We can instinctively see laws as those societal norms we are obligated to follow lest we face a consequence for breaking them. But in today’s reflection, Lori Ranner reminds us that, above all, Jesus understands the Law as that which call us, and frees us, to love. In fact, to love so intently that we let go of all that is less than loving others as ourselves.

November 3, 2024: Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B‍

Deuteronomy 6:2-6

Psalm 18:2-4, 47, 51

Hebrews 7:23-28

Mark 12:28b-34

The Freedom of Loving the Law

A reflection by Lori F. Ranner

The Law. It’s a tricky phrase to the modern ear, with varied and complex connotations – not all of which are positive.

To some, Law with a capital L sounds portentous and solemn: an expression of the social contract, wherein individuals deny themselves certain agencies for the good of the whole, where justice is portrayed with her eyes covered, where she willingly submits to blindness. Justice must be immune to the sight of those pleading their cases, lest she be swayed, and her objectivity compromised.

For others, that majestic portrait is marred by experience. Their encounters with the Law may have seen the fine phrases betrayed by a haphazard or hypocritical implementation. To believe in the power of the Law, one must have known its truth in life. We submit to the Law, because we have been taught that its high ideals  (duty, responsibility, moderation, truth, respect) are in everyone’s best interest; that they express the aspirations of civilization. But what happens when the social contract fails? When the Law is interpreted poorly, or ignored altogether? What happens to the adherents of the Law when they suddenly find themselves outside of its embrace? “Before, I was protected, and thus I believed; what now, when I find myself defenseless?” Does that individual continue to believe in the Law? Should they still consider themselves bound by what only benefits others? It can and does happen so often, in so many places, despite thousands of years of thinking and arguing and studying what we call the Law: where is the country, the class, the organization where the Law is perfectly applied, where there are not people – individuals and groups – who find themselves penalized, not because they have failed to uphold the Law but because the Law has failed to uphold them? How to remain faithful when you have been betrayed by that blind goddess – how to restrain your angry impulse to rip off the blindfold, crying:

Look at me!

See what’s being done in Your name.

Today’s readings deal with the thorny issue of Law - a particularly vexatious one for Jews, whose faith tradition was bound up in the concept of a single, divine Lawgiver and a divine Law which takes precedence over all its earthly counterparts. In this view, Creation had been ordered according to a plan of infinite harmony beyond all human understanding – to the Laws of which humans are bound nonetheless.

As we hear today, the central commandments of God’s Law are few and deceptively simple. Where the Israelites of the First Testament, the people of Jesus’ time, and we ourselves get tangled are in the fraught intricacies of their implementation. How does a human live according to a perfect Law in an imperfect world? Perhaps just as important: is there even a point in trying?

In everyday life, we don’t often use the words “law” and “love” in the same sentence. In some ways, they seem antithetical – the first cerebral by nature, the second, emotional and intuitive. Yet biblical writers of both the First and Second Testaments seem to be almost obsessed with their pairing: their message seems to be that it is not enough (or perhaps even possible) to love God and merely follow the Law; to properly love God, one must love the Law as well. Obedience can be effected without love; one can obey grudgingly the way we adhere to the speed limit in a school zone on a Friday afternoon when all we want to do is get home – not because at that moment we are cherishing the lives of schoolchildren, but because speeding tickets are a drag, and they’re no way to start off a weekend.

That, the biblical writers tell us, is not enough when it comes to God’s Law. We have to love it – with everything that we are. We’re assured that the benefits are endless: protection in time of danger, diligent care, victory over those who would bring us to harm. God commands Moses to tell the people that only observance of the Law, grounded in a fierce, whole-person love, is the path to prosperity, safety, and life itself.

But how the heck do you do that?

Rules, on the other hand – nobody loves those, except maybe the people who make them! My students certainly don’t. Who wants to wear a blazer to chapel when it's ninety degrees, or include a cover sheet on your research paper when your teacher already knows you wrote it? Why are bibliography entries and footnotes differently formatted? Why do shirts have to be tucked in? Rules are restrictive by nature, like the guardrails of life. Rules cramp our style, they invite uniformity, they trammel creativity: these are all the down sides of rules. Something in human nature sees a boundary, and longs to transgress it; rules, the soul cries out, are chains. Rules can be petty and irrational and biased – but they can also be changed.

We view rules as the resentful stepchildren of the Law – attempts at adapting of the empyrean to the quotidian, the divine to the earthly. They are meant to be quibbled over and tweaked. By contrast, Law is something higher – at least we like to think so. Law speaks to the eternal, the noble, the pure and unbiased – so why isn’t it easier to love?

The question invites a closer look. If the debut in the Scriptures of God’s Law seems intimidatingly exotic (burning bushes and all that), subsequent appearances, perhaps, reveal a more familiar aspect. We are told that the Law is a refuge, our “rock;” an outlet of goodness and light. Exactly how one moves from intimidation to refuge is indicated in the nature of the Law’s own commands; there we find how it is that the Law can be loved.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is engaged in one of those perennial jousts with a “scribe,” or religious scholar. That in itself was a perfectly normal element of an educated Jew’s spiritual life. Sparring over a sacred text was how meaning emerged; how the Law, at least in theory, was interpreted into rules, and the rules applied to living circumstance.

What’s different here is that Jesus doesn’t win. It’s one of the rare occasions where we see that Jesus and members of the religious establishment weren’t always at odds; sometimes they enter an illumination hand in hand.

This scribe is a little different too: his question seems to be a genuine one. It’s sometime between Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday; Jesus has been teaching in the Temple, and just finished demolishing the arguments of pretty much everybody from the chief priests and elders to Pharisees, Sadducees, and “Herodians” who had been pulling out all the stops, trying desperately to “catch him out in his words.” Nothing worked.

Then this scribe shows up – definitely somewhere below all these august personages in the pecking order – but not necessarily inferior in the teacher’s context where Jesus is operating. Only one’s insight into the Scripture, or lack thereof, determines that.

He hovers nearby, listening to Jesus. For an intellectual like himself, it must have been exhilarating to witness this razor-sharp wit slicing through all the nonsense they’re throwing at him, cutting straight to the bone of every conundrum they can invent. Thrilled, emboldened – maybe a little starstruck – he speaks up. “Seeing that Jesus had answered them well, he asked, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’”

We can sense the shift in Jesus’ awareness; immediately he intuits a genuine question, and he responds accordingly. Vanished is the dharma combat mode in which Jesus has been operating. Nobody is testing anybody; instead, there are just two people unraveling the mystery of God’s Law, together. It must have been a moment of refreshment for Jesus after all those tense exchanges. We all know that feeling: to meet someone – for a change – who doesn’t have an agenda.

Jesus presents him with the first Great Commandment to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength - and then with the second, “To love your neighbor as yourself.”

Any way you look at it, both of these seem like asking the impossible – far more outrageous than anything else Jesus has proposed. How is it possible to love God in the way such a commandment demands –  with all our being? Does this mean to the exclusion of all else, for which there is nothing left of our capacity for love?

And how can anyone love our “neighbor” – whoever that is, and in whatever dimension – as we love ourselves? Isn’t the very essence of life self-preservation? To love another with such abandon as we tend our own needs will surely end badly for us.

Yet it is to this absurd answer that we imagine a smile of delighted recognition breaking across the scribe’s face; here at last is that someone I’ve been searching for, he must have thought. Someone who knows.

“Well said, teacher! You are right.”

What? Since when do scribes and Pharisees concede points? Well, this one does. In Matthew’s version, this question about the Law is put into the mouth of a Pharisee, one of the “testers” of Jesus, and in that version, we get no reply. Matthew also adds a crucial bit to Jesus’ answer. “All of the Law and the prophets hang upon these two commands.” Mark's scribe, however, doesn’t just concede; he warmly approves. What Jesus offers as human priorities in our dealings with God “are worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Now it’s Jesus’ turn to be impressed. Here is one of the hidden pleasures of reading the Gospels – those moments where Jesus shakes his head in amazement over the hidden wisdom of people. Far from monopolizing knowledge, he clearly relishes this sort of mutual discovery – which is what our psalmist’s “love of the law” most closely resembles. It’s probably why Jesus never stays in the desert for long.

“When Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, he said, ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’”

After that, nobody dared ask him any more questions.

What was it about this tiny exchange that silenced the haters in a way that all Jesus’ previous rhetorical brilliance could not? Was it that in their heart of hearts, they were a little ashamed? The only person who comes to Jesus wide open and hungry to learn is the one whom Jesus compliments; through the one question where a desire to triumph is missing, a true victory is achieved.

Jesus’ reaction is key to his understanding of the Law, and the desire behind it to bring us closer to God. After all, we and the Law are works of the same Divine Author.

Why, exactly, do Jesus and the scribe isolate these two commandments as the greatest, by which they mean those upon which “all the rest” hang? It could be that they are being clever, referencing centuries of commentary that have produced a similar consensus. Behind that, too, however, would be a singular insight – for both are commands of surrender.

To love God with all of ourselves implies letting go of our own plans for our lives, and letting God’s work through us instead. This is what our epistle writer is reminding the Hebrews in his audience: Jesus’ sacrifice is immortal and definitive, replacing every other sacrifice bound by time and place because it is not directed by self-interest, as those sacrifices or “bargains with God” so often are. That, after all, was how the ancient understanding of human-divine relations worked: a business deal, with a specific profit or ambition in mind. Jesus’ sacrifice asks for nothing; like the scribe’s question, it is offered freely. In a certain essential sense, that question, too, like Jesus’ own self, was offered in love.

“The Law appoints men subject to weakness to be high priests,” the Hebrews are instructed. That is, because the Law deals with humans, it has to work through them: people with goals and ambitions, who crave power, and who sometimes prostitute the Law in an effort to satisfy that craving. They are the ones who refashion the Law of love into rules that have been drained of love, infused with selfishness, rules which are petty, harmful, or cruel. It is against this mentality and these putative legal experts that Jesus goes toe-to-toe, methodically stripping away the mask that rule-makers often wear to make them seem like Lawgivers instead. Jesus and the scribe understand that there is only one Law Giver, with rather different priorities.

“The word of the oath, which was taken after the Law, appoints a son who has been made perfect forever.”
Jesus relinquishes the self. He spends his whole ministry trying to show us that this is how our will and God’s become one. On this, too, Jesus and the scribe would be in agreement: one’s understanding of the Law is only made perfect in action.

Of course, we are not Jesus. Our sacrifice will never be perfect, as his was. But perfection is not what counts in adherence to this Law the way it does in rule-following. Breaking the rule means paying the penalty. By contrast – this Law of love is predicated upon effort, not result. Why is the scribe “not far from the Kingdom?” Not because he is perfect. Because the Kingdom, as Jesus never tires of telling us, is made possible by generosity. When we give of ourselves without wanting to score points, or win prizes, or look better than somebody else: that is when miracles occur. That is God’s Reign on earth, where kindness and harmony flourish, “the land flowing with milk and honey” where no one goes hungry, and all are fed. Far from restricting us, or cramping our style – the Law hands us that power to transform God’s Reign from a pretty notion into something real.

This is the real power, not the petty power that rule-makers fight over. Through the selfless encounter of Jesus and the scribe, we witness in real time what happens when the swords of self-interest stay sheathed: a true meeting. A bond. Just keep doing that over and over, every day until the end, the Law urges us. When you fail – as you inevitably will – just keep trying. That is how God’s Reign draws near.

So now you’ve understood. You want to follow the Law, and bring about the Divine Reign. But sometimes the Law is perverted from its natural course, which is love; sometimes rules masquerade as Law. How do we tell them apart?

The Law is fashioned from God’s infinite possibility; rules are the product of human limitations. Rules are based in particularities; Law in universal truths. Rules curry exceptions for our weaknesses. The Law demands that we do our utmost to exceed them, “to be perfect, even as your [God]in Heaven is perfect.” It demands that we become no less than saints: that is, those sinners who keep trying no matter how many fails they rack up; who refuse to surrender to despair.

When in doubt as to whether a rule reflects the Law or not, ask yourself this question. Does it demand that its followers subject themselves to one another, as Paul urges the Ephesians, “out of reverence for Christ?” Or does it prioritize the goals of one over the good of the whole? Does it encourage us in love for each other – or does it fragment us, and drive us into corners where all we can see are walls?

In the current film Conclave, there is a scene where a gathering of fictional cardinal-electors is arguing over what is needed in the next pope. The dispute is abruptly brought to a halt by the observation of one among them – the newest and least experienced cardinal, who has no faction or agenda, and whose only concern is that the Church’s leader be one whose hands will do the work of  love. “The Church is not Tradition,” he observes drily. “It is not the past. The Church is what we will do next.”

So it is with rules and the Law. Rules are predicated upon what we have known – and who we have been – in the past. The Law is what we do next.

‍Lori Frey Ranner is a New Orleans native. She holds a double B.A. in History and Classics from Loyola University New Orleans and an M.Phil. in Byzantine Studies from the University of Oxford (Keble 1996) with a concentration in Ecclesiastical History.

‍Her area of academic specialization is Latin and Greek ecumenical relations in the period following the Fourth Crusade. Between 1999-2014 she held the post of lecturer at Loyola New Orleans in the Departments of History and Classics. She currently teaches Latin Ancient Greek and World Religions at Ursuline Academy.

She is married and mother to three children. In her random bits of free time she is writing one novel editing a second and turning a third into a podcast.