THE LAW OF LOVE

Fr Jim Cogley

With a long religious history behind us of adherence to rules and regulations, and the erroneous belief that keeping the law was the path to salvation, there is something in us that tends to reject the very notion that God is Law. Once we were terrified of breaking the ‘Law’ as we perceived it out of fear of punishment. Now the prevailing attitude is that I can almost do what I like; that God is so all loving that He/She will overlook my behavior and still forgive me. This is completely erroneous thinking that leads to a gradual erosion of all restraints and creates the worst form of enslavement. If I am free to do whatever I like, with whoever I like and as often as I like, as opposed to doing what I ought, it can only give rise to an ego-centric prison where I become a prey to my own desires and passions.

In the Book of Exodus God gives ten commandments to Moses and these have rarely been kept. There are certain inviolable moral laws that like the laws of nature such as gravity and motion that can never change. The old perception was that God punished violation of His laws, today we would say that disobedience is its own punishment. We are not punished because of our sins but by them. We don’t break the commandments, but we do break ourselves by not observing them. Here we see that while God may be all loving and all merciful, He is also a just God who had made a moral universe with certain rules that must be obeyed.

Today we have a crisis of obedience. Young people feel cut adrift in a universe without parameters. The word disciple and the word discipline go hand in hand. We lack the discipline that is part of discipleship. Parents who have never been disciplined lack the ability to give proper discipline to their children. Observe in any supermarket; a child wants something and the mother says ‘no’. The child will then adopt a well-worn strategy of getting attention, like continuous whining or non-cooperation, knowing full well that the mother’s resistance is weak and it’s only a matter of time and patience before she gives in. Such children grow up without the firmness and moral strength that a definite ‘no’ can bring. When it comes to being offered drugs or alcohol the only strength that young adult will have to say ‘no’ will be the definitive ‘no’ the mother exercised in the formative years.

How do we balance the paradox of a God who is Love and a God who is also Law? Jesus said that he came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. He showed that Love is the fulfillment of the Law and so he didn’t always do the right thing, he did the loving thing. What he did bring was a change of emphasis from doing the minimum out of a sense of duty to doing the maximum as a response to being loved. His focus was placed firmly on love and practicing justice. He overlooked many of the man-made rules and summarized the six hundred or more laws of his Jewish religion into one concise framework: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and soul and mind and you must love your neighbor as yourself.’ Upon these he said hung the entire law and the prophets. A man committed a traffic offence for which he had to appear in court. In the lead up days a friend remarked as to how cool and unconcerned he was and enquired why. ‘Should I be worried’ he replied, ‘when I know the judge as my best friend’!