It’s the best I could come up with on short notice; the title of this post that is. The thing is a sudden burst of convoluted thoughts poured into my consciousness all at once and have been screaming to get out so that’s what you get.
This post will in one way or another address all of the items in the title (and link them together somehow too) but it may take some time and I suspect it won’t be pretty.
As a world class hypocrite I have been thinking long about the nature of hypocrisy. The thoughts come and go from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year but they generally run along the same rails – hypocrisy is bad…Christ saved some of his strongest words for the hypocrites…stop being hypocritical. Then, as with all things, life and my mind move on and the hypocrisy station fades in the distance. Of course my mental world is small and before I know it my train of thought has circumnavigated it and lo and behold the thoughts of hypocrisy appear again before me and the cycle ever repeats.
Another station I dwell on is the nature of law, God’s and human. I approach it, stop, get off the train, walk around a but becoming familiar with the station and then board for the next destination.
That’s the background for now.
Today a few news articles caught my mind. One was about how the province of Manitoba might legislate the wearing of bike helmets. Not being a very good Libertarian I applaud the possibility of this happening because every time I get on my bike I know I should wear my helmet and every time I get on it I don’t. This is what we call a classic expression of lazy weakness. I don’t wear one because I don’t want to. No one else does, it might mess my hair (seriously), I don’t want to buy one when I could spend the money on a meal at McDonald’s, etc. etc. I have seen the head injury statistics. I know that logically I should wear a helmet. I know that if I fall and receive a brain injury my family and friends will have the great burden of trying to figure out how to care for me but guess what? I still don’t wear the stupid helmet.
But…
If there was a law to wear it – I would wear one. If I were forced to wear one with the threat of fiscal punishment I would wear one. If everyone else had to wear one I would wear one. Frankly if it were not for the law or the potential of the law I would probably not even think about helmets at all except in a vague, inner common sense, unmotivated kind of way. How lame is that? Very…but it is me.
The apostle Paul writes in Romans 7:1-25 –
“Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.
So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.
What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.
Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”
Paul is speaking to a Jewish audience here. He is. You might want to apply this to the broader world but the audience is distinctly Jewish, both Christ followers and non, but Jewish through and through. The sooner we understand this the sooner we stop wasting time trying to press the truth of this on those who do not comprehend the law.
In a nutshell I have always read this as pointing out that the law, while good, was never meant to regulate behavior but to point out our need for God in Christ. It’s a little like saying the Canadian law was never meant to actually make me commit to wearing a bike helmet but to simply help me recognize that I am fragile.
While this is true it is too simplistic. The law is regulatory AND directional. It is meant to change my behavior AND point me to a greater rule at the same time. The law recognizes that I am somewhat lazy, selfish and foolish and require regulation in order to simply survive…while at the same time telling me that there is another strength beyond myself that will one day put me in a position of never needing the law again…but that is not now – not while I am still on this side of life.
We need law. When law is destroyed like New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina people are murdered, businesses are robbed and chaos ensues.
We need law. Concrete law…not just the idea of law. Law modifies culture and behaviour. It is for our protection and is supposed to reflect the best moral and ethical basis of our culture.
But what happens when we lose sight of morality? What happens when the law, which exists outside of ourselves to protect us, becomes based on us instead of a higher moral authority?
I read a couple of other articles today about how more and more mothers are getting away with murdering their children by using the defense of postpartum depression and the difficulty of raising a new child. See here for more.
The idea is that for one psychological reason or another the children are a burden.
Linked to this article was another one (here) about the recent work of bioethicists on what they called post-birth abortions…what we might call infanticide or murder in another era.
The argument requires a premise that there is no God or if there is, God is so distant and unconcerned about humanity that God may as well not exist. The point? God has nothing to do with human affairs.
Without God our human value is no longer intrinsic based upon being a creation but rather extrinsic meaning it depends on other humans, our own achievements, our health and abilities – especially our ability to not be a drain on society.
Following logically from this premise the bioethicists point out that since most societies in the west have no real ethical problem with abortion given that the state of the mother, her value etc. outweigh that of the unborn baby why do we not carry this logic past the womb to the world? Afterall the womb is simply a layer of flesh. There is no difference in the value of a newborn baby from that of an unborn baby and so all the rules applied to the unborn should apply to the born. Carrying this further they suggest that if a baby is a burden say by being born with down syndrome or being born to a mother who could not access abortion services while she was pregnant why not allow the child to be “aborted” after it is born?
This is the logical extension of ethics and law based solely on a secular godless world where we are responsible for our own value.
Given time if laws are put in place enshrining these new values they will become acceptable to our society. It has happened before. This is how strong law is. It can shape cultures and behaviour. God knows this…hence the law. Designed to shape our behaviour in a way that protects us and recognizes our value as coming from outside of ourselves and not solely from within.
There were some religious leaders in Christ’s time who understood the power of law and clothed themselves in it. Some of them literally wore it in small boxes on the heads called phylacteries that held bits of the Torah….God’s law. The silly thing about these folks is they thought that if they literally kept the law, perfectly, it did not matter how they felt and where their heart was or how they behaved in secret with like-minded friends and neighbours.Translation – just keep up appearances and don’t get caught.
Sound familiar?
This is called hypocrisy.Double-mindedness and Christ saved his harshest words for it.
Remember who Paul was talking to earlier? Those who knew the law. Christ is not saving his words for the average hypocrite – he is focused squarely on the religious hypocrite. The one who bears and boasts about the outward appearance of holiness while being rotten inside. He called them white washed tombs.
Why so tough on hypocrites?
I believe he was hard on them because of his high regard for God’s holiness which was, in part, reflected in the law. When he saw the law being used as a tool to present a holier-than-thou image he recognized that God’s holiness was being tarnished. People look to these leaders to present to them God and what they were shown was corruption that caused them to question this God and God’s justice in the first place. Infuriating.
Christ spent a lot of time with the broken. Prostitutes, drunks, thieves, and all around rabble. People who knew they were broken and could not hide it. People who knew the law, its value, but could not keep it and did not pretend to try.
Real tombs, not white washed ones.
They knew they needed more than the law. Not a replacement…but a fulfillment.
Those who kept to the law rigidly and literalistically were convinced they had no need for anything else. The law they kept was barren without a source…a loving God.
The law is necessary. It protects us and keeps us safe, but only if it stems from a higher source than ourselves…otherwise the law becomes a reflection of us, corrupt, barren and without a sense of value. When that happens the viscious cycle starts and we spiral ever downward to a point where we actually begin to consider the benefit of killing our own children.
Without a higher autonomous source to root the law in our hypocrisy becomes our destroyer and our instructor and we kill ourselves. This is hopelessness.
Harnessing Chaos 