with its 613 prescriptions and prohibitions. What we have is what we find in this morning’s gospel: a set of moral injunctions that seem almost wilfully to fly in the face of public practicality, that disregard the needs of a society or a state. “From him who takes away your cloak do not withhold your coat as well.” How do you run a police force or a legal system on the basis of that? If HSBC suffers a robbery, should they throw open their vaults and invite all comers to help themselves? What would Jesus have said about the people who helped themselves on Branscombe beach? Would he have condemned them, or would he have seen it as a parable of the illimitable generosity of God, of the measure of his gift pressed down and overflowing? The answer is that we simply don’t know.

So: where do we go from there? What do we do when Jesus tells us to hand thieves whatever they want, to take no thought for the morrow, to live as though we were children or sparrows or the lilies of the field?

Most of us, I suspect, quietly relegate these injunctions to a limbo of impossible ideals. Like many Catholics over the issue of contraception, we know what the requirement is but we don’t, seriously, feel obliged to meet it. At the same time, of course, we still feel guilty and a little resentful. We do our best: why shouldn’t that be enough? There are, however, a few things to be said.

Firstly, Jesus was speaking in a context that assumed the Jewish law. He was not defining the law of the land; his society already had a perfectly good body of law, the Mosaic Law which Jesus himself accepted and commended. What he was doing was to set this law within the context by which all law needs to be judged, whether Jewish or Muslim or secular law of the twenty-first century. And that context is the goodness of God. It is, after all, God who turns the cheek to any injury; who gives more when we take something improperly from him, who loves us when we have shown ourselves to be his enemy. However righteous and wise human law may be, it stands against the backdrop of an absolute righteousness and an absolute wisdom. Whatever goodness or justice our arrangements may contrive, the proper point of reference is always the goodness and justice of God.

Part of Jesus’ concern is to remind his hearers of the true reach of goodness, of a goodness so excessive that it seems to us irrational and even stupid. That was his message. We can recognise that; but how much does that help? If the true standard is God’s standard, then we are doomed to failure. The great virtue of the Mosaic law is that, in principle at least, you can keep it. We can all understand what it means not to eat pork, and it is perfectly possible not to eat pork. But Jesus’ injunctions are, effectively, impossible to follow because they refer to a goodness that is not our own, a goodness that is the goodness of God.

This difficulty has preoccupied many since the origin of the faith. It troubled St Paul and Martin Luther, to name just two. We are unlikely to solve it this morning. But we may find a clue if we go back to the text. “To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” What is involved in doing that? What would need to be true of you to enable you to do that?

You would have to believe a number of things. You would have to believe that self-protection was not the ultimate law of human existence. You would have to believe that the competitive, Darwinian conflict that dominates our world was held within a frame that was not competitive but gracious. If you did not on some level believe these things, then to turn the other cheek would be an act of pointless masochism. In other words: to do that would require faith, faith that this absurd act had meaning because it was directed toward and grounded in the infinite goodness of God.

But that is true of much humbler, much less absurd moral actions, actions that we perform every day. To be kind to an elderly neighbour from whom we can expect nothing in return; to give money to African children whom we will never see; all these are acts of faith, faith that the infinite, unreachable goodness of God provides a framework within which our acts have meaning even when, by human standards, they seem impractical or pointless or absurd.

In this morning’s gospel, it is clear that Jesus is not setting out a new law. Perhaps what he is really doing has less to do with law than with faith. When he makes these impossible demands, he is using their very impossibility to bring home to us that these actions can only be acts of faith; that they make no sense in any other terms; that whenever we act in love toward our neighbours, whether as individuals or through the law of our society, we are already displaying our faith, faith in a God whose goodness is so intense, so overwhelming, that it takes up and justifies all the small acts of love of which we are falteringly capable.