For many Christians, especially those who grew up in Protestant circles, the Gospel is essentially defined in opposition to the Jewish Law: There is Law and then there’s Grace and ever the twain shall meet. But we get a very different picture of the Law from the Scriptures, including the texts we Christians know as the Old Testament. This is the focus of two of today’s readings and is well worth considering.
What Martin Luther failed to understand was that for Jews, of ancient times and today, the Law is not opposed to grace, but is the manifestation of God’s grace for them and the world. We see this sentiment beautifully expressed in today’s Psalm:
Oh, how I love your law! all the day long it is in my mind.
Your commandment has made me wiser than my enemies, and it is always with me.
I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your decrees are my study.
I am wiser than the elders, because I observe your commandments.
I restrain my feet from every evil way, that I may keep your word.
I do not shrink from your judgements, because you yourself have taught me.
How sweet are your words to my taste! they are sweeter than honey to my mouth.
Through your commandments I gain understanding; therefore I hate every lying way. (Psalm 119:97-104)
Here we see the Law as a wonderful gift, providing wisdom, understanding, and guidance for the faithful, something ‘sweeter than honey’ to their lips. There’s never a sense in the Scriptures that the Law is anything other than good, beautiful, and even perfect.
But what there is is a sense that the Law must cease being something external but must become deeply embodied and internalized. This is the sense of today’s reading from the Prophets, a passage from Jeremiah very familiar to Christians. In the midst of a longer oracle promising the exiled people’s prosperous return to the land and a time when younger generations will no longer suffer the consequences of the elder’s sins, the prophet envisions a new covenant that God will make with God’s people:
But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31.31-34)
This new covenant is not imagined as a rejection or replacement of the Law, but of it becoming as one with the faithful, living within them and written on their hearts. There will be no need to ‘know the LORD’ because the LORD will be with them intimately.
As Christians we believe this promise was fulfilled in and through Jesus of Nazareth, first through the example of his life and teaching, but then on the day of Pentecost, when the gift of the Holy Spirit was given to his followers.
So it’s not a question of Law vs. Grace, but of External Law as Grace vs. Internal Law as Grace. Yes, Jesus had a lot to saw about how the Law was to be interpreted, rejecting ideas of purity culture and legalism, while radicalizing it to apply to our thoughts and feelings and not just our external actions, but all that is to affirm, not reject, the Law’s goodness. And this is why we might say the Law needs to be written on our hearts and not just in books, for our hearts are malleable and live in shades of grey and all the colours of the spectrum. The written Law may be ‘black fire on white fire’, but the Law on our hearts burns with every hue imaginable. And this is sweet honey indeed.
Matthew Root 