“And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect” (Galatians 3:17).
Today’s Epistle and Gospel may seem a puzzling combination, until we realize that both St. Paul and our Lord are speaking about freedom. Truly, we will never understand our personal freedom or the freedom of our country, until we understand what Almighty God is telling us about freedom though his Son and though St. Paul.
God in the Scriptures is telling us that our freedom is the result of our covenant with Him, through his Son Jesus Christ. A “covenant” is a special sort of relationship, a permanent agreement between two parties, in this case, between God and man. This relationship with God is very important, since there can be no freedom of any kind, unless it is established in the terms of our relationship With God and with one another. No human being is exempt from this truth: true personal freedom must always exist, can only exist, in relation to others.
At first, it may sound odd to define “freedom” only in terms of our relations with others, but that sense of “oddness” is the result of our saturation with a false definition of freedom that was first suggested to mankind by a serpent. This demonic, false definition of freedom insists that we are only free when we are totally disconnected from others, when no one, God or man, can demand that we do anything against our own will or inclination.
And this may sound fine, for example, to a sophomore philosophy class dazzled by the sophistication of its teacher, until we realize that this false definition of freedom is not describing “freedom” at all, but only isolation. A man on a desert island has no one to telling him what to do. He is the theoretical master of all he surveys, but he is not free at all, and he knows it. He hopes daily for the coming of a ship, with its captain, officers, rules, and regulations to rescue him: to put him back into an ordered relationship with other people. He knows that he will have to follow orders aboard ship, but the ship is his true freedom, and not the empty island.
In the same way, the worst punishment of any prison is not found in its execution chamber, but in solitary confinement. It would be funny, then, if it weren’t so sad, that so many secular philosophers have offered a form of self-imposed solitary confinement as the only freedom. We need each other to be free. We need God to be free. We also need, however, a covenant binding us to God and man, in order to be free. Just saying, “we have a relationship” is never enough.
The devils in hell have a “relationship” with God, regardless of their desires or claims, but are the devils free? The people of Communist North Korea have a relationship with each other, but are they free? What is lacking in these cases, and in so many others, is not a “relationship,” but the special, specific, and mutual relationship of a covenant: you be this, and I’ll be that; you do this, and I’ll do that. A marriage is a very familiar form of covenant: you be the wife, and I’ll be the husband; you do what a wife does, and I’ll do what a husband does. A covenant is an ordered relationship, with a knowable form that is understood by all the parties involved, and agreed to voluntarily by them all.
People, nevertheless, are fallible. We make mistakes. We sin. We are fallen. We complicate our lives and create the necessity for complex rules to govern our behavior, even within our covenants. We cry out for laws and for definitions, not so much to improve our covenants, but to look for loopholes in our relationships with others. Think for a moment. ls it really sane that we require stop signs and policemen with guns to enforce the traffic laws, just to keep from killing one another with our cars? Is it reasonable that we demand of God that He issue a commandment against murdering each other, especially when so many people claim that love of neighbor is “normal” and “natural” in human beings?
This may seem like the long way around in summarizing what Christ and St. Paul are saying about freedom, but the covenant, whether in its Old or New-and-improved form is the promise that God made to Abraham in Christ, in these words:
By myself I have sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice (Genesis 22:17-18).
This is the specific promise, that Jesus Christ the Seed of Abraham, and those who are multiplied in him by baptism from every nation and every people, hearing God’s voice and obeying it, will be blessed in all things, will overcome every difficulty, will be freed from every bondage to any enemy, including Satan and death, and even the gates of hell will not stand against them. This promise is the covenant with God.
The fulfillment of this promise is the Christian religion. God’s service is perfect freedom, so hearing God’s voice and obeying his will are not, first of all, a matter of law, but a matter of love: the love of the covenant He has sworn by Himself to give us as his gift. So where does the law come from?
The law comes from our attempt to avoid obeying God, from our search for loopholes in our covenant with him. The law, any law, including the Law of Moses, is not an end in itself, but a series of guidelines and boundaries within a covenant. When we break the law, we have left the ground of the covenant, so the covenant is our right relationship with God, and the law is only a way of preserving it.
If we were morally perfect, we would need no law, only the covenants we live by. The perfect keeper of the covenant would behave in exactly the same way as the perfect keeper of the law. But we are not perfect, and we even learn over time how to manipulate and abuse the law. Say a husband has agreed to take out the garbage every night, making that method of showing his love for his wife a duty and a law in that family. What happens, however, if he is ill and has, say, a temperature of 105 degrees? Should he be required to climb out of bed to take out the garbage? Should the garbage just be allowed to pile up until he is better? Or should another member of the family, of that covenant, take on the job, saying, “I had better do this work, whatever the usual rule, for the sake of the love that I have for the rest of my family”?
The answer is pretty obvious, especially if we understand St. Paul’s warning in his letter to the Galatians against the perversion of the law into a way of avoiding the living covenant with God. The Law of Moses, which came 430 years after God gave the covenant to Abraham, has never been a way around the covenant or a replacement for the covenant. It was given solely as a reminder of our duty to God, as a way of evaluating our behavior by the standard of how one who truly loves God behaves. Apart from this one purpose, we abuse the law in three ways: by putting the law above the covenant; by playing one law against another in order to avoid the duties of the covenant; and by doing evil on the basis of an absence of a particular law against a particular evil. “Where does it say I can’t cheat my wife if I’m unhappy?” “Where does it say I can’t murder my children if I’m sad?” “Doesn’t God want me to be happy?” “Isn’t that the highest law?”
The Parable of the Good Samaritan is our Lord’s method of illustrating the abuse of the law. The priest and the levite who passed by the wounded man were abusing a ritual law that said, in honor of God, no worker in the Temple was allowed to touch a dead or wounded thing. They used this relatively minor matter of ritual against God and the wounded man to do what they felt like, which was to go their own way.
If they were true keepers of the law, out of a desire to be true keepers of the covenant, they would have known and loved all of the law and all of the covenant. They would have stopped to give honor to God by showing mercy to the injured man, because the man belonged to God. They would have known that there could be no law that required them to be selfish, to count the potential loss of their turn to serve in the Temple as more important than their duty to render aid. They would have remembered what every Jewish schoolboy knew, what Jesus Christ taught repeatedly as the summary of the law, that the highest law is love for God and love for our neighbor.
The lawyer had asked Christ, “Who is my neighbor?” in a misbegotten effort to limit his own exposure to this law of love. Christ turned his question around by demonstrating how a God-loving and God-fearing human being should act in order to be a neighbor to others, and by telling him, “Go, and do thou likewise.” In this way, Christ makes the law a matter beyond any legitimate misunderstanding, and He holds up the covenant itself as greater than the law, since the covenant is the living relationship with God and man taught to us by the law.
The law is the teacher, and not what is taught. God and His Christ, along with the Holy Ghost, are not bound by law, but by the love they live in perfection. The perfection of love in Christ, therefore, is the perfection of Christianity, the end purpose of the law. Until Christ’s second coming, however, until He brings us the perfection we need as a final outpouring of the grace of God, we will need the law as a teacher, but never as a slave master.
Other laws matter, of course, to a Christian. The man-made laws of the state and of the Church have a place in our lives and ought to be obeyed, except in one important instance. The Covenant with God supersedes all other relationships, and the laws of the Covenant supersede all other laws.
So, ponder this. What should the priest and levite have done, if there had been a law of the state that prohibited their helping the wounded man? If you say, they still should have stopped to help him, no matter what, you have had a holy thought and have begun to understand the difference between a law and a covenant, and the necessity of hearing God’s voice to live a life of joy, love, and blessing. May we all enjoy such a life, and may we all possess such freedom.