Jesus and "The Law"
I had a questions posed as such:
"One chapter I've always been uncertain of Matthew 5:17 to 5:20.
One of the strange things about language is that if a term or a word can
have both a positive and negative meaning, it will eventually skew
negative and the positive usage of the term will largely become archaic
and eventually fall out of use entirely and even forgotten in most instances. This is almost a universal truism in linguistics.
We also need to unravel some Western programming. In the
post-Reformation world in the West, the term "The Law" has skewed
negative. You don't think about "The Law" in any context largely in a
positive way. If you are at a part and "The Law" shows up, that's
usually a bad thing. Even in terms of things like scientific "laws" of
physics, they are usually viewed as a scientific principle, yes, but
also in the same way that "the law" is viewed in political parlance.
This goes back to at least the writings of John Locke in the 1600s in
Western thought (and before that really, but Locke is a milestone on
this. "The Law" as he defined it was a negative abridgement of freedom.
His ideas were that man is in his nature free, but we have to give up
some of that freedom so that we have a civilized society with rules so
people aren't going around on vigilante revenge killing sprees and it's a
total "the strong survive and the weak perish" kind of world. We put up
with "The Law" so we can have an ordered society with justice and rule
of law and all that.
It's not our nature, but an inconvenience, so Locke says. In other
words, Law is a necessary evil to prevent chaos. I can go on and on
about how that's played out in Western politics and philosophy, but my
point is that "The Law" has come to mean something negative. Something
that is a necessary evil to prevent the greatest evil of anarchy and
chaos, which is the greatest evil because chaos is the precise opposite
of the Divine order. Now, whether one agrees with Locke's premises or
not is not relevant here. What is relevant is how we have been
programmed in the West to hear "The Law" as a negative term by its
nature, but that is a *very* Western view. And it is not the world view
of how non-Western Jews would have heard or understood the term "The
Law."
I came to this realization years ago. I was on a bus with this guy who
was reading the Bible in Hebrew. I was in seminary at the time, and I
happened to ask him what he was studying. He was very suspicious of this
6-foot something dude. I explained I had studied a bit of Hebrew in
seminary, making the mistake of saying, "Hebrew, and several other dead
languages." Three words: wrong answer, McFly! Bless his heart, the guy
went on this rant about how Hebrew was not a dead language because it
was the language of Torah, and he said outright, "The Law gives us life.
The Law is God's Word to us. The Law is life!"
Now, while I would likely still disagree with this gentleman about a
good many things, he made an excellent point that I have never
forgotten, particularly when it comes to passages like this that you
reference. To this gentleman, the notion that The Law was a negative
abridgement of
freedom was anathema to the study of the Bible. The Law was, in fact, a
positive
bridging to freedom, because that freedom comes from God. It is a
revelation of God's divine order.
Now, as Christians, we have a different understanding of that Law and
how it applies in the light of Christ's fulfillment of that Law. I can
go on and on about that, but we have to be very careful not to view The
Law, as it was given to Moses, as this ancient set of rules that was
intended as a negative abridgement of freedom and write off the whole
thing. Luther, for example, was big on this idea that there was "Law'
and there was "Grace" and ne'er the twain shall meet. But that sets up
several dangerous false dichotomies, as if God gave the Law as an
unfulfillable group of persnickety negative and oppressive laws that no
one can possibly hope to follow or ever keep and that have no value
whatsoever. That was not the point of the Law. The Law was to be a life
giving revelation of the Divine order so that God could begin to have a
relationship, first with His people Israel, and then with the whole
world through the revelation of Christ.
That's what Jesus is talking about in this passage. The Law was given as
a life giving bridge to the Divine so that ultimately the world would
come to know Him through His Son, Jesus, who was the fulfillment of the
Law, that bridge to the Divine. The Law was not a negative abridgement
of freedom, given to simpletons by a perverse deity as a code that the
simpletons no possible way of living by or even of understanding, a la
Nietzsche's satire called Thus Spake Zarathustra.
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