From the Summer Priest: Jesus and the Law

From The Rev. Roderick McAulay

I entered law school in 1966. I entered seminary in 1996. In the intervening thirty years I was fully immersed in the world of law beginning as a trial lawyer working on school desegregation for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department, to private practice in downtown Seattle, to a position as counsel for the Washington State Senate, I experienced many facets of a lawyer’s life. As a priest in the Episcopal Church, I have been fascinated and engaged with the many ways that law is woven into the fabric of both our institutional and theological life. It is not surprising that since ordination I have served on various ecclesiastical courts and disciplinary boards, taught Canon Law at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (our Episcopal seminary in Berkeley) and served on our diocesan Commission on Canons and Constitutions.

As Christians we are constantly encountering and interpreting legal question on many levels. For starters there are the multitude of rules in our scriptures. Maimonides, a twelfth century Jewish Rabbi from Cordoba, Spain catalogued 613 discreet rules in the Torah (the first five books of our Old Testament), a few more than the familiar “ten” that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Jesus and the Pharisees frequently argued about these rules and how to apply them. The Pharisees believed that only through strict adherence to the letter of these laws would God look favorably upon the Jewish people and bring them freedom from the Roman occupation.

Beyond Biblical law, as an institution, we have adopted our own rules to establish how we govern ourselves: we have a Constitution, Canons, and the rubrics in our Prayer Book incorporated into our Canons by reference. Each Diocese in the church has its own constitution and canons and each parish has its own Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws. As legal institutions, landowners, and employers we are subject to state and local laws governing non-profit corporations, zoning, and employment. In short, there is a great web of rules regulating our life as a church, guiding, and limiting our practices of worship and governance and even shaping our theological understanding. There are always questions, issues and debates arising from the interpretation of all these commandments, rules, and regulations and in many ways our arguments reflect the same tension that existed between the Pharisees and Jesus.

I believe that the Pharisees’ passion for strict reading of the law reflected not just a desire to be in control of Jewish life, but their insecurity and fear of a chaotic world. Jesus constantly pulled them to a core principle based on compassion. We see that same tension throughout our world today. Whether it is the Taliban seeking to reimpose one thousand-year-old Sharia laws on a modern society, or so-called Originalists on our own Supreme Court, what seems to be the driver is not the restoration of some revered ancient codes, but the security of reinventing a world that mirrors the imagination of frightened jurists of how they saw their world when they were children. They are not turning back hundreds of years: they are just going back fifty years.

This reading of the law fails to recognize the cruel consequences and pain caused to the people. As with Jesus healing the sick on the Sabbath, the Pharisees and their modern day counterparts fail to understand the law living, growing, evolving and gently pliable: not encrusted and rigid. I see the law as the bones of the social body. They provide structure, define relationships, protect vital organs. Like the bones of the youth, they can bend. They are resilient. When broken they can heal. Jesus did not deny the law: he did interpret the law in a context of love.

- The Rev. Rod McAulay