Wednesday 23 March 2022

A pilgrim's reflection: on the beauties and the dangers of the law

 "The man who keeps them and teaches them will be considered great in the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 5:19)

The idea of the law can sometimes have a bad reputation among Christians. The topic seems complicated. Jesus lambasts the Pharisees for adding the burdens of human tradition on top of the laws which God imposed on the Jews under the Old Covenant. The constant scrutiny of legal compliance is what seems to characterise many of their questions to Jesus in the course of His ministry. Yet in today's gospel, Jesus seems to veer in the other direction, specifically warning his disciplines not to imagine He is abolishing the Law and the Prophets.

As we see in the period after the Ascension, the apostles have to work out whether the ritual and dietary elements of the Law should be adopted by Gentiles who become Christians. St Paul even clashes with St Peter on this issue when Peter does not stand up to those Jews who wanted to require Gentiles to conform. That particular issue is of course long since passed in the history of the Church, but in a way the problem haunts us still in another guise, most especially in how we relate to the various elements of the Faith.

For it is possible to treat the practices of the Faith like a set of instrumental rules that deliver salvation to us. When we do this, our compass shifts subtly away from the communion of divine friendship which God calls us to in Jesus Christ, and towards a legalistic compliance by which we measure our own performance in the faith. Let's make no mistake here; divine friendship requires us to be as faithful as we can by God's grace. We take our failings then to the confessional with us. Yet, in our resolve not to sin again, as the act of Contrition says, we can be too ready to police this compliance not so much with rigour as with something approaching egoism - a tendency that has more to do with our self-image, than it has with a genuine outward turning of the soul towards the God of love who reaches out to us.

This is perhaps one of the places in which self-surrender becomes essential. In truth, we are not the masters of our soul, and compliance lies beyond the capabilities of even the greatest saints (for the just man falls seven times a day). Unconscious forces and needs - the wounds of original sin that remain even after baptism - operate in us and twist our best intentions when we least expect it. The good that we would do, that we do not, as St Paul tells the Romans.

Worse still, however, our knowledge of God's laws can work against us when we dress up such unconscious needs as the fulfilment of the law. An unregulated and unconscious need to nurture others can be disguised as a dutiful exercise of love towards our neighbour while underneath it may be more about manipulation and control. An unregulated and unconscious need for attachment to others can be disguised as humility, selflessness or dutiful obedience but underneath it may be a kind of servitude. The best we can do here is to know where self-confidence ends and a genuine distrust of self begins. Or, as St Philip Neri used to pray, "Dear Lord, don't trust Philip!".

So, to conclude,  we should both embrace and avoid the law! Embrace it as the expression of the beautiful order that the God of love calls us to. But avoid it - or not so much avoid it as know how to suspend our legalistic impulses -  when our hearts misuse it as a measure of self-regarding evaluation or as a cover for the pursuit of needs that simply have not been brought before the throne of Christ and surrendered at His feet. 

Surrender all to Him. Our real journey into the abyss of love begins there.

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